Copyright

by

Kevin John Bozelka

2008

The Dissertation Committee for Kevin John Bozelka certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

The Musical Mode: Rock and Hollywood Cinema

Committee:

____________________________________ Janet Staiger, Supervisor

____________________________________

James Buhler

____________________________________ Adrienne McLean

____________________________________

Mary C. Kearney

____________________________________ Thomas Schatz

The Musical Mode: Rock and Hollywood Cinema

by

Kevin John Bozelka, B.A, M.A.

Dissertation

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of

the University of Texas at Austin

in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin

December 2008

Dedication

To my father, John Leonard Bozelka

and my mother Georgia Rose (1938-1993)

v

Acknowledgements

I would first like to thank my family for their support throughout this exceedingly

long journey. Without them, said journey would be even longer. I also would like to

thank the professors at University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee who provided me with an

impeccable undergraduate education in film and television – Lynne Joyrich, Patricia

Mellencamp, and, especially, Patrice Petro. They made the transition into graduate school

much smoother and remain a model of academic excellence.

Although he probably does not know it, Will Straw, my mentor and academic idol

in Montréal, directly inspired this project with an off-the cuff but typically insightful

comment he made in one of his amazing courses at McGill University where I achieved

my MA. His ability to straddle film and popular music studies so brilliantly is a standard

to which I will always aspire.

I am not sure what I did to deserve Janet Staiger. But a better advisor would have to

be some sort of divine spirit indeed. Janet went well above and beyond the call of duty to

bring this project to completion. In her captivating courses, superlative scholarship, and

unstinting editing, she is the Platonic ideal of a professor. And I still have so much to

learn from her, especially how she balances it all! Janet, I am in your eternal debt.

I need to thank my committee – James Buhler, Mary Kearney, Adrienne McLean,

and Thomas Schatz. I would like to single out Mary and Tom in particular for making me

proud of the Radio Television Film dept. I also want to thank RTF’s nerve center of

operations for pesky graduate students – Stephanie Crouch, Susan Dirks, and Bert

Herigstad. And the Instructional Media Center was a luxury most graduate students only

dream about. I want to thank the Center’s staff, particularly Larry Horvat.

vi

The Intellectual Entrepreneurship Program afforded me the opportunity to have

three fantastic undergraduate students help with me this project – Hunter Callaway, Rhett

Morgan, and Shirin Ricklefs. I sincerely hope the intellectual rigor they received from me

in return continues to enrich them.

Nicholas Bacuez, Morgan Blue, Courtney Brannon Donoghue, Rose Coyle,

Carolyn Cunningham, Brian Dauth, Donna De Ville, Fabio Ferreira, Caroline Frick,

Kristen Grant, Michael Grigsby, Qian Hua, Erin Lee, Blake Lucas, Madhavi

Mallapragada, Susan McLeland, Assem Nasr, Elissa Nelson, Joan Neuberger, Tamara

Oxley, Elliot Panek, Matt Payne, Susan Pearlman, Andy Scahill, David Schaefer, Lisa

Schmidt, Suzanne Schulz, Bryan Sebok, Sharon Shahaf, Matt Stahl, Joseph Straubhaar,

Sharon Strover, David Uskovich, Wei-Ching Wang, Kristen Warner, Jessica Wurster,

and Ger Zielinski all contributed to this project in a variety of ways. Thank you all!

Special thanks to Kyle and Lisa Barnett for holding my hand and David Gurney for

always being there.

Finally, I owe an incalculable debt to my husband Stuart Lombard. Because of

Stuart, I now understand better why Ed Emshwiller’s Thanatopsis remains one of my

most beloved films. Our life over the past four years resembled Emshwiller’s dynamic

mise-en-scene with me as the blurred vision fluttering around Stuart’s sturdy fulcrum.

And so he always had better perspective of me than I could acquire myself. Without his

constant reminder of my potential, I might have blurred right out of the frame altogether.

Sainthood awaits you, mon amour.

December 2008

vii

The Musical Mode: Rock and Hollywood Cinema

Kevin John Bozelka, Ph.D.

The University of Texas at Austin, 2008

Supervisor: Janet K. Staiger

This project seeks to determine the extent to which rock music brought an end to

the Hollywood film genre of the musical. It stresses the importance of rock and post-

1960s popular music scholarship to film studies and vice-versa. Both objects of popular

music inquiry remain relatively unexamined within film studies. But while the value of

film studies to popular music scholarship has been much more widely acknowledged,

much more work remains in these areas. Therefore, this project will look at the workings

of rock ideology and how it impacted the development of the Hollywood musical. It will

also examine recording technology and the ways in which it transformed both the film

and music industries. The second half of this project is an extended analysis of how

Hollywood films of the post-rock era (1970 onward) have reflected these changes. It

theorizes that it was not so much the musical that “died” in this era as it was a particular

kind of musical number – the Spontaneous Outburst of Song. The later chapters use the

concept of mode as opposed to genre to examine how the pleasures offered by the

musical of the classical Hollywood era remain available albeit in different guises and

genres. Furthermore, these pleasures are capable of fostering the kinds of communities, if

not utopias, that some scholars claim have died along with the classical Hollywood era.

viii

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................................... 1

LITERATURE REVIEW ........................................................................................................................................ 6

METHODOLOGY............................................................................................................................................... 16

CHAPTER OVERVIEW....................................................................................................................................... 17

CHAPTER 1 – MEDIA MERGERS/PROFESSIONAL MERGERS: ROCK’S ASCENDANCY

OVER TIN PAN ALLEY AND ITS IMPACT ON THE HOLLYWOOD FILM INDUSTRY ....... 23

TIN PAN ALLEY STYLE.................................................................................................................................... 24

THE BUSINESS OF TIN PAN ALLEY ................................................................................................................. 29

THE MERGED PROFESSIONAL ......................................................................................................................... 35

RADIO AND BMI.............................................................................................................................................. 37

SONG GIVES WAY TO RECORDING ................................................................................................................. 42

ROCK ‘N’ ROLL STYLE.................................................................................................................................... 48

THE REACTION TO ROCK ‘N’ ROLL ................................................................................................................ 50

DEVELOPMENTS IN THE MOTION PICTURE INDUSTRY................................................................................... 54

ROCK................................................................................................................................................................58

CHAPTER 2: PEEL IT OFF YOUR FACE: THE IDEOLOGY OF ROCK.......................................... 61

IDEOLOGY ........................................................................................................................................................ 61

ART/COMMERCE.............................................................................................................................................. 63

COMMUNITY .................................................................................................................................................... 79

CHAPTER 3 – NO POINT BEING ASHAMED OF IT: THE SPONTANEOUS OUTBURST OF

SONG ............................................................................................................................................................102

INTEGRATION THEORY.................................................................................................................................. 103

THE INTEGRATED MUSICAL NUMBER AND HISTORY ..................................................................................111

CRITIQUES OF INTEGRATION THEORY ..........................................................................................................122

THE SOS ........................................................................................................................................................139

ROCK IDEOLOGY AND THE SOS ...................................................................................................................146

ix

CHAPTER 4 – THE MUSICAL AS MODE ...............................................................................................152

MODE .............................................................................................................................................................153

THE MUSICAL MODE.....................................................................................................................................155

THE FIRST DEATH OF THE MUSICAL ............................................................................................................160

ROCK OMNISCIENCE AND THE RETREAT FROM THE SOS ..........................................................................166

CHAPTER 5 – “PASS THE SALT!”: THE MUSICAL MODE POST-1970/THE SOS UNDER

DURESS........................................................................................................................................................182

THE COMPILATION SCORE ............................................................................................................................183

MONTAGES ....................................................................................................................................................187

THE ALBUM AND THE SOS...........................................................................................................................188

DANCICALS....................................................................................................................................................191

CONCERT FILMS/EXPLICITLY MARKED PERFORMANCE NUMBERS............................................................194

DISNEY...........................................................................................................................................................205

COMMUNITY ..................................................................................................................................................208

THE SOS UNDER DURESS.............................................................................................................................215

THE NEW HOLLYWOOD AND THE SOS ........................................................................................................216

THE SOS AFTER 1980................................................................................................................................... 223

SOS ANXIETY – A SUMMARY......................................................................................................................230

BUFFY ............................................................................................................................................................231

BARBRA .........................................................................................................................................................235

CHAPTER 6: “THAT’S NOT SUPPOSED TO BE US, IS IT?”: MUSICAL MODALITY,

GENERATION X, AND EMPIRE RECORDS.......................................................................................240

MUSICAL MODALITY IN EMPIRE RECORDS.................................................................................................. 241

GENERATION X AND EMPIRE RECORDS .......................................................................................................250

CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................................................263

BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................................................................285

VITA .................................................................................................................................................................. 297

1

Introduction

The idea that rock killed the Hollywood (and Broadway) musical has become one

of those relatively unexamined bits of wisdom with wide circulation over the last fifty

years, especially in the popular press. A 2001 article in The Independent entitled “Who

killed the Hollywood Musical?” David Benedict states that rock was “too big, aggressive

and anti-authoritarian to develop or handle detailed plot or character” (Benedict). But

film scholars have perpetuated this idea with equal fervency. Jane Feuer comes to a

similar conclusion about rock’s unsuitability for handling narrative tasks: “Since the mid-

1950s rock and pop have been the dominant forms of popular music and these forms

appeared more suited to audio and concert presentational formats than to the movie

musical with its double requirement of numbers and narrative” (xi). And Rick Altman

concludes that both rock ‘n’ roll and rock (I will make the distinction between the two

clearer in Chapter One) have upset the genre’s essential equilibrium between narrative

and number:

From the films of Elvis Presley and the teenie-bopper beach blanket shows starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello to the rock concert documentaries of the seventies and the current tendency toward single-star concert-oriented films where the number of minutes on stage outweigh the rather flimsy plot, the musical has slowly destroyed itself by losing it balance between narrative and music, indeed by abandoning the classic syntax whereby narrative is not just an excuse for music, but stands in a particular, structured relationship to that music. This way, in short, lies the musical as illustrated record album. This way lies MTV. (1987, 121)

All three of the commentaries above suggest that rock possesses inherently anti-

narrative properties that reverse or even negate the storytelling capacity of Hollywood

films. But there has never been a full-length examination of the relationship between rock

2

and the Hollywood musical. Therefore, the question I want to answer with this project is:

to what extent did rock kill the Hollywood musical? And if indeed it did manage to bring

about the death of one of the industry’s most popular genres, what happened to that

genre’s energies in the rock era, i.e., films produced after 1967? In other words, how is

music used, differently or otherwise, in films of the past forty years?

I will argue that rock did indeed impact the development of the Hollywood

musical a great deal. But I also argue that the rise in popularity of recordings in general in

the post-World War II era had just as significant of an impact on the genre. I use the word

“impact” above rather than a more finalizing idea such as “killed off the musical” or

“caused the death of the musical” to make clear my conclusion that the musical did not

die at the hands of rock or recordings. In fact, the musical survived in different guises,

more fervently as a mode rather than a genre.

I have come to this conclusion by answering the following questions. What are

the majors shifts in the American music industry that posit rock ‘n’ roll and rock as

catastrophic changes? What is the relationship between the American music industry and

Hollywood that would necessarily effect a change in a genre so dependent on music for

its signification? Is the film industry in the rock era structured all that differently than it

was in the classical Hollywood era? What are the continuities and discontinuities between

the two eras that might effect a shift in genre development? How does rock work

ideologically? What are the elements of rock ideology that might abrade against the

manner in which the Hollywood musical functioned in the classical era? Does rock

possess inherently anti-narrative properties? Or is it a distortion to frame an analysis of

the Hollywood musical in narrative terms? What exactly is going on in musical numbers?

3

What is the precise relationship between narrative and number in the Hollywood

musical? Can we assume that the values and energies put into motion by the Hollywood

musical simply evaporated with the advent of rock? Or do other forms satisfy those

values and energies? What are the forms the musical has taken in the rock era? How is

music used in films post-1967? Has rock itself changed since the late 1960s and if so,

how has that impacted film? How have audiences changed not just from the classical

Hollywood era but also from the late 1960s? Do changes in demographics necessarily

effect a shift in the manner in which the musical works?

My hope in answering these questions – at least in part or in full -- is to stress the

importance of rock and post-1960s popular music scholarship to film studies and vice-

versa. Both objects of popular music inquiry remain relatively unexamined within film

studies. But while the value of film studies to popular music scholarship has been much

more widely acknowledged, much more work remains in these areas. The reasons for

these oversights are hardly surprising. Gathering knowledge in at least two different

fields of study poses enormous challenges. Apart from the time involved in familiarizing

oneself with the major theories and various histories in popular music and film studies,

synthesizing these different areas into a multidisciplinary argument takes considerable

nuance. And each discipline has its own models from which theories have been formed.

Early film studies took literature as the basis of many of its narratological theories while

reception studies used both literary theory and theater as a more fruitful model for

analysis. Popular music studies has been built on sociology and musicology. This is

definitely not to say, of course, that scholars in each discipline have relegated their work

4

to only these approaches. But the relative dominance of certain models in each discipline

can account for various shifts of focus and blindspots.

In stressing the relationship between Hollywood and the American popular music

industry (with an emphasis on rock music), I aim to reveal this relationship as an often

stormy one. Indeed, much of the impetus behind this project stems not only from my

passion for both Hollywood and rock and other American popular musics but equally

from my disappointment in how the two meet. As rock grew in popularity and

Hollywood began incorporating the music in its films, it occasioned a shift in what kinds

of musicality became tenable in Hollywood cinema. Certainly, rock music serves many

functions quite well on the soundtracks of Hollywood films to this day, e.g., compilation

scoring, singing for characters, motivating explicitly marked performances, etc. all of

which will be discussed more thoroughly in later chapters. But its uses are limited. Most

crucially for the purposes of this project, rock music rarely, if ever, generates what I call

the Spontaneous Outburst of Song (SOS), a term I will define in great detail in Chapter

Three. For now, though, it simply refers to those moments which appear uncalled for, i.e.,

not motivated by a musical performance at a concert or in a club or around the piano or

radio. The Musical Mode maintains that as rock and recordings grew in prominence, the

SOS began to disappear in Hollywood films. The thirst for rock and other popular musics

seems commensurate with an increased anxiety around the SOS. The pages that follow

lament precisely this apparent incompatibility between rock and other popular musics

(funk, metal, R&B, punk, disco, house, hip-hop, techno, etc.) on one hand and the SOS

on the other. Furthermore, they mourn the often hapless attempts to incorporate these

5

musics into films whether through watering down their impact (e.g., The Breakfast Club)

or sowing an enormous amount of ambiguity around them (e.g., Empire Records).

But The Musical Mode will have failed in its mission if it painted the post-1960s

era in film and music as one of only compromise and disappointment. However stormy

the relationship between film and post-1960s popular music, films such as The Breakfast

Club and Empire Records offer undeniable musical pleasures. That these pleasures are

often contradictory does not render them any less real. Nor are contradictory pleasures

somehow indigenous to post-1960s Hollywood cinema. My use of the very concept of

mode means to examine how the pleasures offered by the musical of the classical

Hollywood era still remain very much available in different guises and genres.

Furthermore, these pleasures are capable of fostering the kinds of communities, if not

utopias, that some scholars claim have died along with the classical Hollywood era.

For this reason, I have structured The Musical Mode to problematize received

notions of such monolithic concepts as “the classical Hollywood era,” the musical,”

“rock,” and “integration.” In general, the project moves from a portrait of the classical

Hollywood era as a space of competing audiences and contested texts. It then reveals

recordings and rock as perfectly capable of fostering musical communities before an

extended analysis of the shortcomings of integration theory. It became necessary to look

at integration theory in detail since theorists of the musical in both theater and film have

held up integration as an ideal, one that rock and recordings have destroyed. By focusing

in on the essential incongruous nature of the musical, I show up the limitations of

integration theory to understand better how rock and recordings impacted post-1960s

6

Hollywood film, i.e. how both contributed to the decline of the SOS rather than the

musical or musicality in film overall.

Literature Review

Given the multidisciplinary nature of this project, it became necessary to

introduce the literature on the various disciplines in each chapter. Therefore, this

literature review will be necessarily truncated. It will mainly concern how scholars have

analyzed the Hollywood musical. The work of scholars on the music industry and on

rock, for example, can thus be found in their respective chapters.

Early theorists of the Hollywood musical such as Raymond Bellour, Altman, and

Feuer have employed different, sometimes explicitly contrasting, methods of textual

analysis to analyze the musical. Although the conclusions of Bellour and Altman, in

particular, appear diametrically opposed, they actually compliment one another quite

usefully in that they arrive at the musical via a structuralist approach. Feuer, however,

relates the musical to its (putative) antecedents in vaudeville – an historical approach --

and proceeds to demonstrate how that relationship is played out in the films.

In his essay “To Segment, To Analyze,” Bellour derives much of his

extraordinarily detailed analysis of Gigi from Christian Metz’s notion of the grande

syntagmatique. This was Metz’s attempt to discover an overweening code by which

narrative cinema operates. Bellour aims to elaborate on this idea by suggesting that the

role of the critic in analyzing the film is not to examine individual shots but rather series

7

of segments, hence, the title of his essay.1 In order to locate the segment, the critic must

uncover that unit which provides a film with its unique rhyming structure. A segment will

have a corresponding segment later in the film that seems to rhyme with the previous

segment. But, of course, there is a difference in this latter segment. Some transformation

has taken place. In fact, such a transformation must take place in a narrative film in order

for the film to progress forward towards its final goal. Thus, analyzing segments allows

us to see the play of similarities and differences that are necessary in order to propel the

story, to keep its narrative wheels in motion.

A segment, then, is akin to a scene in common screenplay parlance. Through a

series of beats, a value change has taken place which initiates a link to the next scene.

The process repeats itself with each new link to a scene, forming a syntagmatic chain that

provides the narrative with its overweening structure. Often, the segment or scene can be

easily demarcated through a change in place and, certainly, time. But Bellour warns

against resting too easily on such a designation. He wants to stress that to segment means

to analyze the film’s narrative system. As such, a segment can exceed the boundaries of

place and even time if no significant value change has occurred within that spatial and/or

temporal frame. Or, to place this idea in Bellour’s terms, the segment must comprise a

significant unit that contains the ability to be rhymed later on in the film.

1 Again, it should be noted here that Bellour’s methodology would not apply to the analysis of much avant-garde and/or experimental cinema which would benefit for the examination of individual shots. Indeed, films by Andy Warhol and Michael Snow, for instance, contain only a few shots across their substantial running lengths and the very concept of the shot itself is open to question in Mothlight or the hand-painted films of Stan Brakhage.

8

In short, Bellour’s analysis of a narrative film’s structure (and at this point, we

must assume that this structure applies to all narrative films) reveals that such a film will

move from segment to segment, pushing inexorably forward towards a final resolution.

One might plot out this development as a series of A, B, C, D, E, etc. segments with

rhyming segments later in the film corresponding to each previous letter/segment. And

always, each later segment will rhyme with a difference. Otherwise, the narrative cannot

move forward on a system of similarities and differences.

It is highly ironic that Bellour chose a musical to demonstrate his system of

segmentation because Altman finds that not all narrative films can be analyzed in this

fashion (1981). Indeed, he avers that the musical lends itself much better to a

paradigmatic analysis rather than a syntagmatic one. Altman stresses the dual-focus

nature of musical narratives. His prime example is the Nelson Eddy-Jeannette

MacDonald vehicle New Moon (1940). The earliest scenes of the film invoke a stark

contrast between the characters played by these perennially paired stars. MacDonald

portrays a member of the nobility while Eddy plays a lower-class laborer. In one of the

first musical numbers, both characters are on ship. However, MacDonald is on the upper

deck and sings in a genteel manner along with the sophisticated elite. Eddy is down

below with other workers and sings in a gruff, almost confrontational style. The film will

continually place MacDonald and Eddy as seemingly irreconcilable opposites. But as the

narrative progresses, each character will gradually adopt some of the attributes of other,

e.g. Eddy will gain some gentility in his singing while McDonald exhibits a bit more

spontaneity in her style. And, of course, what the narrative progresses towards is the

formation of the heterosexual couple (as it does with Gigi which Bellour also concludes).

9

So, as Altman notes, a musical will move forward (to the extent that it does) not

from segment to segment but rather by alternating between the characteristics of the

heterosexual couple - here, MacDonald and Eddy. It works more along a compare and

contrast axis so that the film progresses in an A, B, A, B, etc. fashion. To emphasize this

structure, a secondary (and usually comic) couple will go through similar alterations to

support the ultimate oscillation around the two main characters. By the end of the film,

the finally formed heterosexual couple should display characteristics that can only be

described as AB – a perfect, utopian fusion of the best qualities of each character in a

mutually sustaining entity. So while Bellour agrees that Gigi ends with a similar fusion,

he views the progression towards that fusion much more sequentially than Altman.

Feuer certainly does not ignore the centrality of the formation of the heterosexual

couple in the musical (1982). But she is much more concerned with the musical’s

relationship with its antecedents, namely, musical theatre. She conceives of this

relationship as a series of falls from grace running from folk to popular to, finally, mass

mediated modes of the musical arts. The folk mode of making music concerned the

passing down of songs from community to community across history. It did not

emphasize individual performers except only insofar as they were able to transmit certain

characteristics of a song that could then get transformed as the song was passed along.

This is why there are no authors per se for folk songs. If there are authors, then they are

the communities that have played a role in the transformations of the songs. It could even

be said that the very act of transformation authors a folk text given how there are few

rigid boundaries to it. For example, there can be no such thing as a “definitive version” of

an old English ballad like “Barbara Allen.”

10

This folk process switches with the advent of the performer and marks the change

to the popular mode of the musical arts. Feuer fails to pinpoint this transformation if

indeed it is possible to do so. But the concept does not really require specific historical

markers to bring out its salient characteristics. The popular mode occurs when an

individual steps out from the crowd and becomes a performer, someone with apparently

unique capacities for music-making. The folk crowd that contributes to the making of the

song becomes silent here. Indeed, this is when they become an audience. They are there

only to observe and confirm the unique talents of the performer. This mode is

exemplified by musical theatre and the rise of vaudeville in the late nineteenth century.

Audiences pay an admission fee to enter a theatre so that what they are essentially

purchasing is the opportunity to experience that which has allowed individuals to

differentiate themselves from the crowd (and from other individuals with pretenses to

stepping up on a stage to be so observed). The fall from grace, then, would be this

division of labor within the musical arts. In the folk mode, everyone worked on a song. In

the popular mode, only the performer does.

With the rise of a mass media phenomenon like cinema, there is a further fall

from grace. In the theatre, the audience at least enjoyed the ability to be in the same room

as the performer. In the movie theatre, by contrast, the audience enjoys no such luxury.

Indeed, the advent of cinema allows us to look back on the popular mode of the musical

arts and tweak the above description slightly. In the theatre, the audience can register

their experience of the performer’s talents in myriad ways (applause, booing, throwing

both laudatory and critical items on stage, offering flowers, catcalls, leaving, etc.). And

certainly, performers can modulate their performances to the feel of different audiences.

11

Even though the floodlights and orchestral pit creates an eternal chasm between audience

and performer, live theatre in the popular mode still allows for variations on either side of

the divide.

With film, much less variation exists. The film is a recorded performance that the

audience (and indeed the performer) can no longer modulate. It is the ultimate form of

alienation because performer and audience are separated irretrievably from one another.

And as such, it is the ultimate fall from grace. A sense of community has been eroded

effectively by the unbreachable separation that the mass medium upholds. So, in Feuer’s

estimation, it is incumbent upon the musical film to assuage this double fall (first from

folk and then from popular) because of its clear relationship to live performance. Indeed,

it is frequently the goal of the musical film to attempt a return to the folk mode.

A variety of methods exists by which the movie musical can foster the illusion of

itself as a folk art. Chief amongst them is the notion of bricolage which Feuer borrows

from Claude Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss has noted how some cultures with little financial

(and sometimes even natural) resources must “make do” with whatever is available to

them in their environment. Often, an object used will not be directly applicable to the task

at hand. Lévi-Strauss calls this practice bricolage and associates it with pre-industrial

(i.e., folk) modes of work. Countless musical numbers operate in a similar fashion. The

performers indulge in what Feuer calls the myth of spontaneity by using objects in their

song and dance which do not directly apply to the performance. They will spontaneously

grab at seemingly random items in their environments and use them in a musical

expression. For instance, in the “Good Morning” number from Singin’ in the Rain (1952),

Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly), Cosmo Brown (Donald O’Connor), and Kathy Selden

12

(Debbie Reynolds) dance along with raincoats and use living room furniture to suggest

that this is a spontaneous, unrehearsed outburst of musical energy. They “make do” with

the objects surrounding them in their immediate vicinity.

Another method is direct address. Most Hollywood films (indeed most narrative

films) respect the concept of the fourth wall. The camera and the audience comprise a de

facto fourth wall to the action of the film. Therefore, the performers must never

acknowledge the presence of the camera, fostering the illusion that the activity just

happens to be unfolding before the audience who now serve as voyeurs to the scene.

Direct address is often associated with counter cinema tactics (such as those used in the

films of Jean-Luc Godard) precisely for the goal of breaking the illusion of this

hermetically sealed narrative universe. However, the performers in musicals continually

break the fourth wall and directly address the camera and, by extension, the audience.

This direct address amounts to an attempt to bring back some of that synergy between

performer and audience in live theatre. Often, these addresses are direct exhortations to

“participate” in the song. And indeed, the exhortation often works as we tap our feet to

the rhythm or fail miserably at knocking the songs out of our heads long after we have

left the theatre.

Yet another method is the passed along song, a direct allusion to folk modes of

musical transmission. In this practice, a song will pass through various characters (and

even communities) with each individual (or group) placing their unique stamp on the

song. The implication here is that we in the audience are free to pick up the song and

effect our own unique stamp on the song. Again, as mentioned previously, this frequently

occurs upon exiting the theatre when we will continue to sing certain songs throughout

13

the rest of our day (if not week). A perfect example of this happens in the beginning of

Vincente Minnelli’s 1944 masterpiece Meet Me in St. Louis with each family member

(except for the stern father, crucially) taking up snippets of the title song, often in

spontaneous humming rather than full-borne professional singing. And perhaps the most

ecstatic example of the passed along song can be found in Rouben Mamoulian’s 1932

Love Me Tonight where Maurice Chevalier sings a cheeky version of “Isn’t It

Romantic?” in town, and the song eventually makes it way to the country where the

ubiquitous Jeanette MacDonald takes it up in her characteristic light operetta soprano. In

between, however, the song has gone through myriad, often hilarious stylistic

transformations, becoming the province of shop keeps, military men, and gypsies.

Finally, a film musical number will repeatedly bare the markings of its creation

(or, rather, it will offer the illusion that it is doing so). In backstage musicals especially,

we rarely see a completed show. Instead, we are privy to rehearsals and a variety of

backstage machinations. Filmmakers show us how the numbers are put together in order

to demystify (i.e., “folkify”) the performers. However, Feuer is quick to note that a

process of remystification always occurs so that even though the audience is afforded

access to views that the live audience would not enjoy, the conclusions of such numbers

always place us back in the audience (usually at third row center so we can see the backs

of the heads of people in front of us, thus insuring our position within the audience).

Theorizing on the position of the viewer, Jim Collins borrows Emile Benveniste’s

concepts of histoire and discours to discuss how the musical sutures its viewer into the

text (1981). Histoire describes the process by which a text seems to speak in the third-

person, erasing all traces of its énonciation whereas discours speaks in the first-person to

14

an implied “you,” thus underlining its énonciation. All narrative films operate as discours

in the sense that they are constructed by the “I” of the director, crew, institution,

ideology, etc. But most films come across as histoire since they work to efface that

construction. Musicals, however, not only purport to reveal elements of their “putting on

a show” process of creation but they actively engage the viewer via direct address

whether in the lyrics, the editing patterns that substitute a diegetic audience with the

“you” watching the film, or the looks cast in the direction of the viewer. A perfect

example, for Collins, occurs before the “Waltz” from Swing Time (1936) with Fred

Astaire addressing an unseen diegetic nightclub audience but casting a glance towards

“us” watching the film. Thus, as Collins notes, the musical is histoire disguising itself as

discours in its I/You mode of address and as such exemplifies Louis Althusser’s notion of

ideology interpellating viewers to recognize themselves in the texts. “The desired

reaction for the individual in any ideological text is the reaction ‘Oui, c’est bien moi

(‘Yes, it’s me’) in the text.” (140)

Many theorists have commented on the apparent discrepancy between the

narrative and the numbers in the musical. Martin Rubin, for instance, states that the

numbers work by “impossible” conventions, either through their unrealistic introduction

into a realist narrative discourse or within the non-verisimilitudinous scale and effects of

the number itself (2002). Busby Berkeley’s trademark overhead shots of chorus girls in

geometric patterns, in Gold Diggers of 1933, for instance, offer a view that the diegetic

theatre audience watching the chorus line could not possibly attain.

The problem with most of these studies is that they treat rather cursorily the fate

of the musical after the 1960s. There have not been many extended analyses of post-1970

15

Hollywood musicals. Kelly Kessler’s 2004 unpublished dissertation, Tough Guys, Rock

Stars, and Messiahs: Genre and Gender in the Hollywood Musical, 1966-1983, focuses

on generic shifts in post-1970 Hollywood musicals and how those impact the

performance of masculinity. But beyond Kessler’s work, the subject most often appears

as a nostalgia-permeated last chapter to a book-length study of the classical Hollywood

musical. Altman especially discusses the post-1960s musical as either hopelessly

embattled or even non-existent in his The American Film Musical while Feuer paints only

a slightly rosier picture.

Furthermore, when film scholars have concentrated on music, they usually focus

on the classically influenced score. Claudia Gorbman’s ground-breaking Unheard

Melodies certainly paved the way for this field of study with Kathryn Kalinak’s Settling

the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film an insightful follow-up. But rarely do

they touch on popular song much less rock. An excellent anthology such as Soundtrack

Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music, edited by Pamela Robertson Wojcik and

Arthur Knight, has contributed a great deal to our knowledge of the intersection of film

and popular music. But reading the essays included therein, one might never know rock

ever happened given the relative paucity of material on rock or indeed much music

recorded after 1969. Wojcik and Knight’s introduction claims that the goal of their

anthology is to reverse the tendency of theorists to focus on the “classical” music score in

discussing film music. But some of the essays still revolve around analyses of a through-

composed score. And only two of the essays concern rock music. Most of the work that

has appeared recently on popular song and film (anthologies like Pop Fiction – The Song

in Cinema, edited by Steven Lannin and Matthew Caley or Popular Music and Film,

16

edited by Ian Inglis) tend to concentrate on popular music as the score. Little attention

has been given to the relationship between various popular music ideologies (chief

amongst them rock, of course) and Hollywood cinema.

With these shortcomings in mind, I have therefore chosen to define the musical in

broad terms as a film featuring a regular alternation between narrative and number or a

film where all dialogue is sung and/or all action is danced. Immediately, objections will

come to mind. What about Dark City (1950), a film noir that features five songs, one

might ask. Indeed, Clive Hirschhorn states in the introduction to his indispensable

encyclopedia The Hollywood Musical that he has explicitly chosen not to include films

like Dark City because “the songs in them exist merely as interludes and are in no way

integral to the plot” (9). But to what extent is Dark City not a musical if it appears on

youtube listed as one of several film noir musicals?2 And note here that “musical” takes

on the more decisive noun form rather than “film noir.” And to what extent is Dark City

not a musical if it must constantly be invoked in studies of presumably more bona fide

musicals? Finally, as Chapters Three and Four will make clear, perhaps the extent to

which songs are integral to the plot should not be used as a measure of whether or not a

film counts as a musical.

Methodology

The chief methods I use throughout are historical research and textual analysis.

Much of the textual work is influenced by Altman’s semantic/syntactic approach to genre

2 See, for instance, “Film Noir Musicals: Lizabeth Scott in DARK CITY ‘Letter.’” 1 April 2007. 8 March 2008. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZxAg9iW_KU>.

17

analysis. This method will come into play most crucially in the fourth chapter where I

analyze how films function in the musical mode. I have also adopted Altman’s pragmatic

approach to genre which concerns how different perceptual modalities receive texts. This

method clearly dominates chapter five and places this portion of my work within a

cultural studies framework. I use an analysis of historical context and industry in the first

chapter and I perform an ideological analysis of rock in the second chapter.

The method for choosing the films I analyze is a bit more complicated. As

Chapter Four will make clear, certain elements I discuss, such as what I call the

Spontaneous Outburst of Song, appear with dizzying irregularity in Hollywood films of

the last twenty years. Therefore, I could not turn to an encyclopedia or general study on

the musical to delimit what films I would analyze. Indeed, part of my argument in the

later chapters is that a pervasive musicality has invaded Hollywood films in the rock era.

Nevertheless, I did look at every film I could find that features the Spontaneous Outburst

of Song in order to understand better the modulation of the musical in this era.

Furthermore, I looked at films, such as the concert film and the rock ‘n’ roll musical, that

feature rock music prominently to analyze how the films framed the music differently, if

at all, from the way classical Hollywood musicals used music.

Chapter Overview

Chapter One traces the changing of the popular musical guard from Tin Pan Alley

to first rock ‘n’ roll and then rock in a variety of historical developments. Given that Tin

Pan Alley was the major supplier of songs for Hollywood musicals (and Hollywood films

18

in general), its decline in the post-World War II years would obviously have an impact on

the Hollywood film industry. And no matter how much of an actual shift rock ‘n’ roll

occasioned in the production and consumption of music in America, its popularity

ensured that it too would supply Hollywood with its songs. So an analysis of these

developments becomes necessary in order to understand how films would use Tin Pan

Alley and rock ‘n’ roll (and later rock) in different manners.

The chapter is divided into four broad sections. The first section covers the

dominance of Tin Pan Alley and its royalty collection agency The American Society of

Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) in roughly the first half of the twentieth

century. Sheet music was the chief Tin Pan Alley product apart from the appearance of its

songs in Hollywood films. But that would change with the advent of advances made in

recording technology in the years following World War II. The next section documents

an era of relative instability and musical change roughly in the decade following the end

of WWII. I focus on three historical developments in this section: the rise of Broadcast

Music, Inc. (BMI), a royalty collection agency formed by radio broadcasters, and its

challenge to ASCAP’s dominance; the introduction of both the 45 and the LP as well as

their concomitant cultural connotations; and the burgeoning teen market of the 1950s and

its modes of spectatorship. The third section concerns the ascendancy of rock ‘n’ roll and

its relative taming from roughly 1959 to 1963. It will analyze various musical features of

rock ‘n’ roll bringing to the fore those elements that differ most from the Tin Pan Alley

style. Finally, the fourth section will analyze the eventual maturation of rock ‘n’ roll into

rock. This section is necessarily brief since I dedicate the next chapter in its entirety to

19

rock ideology. Nevertheless, this portion of the chapter reveals the contrast between rock

‘n’ roll and rock, two terms that are usually used interchangeably.

Each section will trace stylistic developments alongside institutional and

sociological shifts in an attempt to gauge their impact on the Hollywood film industry.

Two overarching stories should become apparent. One is a tale of Hollywood in the

classical era as a multimedia entity. For instance, most major movie studios owned their

own music publishing firms in the 1930s which allowed them to avoid considerable

payments to royalty societies such as ASCAP (a fate they failed to escape in the early

sound era). And, of course, it afforded them the opportunity to exploit their films in a

variety of ways. The other story lies in mergers between different levels of the music

profession. A division of labor characterizes Tin Pan Alley musical production whereby

composition and lyric writing duties were usually split between two people with yet

another person performing the material. Rock ‘n’ roll ushered in an era when songwriters

increasingly perform their own material, i.e., that which they composed themselves. I call

this latter type of music laborer the merged professional.

Anyone familiar with American popular music history should feel a sense of déjà

vu with the concept of the merged professional. Many blues and country musicians who

helped form the musical foundation of rock ‘n’ roll had long since handled both

composition and lyric writing duties in their music. But rock ‘n’ roll and the replacement

of sheet music with the recording as the central musical product helped disseminate the

merged professional as an ideological imperative. Thus Chapter Two traces how this

merger between composer, lyricist, performer, and musician laid the foundation of rock

ideology, the dominant ideology of popular music in America by the late 1960s. Given its

20

dominance in this era, it would necessarily have an impact on Hollywood films, one that

lent credence to the notion that rock killed off the Hollywood musical. It is for this very

reason that I have chosen to devote an entire chapter to the workings of this ideology.

The chapter examines two major tensions that animated rock ideology – between art and

commerce on the one hand, and between the individual and the community on the other.

It also examines how rock ideology manages to hold these tensions together in such a

way that their fragile equilibrium forms one of the key pleasures of rock for audiences.

The figure of the rock star as a merged professional plays a crucial role in managing these

tensions. The latter half of the chapter, then, analyzes rock stars and the various

communities they bring into existence. As with the Hollywood musical, rock functions as

a motor for community. But in its attempts to represent everyone, its cultural biases come

to the fore.

If both the Hollywood musical and rock share a propensity for bringing together

communities, then what aspects of rock ideology, if any, account for its abrasion against

the musical? I contend in Chapter Three that rock did not so much kill off the musical as

it killed the Spontaneous Outburst of Song (SOS). And to be more precise, I contend that

rather than killing off the SOS in any full-scale manner, rock imbued its appearance with

a great deal of anxiety. Finally, I maintain that not only rock ushered in this state of

affairs. The continued dominance of the recording as well as the increased amount of

delivery systems in the rock era had a significant impact on the Hollywood musical as

well.

Some theorists of the musical might claim that my use of the term Spontaneous

Outburst of Song merely serves to replace the more commonly accepted phrase

21

“integrated musical number.” However, Chapter Three will outline not only the

inconsistency which with theorists have used the latter term but also the

inappropriateness of integration as a theory through which to understand the operations of

the musical. Too much of integration theory seems rooted in a desire for realism that

remains antithetical to the musical and its disjointed narrative/number form. With the

help of Scott McMillin’s remarkable work on the Broadway musical, I demonstrate how

a theory that embraces the incongruous nature of the musical is much better suited to

analyzing the genre which further aids our understanding of the precise impact rock

ideology had on the development of the Hollywood musical. My theory of the

Spontaneous Outburst of Song is an attempt to honor McMillin’s work as well as inch

scholarship on the Hollywood musical away from hopeless claims of realism and towards

consideration of the disruptive potential of the musical number’s interruption of the

forward flow of narrative. It is at this point in the chapter, then, that I contrast the various

elements of the Spontaneous Outburst of Song with the tenets of rock ideology.

Chapter Four follows the energies of the classical Hollywood musical (namely,

the genre’s ability to forge a community) in films of the rock era. I argue that these

energies comprise a mode, as opposed to a genre, that has survived into the 1980s and

beyond. In other words, the musical may be dead as a genre but it lives on in modal form,

peering through texts that few would call musicals. The largest portion of the chapter

traces various instantiations of musical modality such as the “dancical” and the concert

film. The final section looks at the Spontaneous Outburst of Song as a vexed survivor of

the classical Hollywood musical.

22

By the 1980s, rock itself enjoyed a rather vexed existence. In some estimations, it

failed to usher in a musical revolution to rival punk in the 1970s. And many critics and

theorists began to question the assumptions of rock ideology to the point where its more

pernicious values were gathered under the unflattering aegis of rockism. Chapter Five

traces this development and its impact on the 1995 film Empire Records. I choose this

film because it also exemplifies another crisis which gathered steam in the 1980s – the

inability of youth cultures to put their stamp on a musical landscape dominated by

Boomer, and rockist, mentalities. So I analyze how Empire Records attempts to address

one particular youth culture, Generation X, in a way both like and unlike the classical

Hollywood musical.

Finally, the conclusion looks at the oft-reported rebirth of the musical, especially

in the wake of the success of Chicago in 2002 and High School Musical in 2006. I take

this rebirth with a grain of salt considering that previous chapters have dealt with the

continued existence of the musical in various, admittedly subtle forms. In general, I have

positioned this project as a corrective to histories of both Hollywood and American

popular music as a series of falls from grace where at one point in the past, genres and

communities were healthy and vibrant until a full-scale death changed history for the

worst. Such histories have an effect on how audiences perceives texts as well as

themselves and as such deserve close analysis.

23

Chapter 1 – Media Mergers/Professional Mergers: Rock’s Ascendancy

Over Tin Pan Alley and Its Impact on the Hollywood Film Industry

In Yesterdays: Popular Song in America,3 Charles Hamm makes the following

assertion about the rise of rock ‘n’ roll circa 1955: “At no other point in the two-hundred-

year history of popular song in America had there been such a drastic and dramatic

change in such a brief period of time” (Hamm 391). That historical break largely comes

down to the changing of the popular music guard from Tin Pan Alley to rock ‘n’ roll.

This chapter will outline how rock ‘n’ roll pushed aside Tin Pan Alley and its service to

Broadway and Hollywood to become the dominant form of popular music in America

and the implications of this shift for the American motion picture industry. It is necessary

to look back at the early days of rock ‘n’ roll and the stark contrast it provided to Tin Pan

Alley because Hollywood’s embrace of both musics can explain a great deal about the

development of the motion picture musical.

The chapter is divided into four broad sections covering 1) the dominance of Tin

Pan Alley in roughly the first half of the twentieth century before 2) an era of relative

instability and musical change roughly in the decade following the end of WWII which

leads to 3) the ascendancy of rock ‘n’ roll, its relative taming from roughly 1959 to 1963,

and 4) its eventual maturation into rock. Each section will place stylistic music markers

within institutional and sociological contexts as well as trace their impact on the

Hollywood film industry. I have designed the chapter so that two overarching stories

3 “The standard authority on the history of popular songs” according to one writer as late as 2006 (McMillin 35), “holy writ” claims another (Christgau, “Salon”).

24

should become apparent. One is a tale of media mergers (namely between film and

popular music concerns) that occurred in the first half of the twentieth century. This is in

contrast to many histories of Hollywood that place these mergers firmly in the second

half. The other story lies in mergers between different levels of the music profession with

rock ‘n’ roll ushering in an era when songwriters increasingly perform their own material.

These mergers not only affected the transformation of rock ‘n’ roll into rock; they also

form an important cornerstone of the ideology of rock, the subject of the following

chapter.

Tin Pan Alley Style

Tin Pan Alley refers to a group of music publishers clustered mainly on 28th Street

in Manhattan at the turn of the twentieth century but it doubles as shorthand for the style

of music published therein. The keyword here is “publishers,” for despite the undeniable

success of individual songwriters, the publishers remained in economic control of Tin

Pan Alley, especially in the first third of the twentieth century. For instance, the typical

industry practice involved a composer selling a song directly to a publisher for a small

lump sum but then giving up all rights to the song in the process. The lyricist fared even

worse. If the composer did not write the lyrics himself (and few Tin Pan Alley composers

did), he paid a writer no more than five dollars for some verses or else lifted the words

from any number of sources without attribution. Right away, some tensions come into

view (namely, between songwriters and publishers) that will never become resolved

satisfactorily for all concerned in this era, if ever. It is therefore unsurprising that

25

someone like the ubiquitous Irving Berlin (crucially, one of the few Tin Pan Alley

composers who not only wrote his own lyrics but early on enjoyed a career as a

performer) eventually formed his own publishing house. And around the end of World

War II, more and more composers will start performing their songs while many

musicians will move into songwriting.

Hamm dates Tin Pan Alley’s inception to 1881 with the formation of the T. B.

Harms publishing firm and claims that by 1900 Tin Pan Alley had a stranglehold on

American popular music such that few songs outside its purview achieved mass success.

This does not mean that competing musics such as operetta, blues, country, etc. did not

carry any significance or even that they never achieved some degree of commercial

success. But Tin Pan Alley remained hegemonic throughout the first third of the

twentieth century in the United States. It also placed a stranglehold on stylistic diversity:

Publishers concluded that the public wanted familiar songs, and new songs in a familiar style. Tin Pan Alley songwriters soon reached a stylistic plateau, a more homogeneous style than had ever before been the case in the history of song in America. (Hamm 290)

Most of the Tin Pan Alley giants held fast to this style across their, in many cases, several

decades of composing and certainly well into the 1950s alongside developments in rock

‘n’ roll. They also saw no reason to tailor their music to the different media that

employed it (vaudeville, film, phonograph records, radio, television, etc.) in a manner

that might have been better suited to each outlet. Even during the big band craze of the

1930s and early 1940s, arrangers adapted Tin Pan Alley songs to their needs; Tin Pan

Alley composers never tweaked their style to accommodate the big bands. So despite a

series of technological changes in mass media which could have ushered in new

26

dominant musical styles, Tin Pan Alley evinced a remarkable consistency throughout this

period and remained the most popular music in America until significant challenges to its

hegemony in the 1940s.

Some of the hallmarks of the Tin Pan Alley style not only stand in direct

contradistinction to rock n’ roll but can reveal something about its appropriateness for the

classical Hollywood musical which used Tin Pan Alley tunes almost exclusively. A key

difference between Tin Pan Alley songs and those of the previous era concerns the

chorus. Whereas once several voices would have been sung the chorus, a solo voice

increasingly sings it. Also, more of the melodic interest of Tin Pan Alley songs lies in the

chorus so much so that the verses were frequently discarded during performances and

recordings. Many canonical tunes have verses that few people remember today assuming

they actually ever heard them. Sometimes the verses spelled out a grim tragedy that

utterly contradicted the almost always chipper tone of the chorus. One might conclude,

then, that it was part of rock ‘n’ roll’s (and certainly rock’s) project to restore a sort of

gritty realism to popular music (particularly in its borrowings from various less dominant

musics such as folk and blues) that Tin Pan Alley had excised. In any event, the verses

hover in Tin Pan Alley songs as a curious structured absence:

The relationship between verse and chorus begins to approach the recitative-aria pattern of opera, with a first section of lesser musical interest sketching a dramatic situation, which is elaborated on in a second section containing the most memorable melodic material. (Hamm 293)

Certainly, then, the frequent exclusion of this lesser musical material did not diminish the

song’s catchiness or hummability. It may have dulled the song’s overall narrative impact,

however. Given that the chorus usually aspires to outlining a generalized emotional state

rather than tracing a tight narrative line, its insertion into a play or film might feel

27

wedged in. And indeed, the interpolation of hit songs into not just vaudeville shows but

also musical comedies and even operettas was a common practice in early twentieth-

century theater with the star vocalist stopping the flow of the story with a performance of

the hot new tune. This anti-narrative propensity of musical numbers will be discussed in

much greater detail in later chapters. However, it is important to note here that in its

affinities with classical music, Tin Pan Alley songs actually possess a strong narrative

pull: “Phrases are goal-oriented, with melodies and their supporting chords constructed to

lead the listener from one point in the piece to the next, until a high point or a climax is

reached, with a resting point (cadence) following” (Hamm 369). Hamm’s language in this

quote bears a remarkable resemblance to some of the key tenets of narrative theory. The

point here is that even if a song in a play or a classical Hollywood musical does not

propel the narrative forward, the music itself contains strong narrative elements, chief

amongst them the arrangement of chords to suggest a dramatic curve and melodies

repeated at a different pitch to lift the song into another point on that curve.4 Crucially,

this style does not partake in the repeated patterns of Afro-American music which would

play a central role in the development of rock ‘n’ roll and suggests that rock ‘n’ roll may

not have proven suitable for at least some narrative purposes, an idea taken up in later

chapters.

One more key quality of the Tin Pan Alley style to discuss is its expressivity. If

the lyrics rarely outlined a specific narrative event, then certainly they almost never

referenced the outside world, especially political issues or social problems. Instead, they

4 For an example of the latter, Hamm uses the familiar example of “Embraceable You.” (Hamm 390)

28

focused on the inner, emotional world of the character singing the song. This means that

Tin Pan Alley songs were not primarily a vehicle for composers or lyricists to express

themselves directly.5 Steve Coombes’s comments on the lyricists for 1930s Broadway

shows applies to Tin Pan Alley overall:

The moods of their lyrics do not reflect emotions they had actually felt nor that they expected anyone to think that they had felt nor even that they expected anyone else to feel for that matter. Nothing would have disturbed the cosmopolitan Cole Porter more than the idea that people might think that he actually did sit and moon over lost love – that emphatically was not his style. The moods of thirties lyrics are about what you ought to have felt or more accurately what you might like to have felt given the chance to think about it. (Coombes, quoted in Frith 1988 128)

But for Tin Pan Alley lyricists themselves, their choruses radiate more the kind of pride

in faceless craft or a job well done on an assembly line product. As a perfect illustration

of this aspect, take the work of lyricist Jack Norworth and composer Albert Von Tilzer.

Neither had ever attended a baseball game nor shown any interest in the sport. And yet

because they gathered that a song on the subject might sell, they wrote a little something

called “Take Me Out To The Ball Game.” Given these working methods, many of the

great tunesmiths traffic in a kind of anonymity, their inner worlds utterly unfathomable

from their work product. Berlin, for instance, remained provocatively tight-lipped about

himself and cultivated so much mystery around his modus operandi that some believe his

songs were written by committee and even that the man himself had never existed!6 This

anonymous quality is reinforced by how many Tin Pan Alley songs have been handed

5 Charles K. Harris, author of “After The Ball,” one of Tin Pan Alley’s earliest smashes, offers this piece of advice to new songwriters: “Let your melody musically convey the character and sentiment of the lyrics.” No mention is made of the necessity of conveying yourself, the author, in any way. Quoted in Hamm 290. 6 See Mast 39-40.

29

down to the subsequent generation almost in folk song fashion and thus appear authorless

in a way that cannot be chalked up simply to how old they are. It makes perfect sense that

most people today would have no clue who wrote “Take Me Out To The Ball Game,” for

example, given that it was written a century ago. But the song’s utilitarianism quite

obviously trumps its author function.

Before moving into the business of Tin Pan Alley and its relationship to the

motion picture industry, it should be mentioned briefly here that the descriptions in the

paragraph above do not amount to value judgments. Anonymous composition and profit

motives do not preclude greatness. Nor do these descriptions mean to suggest that author

functions remain unavailable to all listeners. But if Tin Pan Alley songs sound

expressive, they are often so in spite of themselves. And it is these qualities that make up

what is known simply as pop and that will survive the waning of Tin Pan Alley in

different guises. As the next chapter will make clear, pop is precisely the musical practice

against which the ideology of rock will define itself.

The Business of Tin Pan Alley

Tin Pan Alley remained the dominant style of popular music in America for

decades, enjoying its greatest popularity approximately in the years between the two

world wars. But its publishers and songwriters consolidated their power economically

with the formation of the American Society of Composers and Publishers (ASCAP) on

February 13, 1914. The goal of ASCAP was to collect royalties on behalf of its members

(170 composers and lyricists as well as twenty-two publishers at the time of its

30

formation) for any copyrighted music performed or reproduced in public. Its first years of

operation were rocky and its very existence was met with outright hostility by the many

establishments whose success depended on the daily performance of music: theaters,

restaurants, hotels, cabarets, and, of course, motion picture houses, the proprietors of

which would by 1917 owe ASCAP a “music tax” of as much as ten cents per seat per

year if they wanted to use any of the copyrights the Society controlled (Altman 2004

352). These establishments immediately sought ways to free themselves of having to pay

ASCAP “taxes.” Often, they would rely on songs in the public domain or by composers

and publishers who were either not affiliated with ASCAP or had defected from the

Society.

Music was crucial to motion picture exhibition in the so-called silent era. A

theater orchestra providing accompaniment to a silent film raised profits considerably.

But in late 1920, due to a reorganization of ASCAP, a huge bank of previously tax-free

music returned to the Society’s control. So movie studios hired classically trained

composers to write original music that would be played by the twenty-two thousand

musicians employed by the twenty-three thousand movie theaters that existed in America

by 1926. Nevertheless, in 1926, eleven thousand exhibitors eventually caved in to the

necessity of becoming ASCAP licensees, the half a million dollars paid amounting to

more than half of the Society’s earnings that year (Sanjek 50).

The coming of sound to cinema changed this playing field. In fact, it was a key

development which underlined that the motion picture business in America had always

partaken in mergers. For instance, one of the Big Five Hollywood studios was created

through just such a merger. In 1928, David Sarnoff, president of Radio Corporation of

31

America (RCA), purchased an interest in a minor movie studio called Film Booking

Offices of America (FBO), owned at the time by Joseph P. Kennedy. Sarnoff made the

purchase because RCA’s parent company, General Electric, had developed Photophone, a

sound-on-film system, and needed a film company that could utilize the system.

However, most theaters and studios were using the Vitaphone sound-on-disc process. So

Sarnoff/Kennedy added the prestigious Keith-Albee-Orpheum theater circuit to their

empire, and on October 23, 1928, the merger became official with the name Radio-Keith-

Orpheum or RKO (Jewell 10). Immediately at the birth of sync-sound dialogue in

Hollywood film, then, a major movie studio forms by unambiguously aligning itself with

a sound concern and, by extension, welcomes music into its very incorporation. And it is

important to note here that the resulting name neglects to reference the film production

wing. Undoubtedly, Sarnoff wanted to distance the company from the cheapness of FBO

products. Nevertheless, that the “R” prevails over an “F” demonstrates that what most

think of primarily as a movie studio is actually a product of merger logics.

Early film sound recording may have ended the careers of some actors whose

dialogue delivery failed for a variety of reasons. But it proved quite fortuitous for music

and singers in particular. Songs poured into early sound films, even those that were not

“purely musical” (Sanjek 113). By the late 1920s, film was superseding vaudeville

(which is where Americans primarily heard music since about 1890) as the chief venue

for plugging songs. For sure, movies plugged songs at a much faster rate than vaudeville.

It would take four months for vaudeville to disseminate a song as widely as a film could

in just one week of exhibition (Sanjek 112).

32

As the value of music to the success of a film grew, so did the desire on the part

of the movie studios to own as many music copyrights as possible in order to make itself

independent of ASCAP fees. But even assembling an arsenal of top songwriters and

lyricists would leave them beholden to increasingly high synchronization rights payable

to ASCAP. So their next logical step was to acquire music publishing houses, setting a

vogue for early film and music mergers. Warner Bros. pursued this avenue more

fervently by gobbling up the venerable firms of M. Witmark & Sons (established in

1885) and Harms, Inc. in 1929 (Spring 58-9).

The studio made this move for a variety of reasons beyond the income saved from

no longer having to pay ASCAP fees. Chief amongst them was the ability to raise the

price of their films since exhibitors would be free of the need to pay ASCAP especially

those that were owned by vertically integrated movie studios. As Russell Sanjek puts it:

Once a catalogue of a sufficient number of copyrights made Warner independent of existing music-licensing organizations, the company could grant performing rights to exhibitors without charge, and force competitors to pay whatever the traffic would bear for synchronization rights. (Sanjek 108)

This control of copyrights by the motion picture industry could lead to the disappearance

not only of the ten cents per theater seat fees collected by ASCAP but of ASCAP itself.

At the very least, the industry threatened to bend policy making within the Society

towards motion picture interests.

Due to the onslaught of the Depression, however, all of the movie studios cut

back on their music spending. Sanjek reports that the number of songwriters employed by

studios dropped from 143 to twenty by 1931 (148). And with as many as eight songs in

one production, including many repetitions of a film’s theme song, Hollywood created an

33

inflation of movie music that sold tickets but not sheet music or records (Sanjek 111).

That a song’s popularity rarely outlasted the popularity of the movie with which it was

associated only augmented the fact that profits from even successful movie songs paled

in comparison to box office receipts (Sanjek 56). Even worse for studios which had just

annexed music publishing to their empires, audiences began to grow weary of the use of

music in movies. The pesky theme song came under heavy criticism as it could hardly

disguise its blatant promotional role given its sometimes frequent repetition in a film.

And by the end of 1930, a moratorium was placed on the production of musicals which I

will discuss in Chapter Four. Unsurprisingly, it was a difficult time to work as a

songwriter. Only a handful managed to remain consistently successful. Much of the

problem was due to ASCAP’s chaotic compensation rules which paid out more to its

older members faithfully ensconced in New York City over those who had traveled to

Hollywood at the coming of sound (Ennis 108). For a moment, though, it seemed as if the

popular music tide had drifted back to New York City. Some believed that the

songwriting profession had returned to its true purpose in crafting songs to suit the tenor

of the times rather than the specifics of motion picture narratives. As one writer put it at

the time, “No more fitting ‘em to match the profile of the heroine” (Abel Green, quoted

in Sanjek 113).

But it was to be a short-lived moment. The musical rebounded with the help of

42nd Street (1933) from Warner Bros. and the Astaire/Rogers cycle at RKO. Profits for

these films were enormous and other studios mirrored this success with similar

productions. Featured songs were selling sheet music in large numbers again and

songwriters were being paid more. In 1936, sixty-three of them moved from New York

34

City to Hollywood, half on salary. A year earlier, eight of the ten most performed songs

came from movies. In 1937, ninety percent of the prime-time shows on network radio

moved out west. And in the same year, the music publishing firms owned partially or

wholly by the movie studios enjoyed sixty-five percent of ASCAP’s distributions, a

enviable situation that would remain constant for the next decade (Sanjek 152-5)! It was a

situation that caused a poverty of successful Broadway musicals (and no doubt

contributed to the low profile of the 1930s in histories of Broadway) and effectively

wrote most independent music publishing firms out of the business, an omen of

paradigm-shifting changes to come.

Throughout this era, radio proved even an more important vehicle through which

publishers could plug their tunes. A song plugger tried to have his firm’s latest song

played on the radio as many times as possible not only to stimulate sheet music and

record sales but also to win a slot on “the sheet” – a list of the “Most Plugged Radio

Songs” that appeared in Variety, Billboard, and other trade mewspapers. In his book The

Seventh Stream: The Emergence of Rocknroll in American Popular Music, Philip H.

Ennis reproduces a similar chart from a 1937 issue of Variety called “Breakdown of

Network Plugs” (67). The chart is divided into six columns – the title of the song; its

publisher; the source (“film songs,” “legit tunes,” and “pop”); the number of times a song

was heard on a commercial as opposed to a sustaining show; the number of vocal

renditions of the song; and a grand total of plugs for the week. Movie songs occupied the

top three slots on the chart. What is remarkable about this chart from a contemporary

perspective is that neither the songwriters nor any performers are mentioned. Even

though radio served to associate a song with a particular singer or bandleader, the song

35

reigns supreme here and the anonymity at the heart of Tin Pan Alley is quite beautifully

reinforced.

Four aspects of this summary of Tin Pan Alley and its service to Hollywood need

to be brought to the surface before moving into the turbulent 1940s. One, movie studios

engaged in media mergers with music concerns quite early in the film sound era. Two,

Hollywood challenged New York City as the center of Tin Pan Alley popular music

activity. Three, the song supersedes the songwriter supersedes the performer. And four,

the latter occurs because Tin Pan Alley displayed a large degree of specialization in that

the composer, the lyricist, and the performer were almost never the same person, a

situation much less common in blues and country. All four of these aspects will influence

the flowering of rock ‘n’ roll which in turn will impact the development of the

Hollywood musical.

The Merged Professional

Musicians in roughly the first half of the twentieth century could make a living in

two ways that do not exist today – in orchestras accompanying silent film and live

performances on the radio.7 The coming of the talkie obviously eliminated the former.

Work as a studio player was scarce since the motion picture industry employed only 250

musicians in 1930 (Crafton, 223). The American Federation of Musicians (AFM)

responded to this change with The Music Defense League, a campaign to drum up

support to reinstall live musical accompaniment in movie theaters. In an ad run by The

7 This is not to say that today there are never live orchestral accompaniment to films nor live performances on the radio. But a musician can gain steady employment from neither.

36

League in a May 1930 issue of Billboard, a cartoon shows a robot on the run from a mob

of “real music” lovers led by a Greek muse brandishing a lyre. The robot flees carrying a

harp with an angel holding his/her head in shame as its crown and an over-sized tag

reading “Theater With Sound.” The ad merely called for supporters to enroll in The

League “if you, too, would like to register your resentment against the substitution of

soulless, mechanical reproduction of music and the elimination of real music in motion

picture theaters” (“The Robot,” 15). But the effort was for naught. It was clear by the end

of 1929 that theaters wired for sound would become the norm.8

With this loss of revenue, musicians naturally began to turn their attention

towards the use of recordings on the radio. In 1936 bandleader Fred Waring, for instance,

won a case against a Philadelphia radio station which broadcasted his recordings without

his permission. Radio stations were not required to pay musicians like Waring since they

rarely owned the copyright on the recordings on which they performed. But in Waring’s

estimation, he deserved compensation due to his irreducibly unique take on a

composition. Even though he was compensated handsomely for his broadcasts, a radio

station paid only about seventy-five cents for a recording for which he received only a

few cents. In the wake of his legal victory, Waring formed the National Association of

Performing Artists (NAPA) in an attempt to create a rights society similar to ASCAP for

the express purpose of collecting payment for performers. NAPA and its team of lawyers

even tried to draft legislation that would make such collection legal (Ennis 103).

But it was not to be. Another bandleader, Paul Whiteman, filed a similar suit

against a radio station in 1940. But this time, the case was lost. Even worse, the Supreme

8 Although it took many rural theaters well into the 1930s to make the conversion.

37

Court refused to hear any more arguments on the decision. This defeat effectively killed

off performers’ rights entering in the business practices of the music industry. Not

surprisingly, it signaled a decrease in the kind of specialization that characterized Tin Pan

Alley and a more widespread adoption of the practices of blues and country musicians,

many of whom did, in fact, write and perform their own material. Bandleaders, for one,

quite understandably began to see it as their province to create their own copyrights. In

Ennis’s estimation:

If the performer could not find a legal basis for earning anything from his or her unique, interpretive version of a song, the next best thing, the only thing, was to become the copyright holder as writer, composer, or publisher, or as all three. The institutional basis for rocknroll’s [sic] strong reliance on the singer-songwriter clearly lay in this earlier failure of performers to secure a property right in their performance. (Ennis 104)

Thus in order to maximize economic gain and creative control, the performer had to

become what I call the merged professional, a recording artist who functions in a variety

of roles that were specialized in Tin Pan Alley – composer, writer, singer, publisher --

and as recordings became more prominent, producer, engineer, etc. The emergence of the

merged professional marks an era when the most popular music in America moves from a

product resulting from specialization to one resulting from a synthesis of specialized

areas of musical labor. It will form the nucleus of rock ideology and influence greatly the

development of the Hollywood musical.

Radio and BMI

The defeat of performers’ rights allowed radio stations to play records on the air

with little threat of the obligation to pay more fees. Independent radio stations thus

38

entered a more synergistic relationship with the record industry. But another event which

drew these two entities together was the threat of a musicians’ strike in 1938. The AFM,

under the direction of James C. Petrillo, believed that all mechanically reproduced music

now diminished their employment opportunities. So the AFM drew up a contract with

radio stations which required the latter to place more musicians on their paid staffs.

However, independent radio stations grossing under $20,000 were exempt from this

contract (Ennis 104). They were thus free to broadcast as many records as they saw fit.

These stations became the testing grounds in which would brew a slew of developments

that changed the rules of the music industry.

Petrillo took aim at the record companies as well. In addition to WWII calling

many musicians to service and the big bands either scaled back or dissolved altogether

due to gasoline rations and other setbacks, the increased popularity of jukeboxes caused

musicians even more employment woes. Coupled with the use of recordings on the radio,

this grim portrait for musicians compelled Petrillo to institute a recording ban in 1942. He

called for a fund for unemployed musicians payable by the record companies. Major

record labels like Decca, Columbia, and Victor held out for as long as two years. But

many independent labels signed with the AFM immediately. These labels recorded so-

called hillbilly and race music acts, and for once, this music was easier to find on the

radio and in record stores than the pop hits from current Hollywood or Broadway

productions. Its wider dissemination during the ban helped create a thirst for these new

(to some ears) sounds.

Curiously, the ban covered only instrumentals. Singers could record and did so

either solo or in small singing groups which marshaled a golden age for the singer in the

39

postwar years. In the swing era of the 1930s, by contrast, the hot big band was the center

of attention despite the obvious popularity of certain singers at this time. Coupled with

smaller bands playing more freely across America during World War II, this new

supremacy for the singer “influenced the song repertoire towards more individualized,

more intimate vocalized material and more loosely improvised ensemble performance

styles” (Ennis 123). And, by extension, it influenced rock ‘n’ roll.

Another effect WWII had on the history of popular music was the increased

mobility that the war triggered. Millions of Americans either joined the military and

found themselves cast about the globe or moved into the cities to work for the various

war industries. Military/urban life afforded many people the opportunity to encounter

different ethnic/cultural groups which, of course, extended to their musics. This exodus

brought large populations out of their homes and away from their families, a move which

contributed to the widening of the generation gap that would gain steam in the decades

following the war and provide a strong platform from which to exploit rock ‘n’ roll from

an economic perspective.

Even before the war, though, music on the radio began to diversify as a result of

the formation of the Broadcast Music Incorporated, BMI, an event that unquestionably

caused the most turbulence in the music industry of the 1940s and beyond, with direct

implications for the economic prominence of rock ‘n ‘ roll. BMI’s existence was the

product of the five-year contract between ASCAP and radio broadcasters coming up for

renewal. Radio broadcasters had already wished to free themselves of obligations to

ASCAP. But when the Society demanded twice the amount they had previously been

receiving, the National Association of Broadcasters pooled its resources to create its own

40

bank of music, funding BMI well enough so that it can enter the business of acquiring

music publishing firms competitively.

BMI managed to make peace with ASCAP. In 1941, the radio networks signed a

new contract with ASCAP. But for about a year prior to this agreement, BMI pressured

stations to program as much non-ASCAP music as possible. Some networks even

required bands to perform non-ASCAP copyrights or else they would refuse to broadcast

their performances. During this virtual ban on ASCAP, Americans heard an odd array of

music on the radio. Early on, BMI was forced to work with newer, less established

songwriters since few publishers wanted to align themselves with such a new and

possibly fleeting organization. Soon, however, BMI acquired Ralph Peer’s Southern

Music and M. M. Cole of Chicago (both of which featured extensive hillbilly music

copyrights) as well as the more established firm of Edward B. Marks which included

many Latin songs in addition to its prestigious pop catalog. No doubt the foothold gained

by hillbilly music during the ban was responsible for the popularity of songs about the

West as well as the unprecedented success of Al Dexter’s “Pistol Packin’ Mama” in 1943

which became one of the most popular hits during World War II. Importantly, Dexter not

only wrote the song himself but recorded it as well.9 Public domain music also gained a

foothold. Hamm points out that Stephen Foster experienced a resurgence in popularity at

this time (Hamm 389). Novelty tunes began to flood the airwaves. So even though a new

ASCAP contract was drawn up in 1941, BMI had built up a large enough arsenal of

copyrights to instill in some listeners a desire to explore other music outside of the Tin

Pan Alley stranglehold.

9 Although Bing Crosby recorded the most popular version with The Andrew Sisters.

41

Unlike ASCAP, BMI made no distinction between live and recorded

performances nor between performances on networks and independent radio stations

when it came to payouts. And whereas ASCAP made larger payments to its more

established members, BMI paid out based simply on how well a present performance of a

song was doing. Placing its members and the type of performances on equal footing

strengthened the importance of the independent radio stations. Not only could they now

break hits more easily but they could make a hit out of a particular record as opposed to a

song. Their newfound power stimulated the ailing record business which had almost

always trailed behind publishing and the sheet music trade. It was not until almost the

1920s that records would sell in the millions. And the Depression hit the business so hard

that the entire industry almost disappeared by 1932. But towards the end of the decade, it

was slowly recovering so that by 1940, Billboard changed its reporting to reflect the

growing sales of records. In the July 27th issue, one chart would now track the “Records

Most Popular on Music Machines” with a corresponding list of the “Best Selling Retail

Records.” These new lists shared space with the traditional “List of Songs with most

Radio Plugs” and Billboard’s corresponding chart of “Sheet Music Best Sellers” thus

solidifying the importance of record sales (Ennis 120-1). For now, records and songs

were granted equal recognition if not equal sales. But Tin Pan Alley was gradually losing

its hegemony. The most storied songwriters were scoring fewer hits. And soon, a

completely different music would overtake the old guard in both sales and cultural

relevancy.

42

Song Gives Way to Recording

In 1948, Columbia introduced the long-playing record album or the LP for short.

The technology for this development had already existed when Vitaphone brought film

into the sound era by creating a twenty-inch disc that could hold eleven minutes of

recordings which corresponded to the length of one 35mm film reel (yet another

demonstration of the close link between the film and music industries). However, most

attempts to market a similar disc to consumers failed mostly because the tone arm was

too heavy and tore into the weaker plastic discs that replaced shellac 78s for radio

transcriptions. So what Columbia really developed was a tone arm light enough to play

these plastic discs (Dawson and Propes 10). RCA, Columbia’s chief rival in the record

business, responded the following year with a smaller seven-inch disc that moved at

forty-five revolutions per minute (called simply a 45) as opposed to the twelve-inch LP’s

thirty-three-and-a-third revolutions per minute. RCA also introduced an array of players,

the cheapest of which was a small, plastic 45-only player. In Ennis’s estimation, this

machine “was probably the single most important piece of technology facilitating

rocknroll’s [sic] appearance” (Ennis 133).

Immediately, Columbia had to deal with the question of what to place on long-

playing albums. Columbia decided on several classical releases for its first batch of LP

releases since the length of most classical symphonies and concertos would be suited to

the LP’s ideal length of about twenty minutes per side. But soon, record companies were

faced with the task of stringing together collections of three-minute songs under some

sort of organizing principle. Songs by a single performer were an obvious choice and the

43

first pop LPs released by Columbia featured such performers as Frank Sinatra, Billie

Holliday, Doris Day, and Dinah Shore. Themes centered on dances or ethnic and seasonal

songs provided more opportunities to create sustained LP programs. And, of course, the

format perfectly accommodated musical scores from movies and Broadway shows.

The 45, by contrast, featured only one song per side. So where Columbia had to

concern itself with how to integrate songs into one coherent long-playing program, RCA

merely dipped into its catalog to reissue individual songs that had appeared on 78s.10

They formed an alliance with Capitol Records to manufacture 45s for them. Unlike RCA,

Capitol had no classical music catalog to exploit and thus focused on reissuing pop,

country, and R&B tunes. But soon both companies along with MGM Records began

issuing 45s of their current songs. Additionally, the 45 traveled lightly, both literally and

in promotional efforts. It was much more difficult to exploit the LP given that it gained

exposure primarily through record store displays and newspaper advertisements. By

contrast, the 45 enjoyed much wider exposure through jukeboxes and the radio. So from

the very beginning of these format wars in the record industry, an undeniable split was

between the 45 and the LP in terms of the exploitation systems through which each

moved. But a demographic split was occurring as well. Even though the 45 experienced

shaky sales in its first year, the record companies noticed immediately that the 45 was

popular with teenagers.

The radio DJ was the key force in exploiting the music on 45s to teenagers. His

ascendancy is a product of the growth of local radio stations. After WWII, the FCC

granted licenses to so many new stations that by 1948, they cut in half the average

10 Both companies eventually released recordings in both formats, however.

44

audience for each which rendered the business more competitive (Ennis 136). More than

ever, radio stations were vying with one another for advertising dollars and the ears of as

many listeners as possible. In such a cutthroat environment, each station sought an angle

that would make it stand out from the others and found an answer in a DJ with a strong

personality. In the person of the DJ, radio stations could synthesize their various

marketing concerns by having one forceful figurehead sell advertising, records, and the

station itself. And once it was determined that teenagers were purchasing the most

popular records, age became a crucial factor in determining the audiences to target with

increasingly specialized broadcasts.

The problem was how to track positive responses to a single early enough so that

radio stations and record companies could build momentum. One site to achieve this goal

became the radio station itself. Teenagers were invited into the studio to meet the DJ and

to offer their opinions on current records. This tactic served to build a much stronger

rapport between DJs and teenage listeners, one built out of respect which teenagers could

report back to their friends. A flow occurred in the opposite direction as well. Many DJs

met teenagers on their own turfs at record hops and school dances. Such direct contact

had been reserved for the publisher and the performer under the Tin Pan Alley regime. A

performer would often visit the publisher’s office to hear new songs and choose a

repertoire accordingly. Now the DJ became an extension of the Artists & Repertoire

(A&R) division of record companies (responsible for locating and signing acts) and, in

many instances, brought records directly to audiences. The combination of the publishers

with their ranks of song pluggers was being slowly swept aside to make room for the

45

combination of record companies with their A&R men and, by extension, the DJs. In

Hamm’s words:

At the root of this switch of power from music publishers to recording companies was perhaps the most fundamental change in the entire history of popular song in America – from a music existing in a written tradition to one on oral tradition. (Hamm 402)

If the DJ synthesized a variety of economic functions for radio stations, he also

managed to bring together the musical streams that led to the formation of rock ‘n’ roll.

In this role, he provided continuity at a time when R&B and country records on

independent labels rose in popularity alongside a Tin Pan Alley that was still quite

successful in the hit-making game. What this increasingly chaotic jumble of styles on the

airwaves made clear was that New York City was losing its ground as the epicenter of the

popular music business (again, with the proviso that Hollywood had already challenged

that dominance). With the increase of the number of local radio stations, the landscape

became much more atomized. Here again, though, the DJ offered a cementing function.

As Ennis notes, “the hit-making disk jockeys helped create an integrated national grand

loop out of the smaller short loops each had constructed in their own cities” (Ennis 160).

They achieved this integration via the careful monitoring of tastes and hit songs which in

turn tutored audiences in the physics of the hit-making process. Radio shows such as the

Lucky Strike Hit Parade, which hit the airwaves in 1935, had already started training

listeners in this area. But what was changing in the postwar years was the way in which

the various music industry trade magazines (chief amongst them, of course, Billboard)

dutifully reported all of this activity. As with the DJs themselves, these trade journals

46

went a long way towards making sense of a chaotic musicscape and eventually brought

several streams together in what became known as rock ‘n’ roll.

The pop, R&B, and country streams all had their own versions of the pared-down

swing band at this time. But the industry, especially record retailers, needed Billboard’s

all important best-selling singles chart to reflect the performance of each stream

comparatively. So Billboard adjusted the size of each chart accordingly to reflect those

discrepancies in speed, distribution, and sales: “As the number of records released in each

stream expanded or declined, the number of slots in the charts altered...the pop, country,

and R&B charts…were made to appear as if they were moving at the same rate” (Ennis

185).

The reason these adjustments were so important is because record retailers relied

on Billboard’s best-selling singles chart in making their purchasing decisions. Radio

programmers used the same chart to regulate the flow of records on and off their play

lists. And, of course, record companies required this information in order to estimate to

what extent they needed to promote certain releases. But with more representation of

R&B and country singles on one hit parade, crossovers happened much more frequently.

As a barometer of these flows, the answer song showed how tangled the streams were.11

For example, Ennis traces the lineage of one of the best-selling country records of 1953,

Homer and Jethro’s “That Hound Dog in the Window,” a unique answer song in that it

responded to two hit records – Patti Page’s “How Much Is That Doggie In The Window”

and Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton’s “Hound Dog.” Page’s hit represented the

11 An answer song is a song that makes explicit reference to some aspect of a previous song, most often a lyric. A later example is Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” (1974) which was an answer song to Neil Young’s “Southern Man” (1970).

47

pop/Tin Pan Alley stream which was speaking less frequently to teenagers, particularly in

its lack of a dance beat and its expensive studio trickery that rendered the recording

unduplicatable by small combos. By contrast, “Hound Dog” represented the R&B stream

and featured a raw, driving rhythm more than suitable for dancing (Ennis 193-4). Answer

songs, then, instructed listeners to locate generic boundaries and compelled them to

determine which expression was the most authentic. But it is crucial to underline that

even though the large number of answer songs and cover versions in this period betrayed

remnants of the supremacy of the song over the record, the charts were tracking their

instantiations as specific recordings by individual artists whose names were mentioned in

each slot. And it was only a matter of time before one record (as opposed to one song) hit

in all three streams. In early 1956, Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” became a top five

song on the pop, R&B, and country charts. Later in the year, his “Don’t Be

Cruel”/”Hound Dog” single hit the number one spot on all three charts. In some

estimations, rock ‘n’ roll was born.

In short, advances in recording and playback technology, coupled with the

formation of BMI and the emergence of the merged professional, led to a situation in

which the song began to lose its footing as the essential popular music building block,

giving way to the prominence of the recording. Ennis provides a perfect summation of

this era:

The song as written notes, inviting varied interpretations by any performer, was gradually being replaced by a unique recorded performance by a single artist (soloist, vocal group, or a band). The performer came to dominate the creative side, overshadowing the songwriter and lyricist. Consequently, it was the record company with its producers, talent scouts, and exploitation machinery that displaced the publisher as impresarial center. (Ennis 99, emphasis in original)

48

This development would characterize rock ‘n’ roll as a music in which a specific

recording becomes associated with a specific performer, increasingly one who has

composed and wrote the lyrics for the song recorded.

Rock ‘n’ Roll Style

For many who heard rock ‘n’ roll for the first time, it was “shocking, exciting, and

most of all, extraordinarily different from what had preceded it” (Hamm 393). Hamm

describes the style of the music largely in negatives in terms of how it related to Tin Pan

Alley. No instruments associated with the lush orchestrations of Tin Pan Alley such as

strings and most woodwinds were used in the performance of early rock ‘n’ roll. The

instrumentation instead derived from the guitar-bass-drums combo prevalent in both

country and R&B music. Rock ‘n’ roll singers rarely crooned nor displayed any expertise

in sustaining quasi-operatic high notes. The music borrowed none of the harmonic

subtleties and chromatic chords that linked Tin Pan Alley to Western European art music

and lent it its narrative thrust. With such a heavy emphasis on a fast, driving beat, each

instrument seemed to form part of the rhythm section (Hamm 395-6). In short, “it

differed in almost every possible way from the music that had dominated popular song in

America for almost half a century” (Hamm 394). Yet this was a music perfect for the

increasingly wild form of dancing favored by teenagers. And while swing bands of the

1930s gained rabid popularity with both adult and younger audience, particularly the

college set, few, if any, adults danced to rock ‘n’ roll.

49

It became immediately apparent that this was racially hybrid music which made

for probably the clearest distinguishing feature from the era of popular music

immediately preceding it. Tin Pan Alley had a much stronger connection to early

nineteenth-century European classical music than it did to the black rhythms of the day

even though many composers, especially George Gershwin, incorporated explicit

elements of jazz and blues in their songwriting. For the most part, Tin Pan Alley’s

rhythms were comparatively stilted time-keeping mechanisms. In the rhythms of rock ‘n’

roll, it was clear that black and white musics were coming together in ways that they

never had before, a fact that drove many teenagers to fanatical devotion to the music and

many adults to feverish condemnations of it. On this matter, the oft-quoted Asa E. Carter

of the North Alabama Citizens Council, a group formed to fight desegregation, viewed

rock ‘n’ roll as a fiendish plot on the part of the NAACP to “mongrelize America” and

said of the music that “it appeals to the base in man, brings out animalism and vulgarity”

(Hamm 400-1). Most rock ‘n’ roll fans would embrace these very same qualities as the

reason for why they adored the music so much even to this day.

The lyrics of rock ‘n’ roll provided yet another stark contrast with Tin Pan Alley.

Where the lyrics to most Tin Pan Alley songs aspired to an idealized romance, many rock

‘n’ roll lyrics described sexual situations in barely euphemistic language. Indeed, the very

name of the music itself was code for the sexual act. And much of rock ‘n’ roll

functioned like a secret code amongst teenagers that left adults clueless and baffled.

Many parents could not understand the words anyway. So some artists revved up the

incoherency as a way to mark further this music as the exclusive property of teenagers, a

practice which reached its apotheosis in two songs that hit the top five in 1963 and have

50

since become profane sacred texts of rock ‘n’ roll – The Kingsmen “Louie Louie” and

The Trashmen’s “Surfin’ Bird.” As a torrent of pre-Oedipal babble, few rock ‘n’ roll

lyrics counseled teenagers as to their responsibility towards the future. If parents

constantly haggled teens to make plans and save accordingly, rock ‘n’ roll enticed them

to spend their discretionary income and their energy right now, a winning scenario for the

rapidly expanding consumer culture of 1950s America eager to foster this buy now-pay

later ethos with lines of credit. Music and lyrics together would thus lend rock ‘n’ roll its

legacy as a music of rebellion while rendering it a perfect commodity for the postwar

economy.

The Reaction to Rock ‘n’ Roll

If anything kept the youth of America in line in the decades before rock ‘n’ roll, it

was the twin scourges of the Great Depression and World War II. But many Americans,

particularly white Americans making an exodus to the suburbs, were choking on

economic prosperity by the 1950s. And a portion of the audience for rock ‘n’ roll were

too young for World War II to have had a significant impact on them. Ennis makes the

astute observation that Presley had no immediate family in the war which meant that

“Elvis delegitimated the adults’ command over these kids by making any authority

conferred by World War II irrelevant” (Ennis 245).12 The same held true for Presley’s

safer, whitebread manifestation in Pat Boone. In this respect, adults had trouble

conveying their hard-won wisdom. And exhortations on the part of parents for their

12 This situation would hold in England several years later with The Beatles. In the film A

Hard Day’s Night, a stuffy older man shares a train compartment with The Beatles and grows annoyed at the music they are playing on the radio. “I fought the war for your sort,” he huffs. “I bet you’re sorry you won,” Ringo replies.

51

children to buckle down and achieve in a success-obsessed America often fell on deaf

ears poised to overthrow their elders.

The old guard of popular music represented by ASCAP waged continuous battle

against this nascent form of popular music. They had every reason to worry. Sheet music

sales were plummeting while record sales reached unprecedented numbers. In 1946, the

record industry sold eight million discs. In 1951, they were moving 180 million of them,

a figure which nearly doubled by 1956. In that year alone, Presley sold ten million

records. But Tin Pan Alley steadfastly remained on the airwaves and in the charts. Doris

Day, Perry Como, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, etc. enjoyed huge hits in this vein deep in

the heart of rock ‘n’ roll activity. Some rock ‘n’ rollers (or artists who became associated

with rock ‘n’ roll) recorded Tin Pan Alley tunes outright such as Fats Domino did for his

biggest hit, “Blueberry Hill.” Or else they recorded in a Tin Pan Alley style. Many of the

Everly Brothers’ songs, for instance, sounded like a canny fusion of country and western

with Tin Pan Alley. They were one of the few artists apart from Presley and Jerry Lee

Lewis, who consistently scored hit records on the pop, R&B, and country charts with

their 1958 single “All I Have To Do Is Dream” reaching the top spot on all three. Cover

versions worked in a similar fashion. White artists would tackle an R&B song in crooner

fashion while the backing track mimicked the orchestral stylings of Tin Pan Alley. Boone

was the most notorious of these cover version offenders. Even Presley checked in with an

endless string of ballads, perhaps his greatest legacy, and dragged in the era of the teen

idol. Boone, Paul Anka, Frankie Avalon, and the like were basically Tin Pan Alley

singers writ small. And a combination of the Army, religion, scandal, and death took bad

boys like Presley, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Buddy Holly off the scene.

52

Overall, a general taming of rock ‘n’ roll went into immediate effect after its first initial

shock to the system so that by 1960, the early rock ‘n’ roll style had practically

disappeared from the airwaves.

ASCAP used their political clout to reverse their fortunes, however temporarily.

Under the leadership of Arthur Schwartz, the Society met regularly with several bodies of

the US Congress to claim that BMI was unduly influencing radio play towards their own

copyrights. A bill making it illegal for owners of radio and/or television stations to

engage in publishing failed. But Schwartz persevered and managed to compel Congress

to investigate the issue of payola and radio DJs. ASCAP was more successful with this

gambit. The famed DJ Alan Freed was taken down when ABC fired him for refusing to

sign a statement that he never engaged in payola. Dick Clark was ordered to divest

himself of his various holdings in the music business. No longer would a single DJ be

responsible for making hits (to whatever extent he truly was in the past). More

programming decisions were made by committee after these investigations. ASCAP

succeeded in diminishing the amount of music for teenagers on AM radio which had a

devastating effect on the indie labels that depended on the singles market for a large part

of their revenue. The major labels forged ahead by marketing the long-playing album to

adults (Ennis 265-7).

Distinctions between the LP and the 45 helped widen the generation gap. For the

most part, the indies continued servicing jukeboxes and the ever-burgeoning teen market

with 45s while all of the major labels targeted adults with the LP. By the 1950s record

companies wielded high fidelity stereo sound as a feature of LPs to sell to adults since

they formed the market that possessed the income necessary to purchase hi-fi equipment.

53

The teen market purchased the cheaper 45s. But from 1959 to 1969, sales of 45s made up

only about twenty-five percent of the recording industry’s revenue (Smith 50). This is

why major labels focused on selling LPs to the adult market leaving. And one of the

types of long-playing records the majors sold to adults was the movie soundtrack album.

The soundtrack album featuring instrumental movie scores formed one crucial

component in the cultural and economic war against rock ‘n’ roll. Many in the music

industry, including artists, trade journalists, disc jockeys, and record company personnel,

viewed rock ‘n’ roll as a grotesque fad (especially in the wake of the payola scandals) and

tried to foster a musicscape that would turn back to more melodic pop. Jeff Smith quotes

a late 1959 Variety article called “The No-Payola Sound of Music” which offers

suggestions to broadcasters towards this end: “Brahms, Elvis, Mantovani, Harry

Belafonte, and various film scores, more specifically the soundtracks from Exodus, The

Alamo, The Apartment, and the UA collection, Great Motion Picture Themes” (Smith

53). The inclusion of Elvis in this list is quite remarkable because it is a measure of how

well the Tin Pan Alley mafia actually managed quickly to tame rock ‘n’ roll. And his

soundtrack fare would soon keep him in line with the sugary output of teen idols like

Fabian, Tab Hunter, and Boone all of whom starred in films as well. With the help of the

soundtrack album, then, the campaign for sweeter sounds in both the adult and teen

markets seems to have worked. So I would amend one of Smith’s conclusions to read that

“it is within this larger industrial and ideological context that many of the earliest original

soundtrack albums were released” (Smith 53). Their very birth thus evinces a tension

with rock ‘n’ roll.

54

Developments in the Motion Picture Industry

The advent of the merged professional as well as the increased importance of the

recording made it much easier for a song to become popular without the help of

Broadway or even a motion picture. Songs from movies and Broadway shows made up

only about forty percent of the most popular songs in 1951, down from eighty percent in

1943 (Sanjek 318). But just as movie studios purchased publishing houses after the

advent of sound, so they began acquiring record companies in such a way that to speak of

“the recording industry” would necessarily entail a consideration of its place within larger

corporations. Hollywood quickly saw the gargantuan profit potential in records and soon

joined the industry by forming their own record divisions or purchasing companies

whole. The strategy paid off in quite unique ways for some corporations. For instance, by

1958, Loew’s could report that its holdings in music, which included radio, publishing,

and MGM Records, generated more profits than its film divisions (Smith 34).13

This decentering of film production within the motion picture industry points to

an industry-wide identity crisis in this era due to a variety of factors – television; the

increasing deterioration of picture palaces in large cities in the wake of suburban flight;

the rise of the independent producer; the death of the long-term studio contract and the

concurrent rise of self-incorporated actors, some of whom formed their own production

companies; and, most importantly for this study, the changing demographic of

moviegoers. As early as 1947, the audiences for motion pictures were skewing young,

13 Record sales would continue to outflank film revenues into the 1990s largely due to the most expensive albums costing much less than a Hollywood blockbuster. Also, music stars are much more predictable bearer of profits than movie stars who change their personas far more frequently.

55

unmarried, and male. And just as many in the music industry mourned the popularity of

teen music, motion picture industry professionals mourned the decline of adult attendance

at movie theaters. Despite producing a slew of rock ‘n’ roll films explicitly addressed to

teens (which will be discussed in later chapters), the industry continued to favor adult

fare, often to its own detriment. As Thomas Doherty puts it:

Many industry professionals - producers, directors, and screenwriters - had "adult" artistic sensibilities. Whether nurtured in the classical Hollywood studio system or recently graduated from New York stages, they were unwilling to allow juveniles to dictate the exercise of their talents…Despite box office reports and statistical data, many continued to work against their own economic interests by making movies for an audience that really didn't go to the movies that much: married adults with children. (65)

This demographic shift showed no signs of abating in the 1960s if indeed it truly has ever

since. By the end of the decade, the 16-24 crowd made up almost half of box office

admissions (Doherty 231).

Still, Hollywood persisted desperately in trying to win back the adult audience.

And one type of film used to that end was the musical. The major studios treated many

musicals in this era as prestige pictures and thus poured a great deal of money and

promotional effort into them. As a measure of that prestige if not the cultural anxiety

fueling it, it pays to recall that in the decade spanning from 1958 to 1968, half of the Best

Picture Oscar winners were musicals – Gigi (1958), West Side Story (1961), My Fair

Lady (1964), The Sound of Music (1965), and Oliver! (1968). Prior to that, only The

Broadway Melody (1929) and The Great Ziegfeld (1936) captured the Best Picture Oscar

and subsequently, only Chicago (2002), and arguably Amadeus (1984), managed the

same feat. To heighten that prestige, the majors often exhibited musicals around the

56

States as roadshows, exclusive engagements with reserved seating, souvenir programs,

intermissions, and drinks in the lobby which associated films with the higher class

pastime of stage theater. And always the goal was to attract not just adults but the entire

family.

One can see this method at work as late as 1970 with the notorious flop Song of

Norway, a musical biography of composer Edvard Grieg directed by Andrew L. Stone.

To begin with, ABC Pictures, the film division of the television corporation The

American Broadcasting Company, produced Song of Norway as a roadshow attraction in

partnership with the Cinerama Releasing Corporation (CRC) which testifies not only to

the blurring of the film and television industries by this time but also the fluctuating

notion of what counts as a major studio in this era. Indeed, CRC was labeled an “instant

major” upon its formation in 1967 (Cook 10). The ABC-CRC partnership meant that

Song of Norway would be exhibited in theaters that could project the film on an

enormous, curved Cinerama screen or an approximation thereof in keeping with the

spectacular nature of roadshows.14

An ad for Song of Norway reveals the family as the primary demographic target

(“Songofnorway.jpg.”). Before it even identifies the film as a musical, the headline

screams “Here at last, a beautiful new family movie that we love.” The copy continues:

“It’s a charmer, a musical movie that will delight you as much as it delights your

youngsters and your in-laws.” The bottom half of the ad suggests purchasing tickets in

advance at Macy’s department store with a Macy’s charge card. And while there, one can

14 Cinerama was a three-camera widescreen process. But later films like Song of Norway were shot in a single-camera process, in this instance Super Panavision 70.

57

purchase “big and little sister fashions” inspired by the Norwegian folk dress in the film.

The phrase “Our pretty peasants” appears in large letters above an illustration of five

outfits.15

But the ad targets a demographic that had long since ceased making up the

dominant portion of box office receipts. And roadshows failed to attract a younger

demographic (Monaco 51). Thus Song of Norway was a critical and commercial flop

“which earned just under $4.5 million and failed to return its negative cost” (Cook 209).16

And it served as only the most blatant attempt to replicate the gargantuan success of The

Sound of Music (1965), the soundtrack of which became one of the biggest selling

albums of the 1960s. Doctor Dolittle (1967), Camelot (1967), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

(1968), Star! (1968), Paint Your Wagon (1969), Darling Lili (1970), On A Clear Day

You Can See Forever (1970), etc. all tried to build off the momentum of The Sound of

Music and all performed poorly at the box office and not much better with critics. With

the major studios producing less films per year, far too much rode on individual releases.

Even a success like Hello, Dolly! (1969) initially reaped only modest profits due to a

budget of over $20 million making it one of the most expensive picture to date (Kimbrell

175). Despite the impressive box office of Oliver! and Funny Girl (1968), the musical

stood out as the genre most responsible for Hollywood’s financial woes at the turn of the

decade. So roughly in the decade following the emergence of rock ‘n’ roll, the United

States experienced a generation gap with musicals/LPs/adult market on one end and rock

15 Apparently this was a savvy marketing ploy. Vincent Canby ended his New York Times

review of the film observing a little girl who remarked “I'd love to live in Norway!…The children wear such pretty clothes!" See Canby. 16 Remarkably, Stone was back in 1972 with yet another musical biography, this time of Johann Strauss in MGM’s The Great Waltz.

58

‘n’ roll/45s/teen market on the other. But soon that balance would be thrown off by the

advent of rock.

Rock

The next chapter will go into rock in great detail. Suffice to say here that the

youth market was slowly taking to the LP. The Beatles were largely responsible for this

transformation, lending a cohesiveness to a stylistically dispersed popular music scene

and providing a bridge back to the rock ‘n’ roll explosion of 1955:

Their music (along with that of other successful British groups at the time) can be heard as a continuation of what had begun in America in 1955-58 - the only continuation, since American music in 1959-64 had moved in quite different directions. (Hamm 423)17

Many early Beatles songs possessed some of the trappings of Tin Pan Alley. But

even before they wielded the studio as an instrument, The Fab Four constantly tweaked

the formula with odd chord formations and looser song forms. They grafted complex

harmonies reminiscent of 1950s doo-wop and the sweet vocal groups of the 1940s onto

raw R&B instrumentation. And their lyrics flirted with sexual ambiguity almost from the

very beginning. This combination sold so many singles and LPs that the record business

now turned towards marketing long-playing albums to teenagers. The success of the

soundtrack for A Hard Day’s Night in 1964 paved the way for Hollywood studios to start

marketing their soundtrack fare to teens (Smith 56). For better or worse, rock and roll

17 “The only continuation” is overstated. The rawness of a lot of R&B songs proceeded untrammeled in this era. And the proto-garage bands of the Pacific Northwest scene unquestionably continued the rock ‘n’ roll spirit. The Wailers were recording hard, raunchy rock ‘n’ roll as early as 1959 with The Sonics and the sainted Kingsmen following several years later.

59

was maturing into rock and fashioned the long-playing album into an art form, reaching

its apotheosis with The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in June of 1967.

Rock, as opposed to rock ‘n’ roll (and certainly as opposed to Tin Pan Alley), was now

hegemonic.

But its hegemony should not distort the more important historical development of

recordings moving to the center of popular music experience in the United States. This is

why Smith’s The Sounds of Commerce and Tim J. Anderson’s Making Easy Listening are

such crucial contributions to the field. With the former’s focus mostly on non-rock movie

soundtracks and the latter’s on how recordings trained the mostly adult ear in active

listening, they underline how “popular music belonged to the public in a materially

distinct and different manner than before,” a history brushed to the side too often by

studies of rock (Anderson xxxii). Even in musical theater, which crossed over very few

individual songs onto the pop charts after the advent of rock, recordings grew in

importance at least for the wildly successful Andrew Lloyd Webber whose musicals

Jesus Christ Superstar (1970) and Evita (1976) both started life as popular albums.

Nevertheless, rock became hegemonic in an era where music not only became

more portable but more ambient as well. Mark N. Grant writes about this development in

relation to the Broadway musical. He notes that what he calls the rock groove, the basic

rhythmic thrust of rock music, has infiltrated not only the Broadway musical, which in

his assessment has contributed to its downfall, but everywhere:

The rock groove has been "Muzak-ized" in America to a pervasive degree undreamt of by Mantovani or Guy Lombardo. The rock groove is the primal sound of postmodern Western civilization. It is heard 24/7 on every form of electronic broadcast media - television, radio, the Web - on jingles, station breaks, commercials, downloads, and on one's headphones while jogging or

60

commuting to the office. It is heard in airports, on airplanes, in movie theaters, in sports stadiums. This was never true of the foxtrot, the waltz, the two-step, the march, the tango, or any other rhythm or dance pattern known to history. Our culture speaks the common tongue of the rock groove and exports it to Iceland, India, Italy, and everywhere else around the globe. (Grant 159)

In a kinder estimation, Ennis echoes this sentiment when he discusses how the

incorporation of rock into other musics and settings has absorbed its propensity to shock:

“There is hardly a musical stream that rock has not creatively encountered. The ultimate

indicator of mass acceptance is rock’s narcoleptic presence in the shopping mall, the

supermarket, the high-rise elevator, and the dentist’s office” (373). So even though record

and motion picture industry professionals waged an unmistakable war against rock ‘n’

roll and rock, it became clear that rock in its multifarious, sometimes compromised forms

won that war as the 1970s rolled around.

But rock’s ambient presence disseminated much more widely the assumptions

underpinning it as an ideology, namely, the merged professional as an ideal in American

popular music. And given how the audience for rock music overlapped with the younger

demographic attending the movies, the films in this era started incorporating those

assumptions more often, with the largest impact felt on the musical.

61

Chapter 2: Peel It Off Your Face: The Ideology of Rock

The professional merger of composer, lyricist, performer, and musician,

occasioned by the defeat of performers’ rights, laid the foundation of rock ideology, the

dominant ideology of popular music in America by the late 1960s. As such, it impacted

the development of the Hollywood musical with a force that gave rise to the canard that

rock killed off the genre altogether. Before mapping out the specific coordinates of that

impact, it is imperative to define rock ideology and demonstrate how it worked. This

chapter, then, will examine the two major tensions that animated rock ideology – between

art and commerce on the one hand, and between the individual and the community on the

other. But rock could never be a source of pleasure or inspiration (or conversely, concern

or even repulsion) if it failed somehow to manage these tensions. So I will also analyze

how the figure of the rock star as a merged professional, the point at which composer,

lyricist, performer, and musician have now merged, manages these tensions by either

papering over them or holding them next to one another in a productive, often

exhilarating tension.

Ideology

Louis Althusser defines ideology as “the system of ideas and representations

which dominate the mind of a man [sic] or a social group” (76). Social groups living in a

modern capitalist system often take these ideas and representations as natural facts. But,

in fact, ideology takes the form of a variety of social institutions that Althusser labels

62

Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) – religion, education, family, law, politics, trade-

unions, communications, and, most importantly for the present study, culture

(“Literature, the Arts, sports, etc.”) (67). Althusser goes to great lengths to distinguish

ISAs from the Repressive State Apparatus which comprises “the Government, the

Administration, the Army, the Police, the Courts, the Prisons, etc.” and which functions

through its ultimate potential for violence. ISAs, by contrast, function with relative

autonomy as they interpellate, or hail, individual subjects to find themselves within a

particular ideology and to take its ideas and representations to be self-evident. But the

process of interpellation cannot preclude failure largely because, as Robin Wood notes,

“ideology…is inherently riddled with hopeless contradictions and unresolvable tensions”

(61). For instance, American capitalist ideology valorizes the pursuit of success and

wealth while promulgating the idea that money corrupts (what Wood called “the Rosebud

syndrome” after Citizen Kane’s happier-in-poverty narrative) (61). Sometimes the

contradictions will remain unresolved, and thus ideology will fail to interpellate a subject

to whatever extent. So while, for instance, rock ideology indeed became the dominant

popular music ideology in late 1960s America, by no means did all audiences find

themselves within rock’s ideas and representations. In Lee Marshall’s estimation,

“ideology is not merely a way of describing the world in which we live, it is a way of

dealing with the tensions of our lived experience, of ironing out the contradictions and

ruptures of the modern world. It works to conceal tensions and this is the case with…rock

ideology” (111).

Most definitions of ideology treat it as a hoodwinking, pernicious reality. Indeed,

Althusser defines ideology along another line as “a representation of the imaginary

63

relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (78). But more attention

needs to be paid to the appeal of particular ideologies and their pleasurable, even life-

affirming capacities. For instance, according to Michel Foucault, various late nineteenth-

century judicial, medical, educational, etc. institutions created the modern homosexual

subject as something to be understood, studied, cured, and/or punished. But they also

created a situation whereby homosexual subjects could form coalitions to combat

oppressive ideologies and actions. Ignoring the full spectrum of ideology, its capacity to

produce both negative and positive effects, prevents a deeper understanding of how

precisely it interpellates subjects.

Art/Commerce

The attraction of rock ideology becomes obvious when one looks at its roots in

the humiliating defeat of performers’ rights. Rock ideology works overtime to locate and

honor musicianship, a direct result of the merged professionals in post-WWII American

popular music. As their ranks increased, so did the value attached to artists who not only

write their own music and lyrics but also play and sing them. Furthermore, the

performance side of the equation matched, if not outweighed, composition in importance.

As Joe Carducci explains:

Invariably the art in rock music is found at that superheated nexus in performance where each musician, while playing his part in the material, hears and feels and anticipates the greater whole as it is being reincarnated…In rock music songwriting may be a significant aid in the conjuring, but it’s still essentially a pretext for the art itself. Better songwriting and arrangement provide a more fertile base for performance…It is not the replication of a song that matters but what jam/spirit can be invoked in the musical use of the tune. (8-9)

64

The centrality of performance to rock accounts for the importance of not only live

concerts, but also movies, and, increasingly, television in verifying, though by no means

unproblematically, the work that goes into a performance if not a recording. As Anno

Mungen notes, “the music is perceivable to full degree only in mediatized performance,

where all features of the theatrical act prove their significance” (72). Songwriters who did

not perform their own songs could fade into the background while performers could

receive much more widespread acclaim for putting their unique stamp on songs they did

not write (the careers of Elvis Presley, Janis Joplin, Joe Cocker as well as Jimi Hendrix’s

celebrated cover of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” figure prominently here).

Ultimately, however, rock ideology creates aspirations towards both performing and

composing one’s own song.

There is no better summary of this most crucial aspect of rock ideology than

Robert Christgau’s New York Times review of Barbra Streisand’s What About Today?

album from 1969. As a singer who initially found fame on Broadway in the early 1960s,

Streisand exemplifies a sort of last gasp for Tin Pan Alley in the rock era. The intent

behind What About Today? was to make a connection with her contemporaries in a

popular music world on which, as Broadway and film star in the late 1960s, she had little

impact. So she covered songs by songwriters associated to varying degrees with rock:

John Lennon-Paul McCartney, Paul Simon, Jimmy Webb, Burt Bacharach-Hal David,

and Buffy Sainte-Marie.18 Christgau, soon to anoint himself The Dean of American Rock

18As Christgau points out, though, the project was compromised from the start with her choices. Webb and especially Bacharach-David gained prestige writing songs for others which links them back to Tin Pan Alley. Sainte-Marie and Simon are closer to the gentle

65

Critics, naturally found her interpretations a catastrophe. His reasons why are worth

quoting at length for the insight they provide into rock ideology:

She is not so much a singer as an actress, turning each song into a little playlet--or rather, since hitting the notes is important to her, a little operetta. Every song is a new role, and her natural mode is the tour de force. It is this very conceit that rock has striven to destroy from its inception. The rock singer may play-act, but never so frankly or variously: His concern is image rather than role. Like the blues and country artists who were his forebears, his aim is always to appear that he is singing his own life--not just recalling his own experience in order to enrich a song, in the manner of Frank Sinatra, but singing his own life and preferably his own composition. To a sensibility accustomed to this conceit, the histrionics of Broadway nightclub pop seem absurdly corny, no matter how "sophisticated" the approach, and the audience for such transparent dramatics seems positively innocent in its eager suspension of disbelief. (Christgau 167-8)

Later in the review, he excoriates Streisand for her recasting of Simon’s “Punky’s

Dilemma,” an ironic song about a young man’s fear of being drafted. “In order for this

irony to come across, however, it must be sung by a man,” concludes Christgau (169),

who then goes on to lambaste her interpretive abilities.19 For an actress, playing a man

might pose a welcome challenge. Indeed, if pulled off well enough, it might even reap

sounds of folk-rock. And of the three Lennon-McCartney songs she chose, two were sung by Ringo Starr on their respective Beatles albums (one, “Good Night,” a string-laden lullaby) while the other, “Honey Pie,” is performed by McCartney in the style of an old English music hall tune with one line delivered through a megaphone and speckled with scratches to emulate a 78 RPM record. 19 In Streisand’s semi-defense, she does change “If I become a first lieutenant” to “If I become a famous lady” and slips in a minor gender reversal in the same verse. However, these changes either strengthen Christgau’s argument that she did not understand the irony of the song or suggest that Streisand was after a camp desecration of rock ideology. The former seems more likely since she dedicated the album “to the young people who push against indifference, shout down mediocrity, demand a better future, and who write and sing the songs of today.” Curiously, at least one other version of this song exists sung by a woman, the obscure Lois Lane. Lane changes the line to “If you become a first lieutenant.” But her use of the first person in the previous verses suggests she missed the irony as well. See Lois Lane, “Punky’s Dilemma” (Mercury 1968).

66

some acclaim. But for a rock performer, such blatant role-playing abrades against the

image of the merged professional. Lee Marshall lays out these distinctions between film

stars and rock stars thusly:

[Richard] Dyer argues that, in analyzing film stars, we must distinguish between authorship of films and authorship of star-image, but such a distinction is more problematic when analyzing rock stars. [Bob] Dylan is a star because of his songs just as Jack Nicholson is famous because of his films, but those two uses of “his” mean different things: the actor may add considerable qualities to a film but, in most cases, he does not write the script and while the actor's presence in a film is never completely subsumed by the character he is playing, the actor is famous for pretending to be other people. Dylan, on the other hand, became famous for performing songs he had written and the impression is that when he performs these songs he performs as himself. (15-16)

In other words, film stars like Nicholson have not merged the various elements of their

profession into their star-images as completely as rock stars like Dylan have. Indeed, the

director is usually thought of as the author of a film. And thus film stars offer a much less

fervent impression that they are performing as themselves. Again, the farther film stars

travel outside themselves for a performance, the greater the potential acclaim.

This is certainly not to say that this aspect of rock ideology has never been

critiqued, even from within rock music. The example that immediately springs to mind is,

of course, David Bowie. At the height of his fame in the 1970s, Bowie performed as a

variety of characters such as Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White

Duke, and the Jean Genie. As Philip Auslander puts it, “if [T. Rex’s Marc] Bolan

showed, contra rock's ideology of authenticity, that it was possible for a rock musician to

shift personae at will, Bowie went a step further by demonstrating that a rock performer

could take on multiple personae in the manner of a music hall singer or an actor” (111).

But these personae were never so richly defined (and, truth be told, not so different from

67

one another either) as to overwhelm a consistent star-image “underneath.” Or, to put a

different spin on it, one persona dominated over all others to the point where Robert

Sheffield could claim “[Bowie’s] enduring persona, the one that owns him body and soul,

is Major Tom” (55).

But in order for rock ideology to work most efficiently, it needs another music

against which to define itself, usually rock’s eternal Other, pop. Distinctions between

rock and pop position rock as the music that is supposed to mean. It hands down a

musical message or structure to the listener who must then interpret its meaning through

attentive listening. Pop music is more utilitarian. It aims to encapsulate generalized, even

banal practices (e.g. dancing or partying) or states of emotion (e.g. love) which audiences

then use to instigate similar practices or states or to provide a backdrop to them. In

Christgau’s words, “the blanker music is, the more you can project on it--the more

listeners (and also professional interpreters) can bend it to their own whimsies, fantasies,

needs. Hence, pop function empowers the consumer…where rock meaningfulness

privileges the author (and by implication patriarchy and hierarchy)” (“Decade”).

I will deal with the patriarchal leanings of rock authorship later. For now, it

should be noted that the implication of pop empowering the consumer is that it

supposedly ties the music more closely to commerce:

Rock ideology distinguishes rock musicians from pop musicians by asserting that the former generally have more musical skill than the latter. According to this ideology, the pop singer is simply someone who performs and ultimately sells other people's material, while rockers write and perform their own music. For this reason, rock musicians are considered more “authentic” than pop artists, or as more interested in musical expression than commercial success. (Schippers 24)

68

More than any other concept, authenticity forms the nucleus of rock ideology.

Authenticity upholds the idea that rock manages to free itself of all distortions in the line

of direct self-expression, thus fueling the first of rock ideology’s major tensions --

between art and commerce. Rock ideology conceives rock as an art music or at least

artful in its artlessness. Ideally, rock artists have not allowed any commercial concerns to

color their art. By contrast, pop artists, if they can even be deemed artists under rock

ideology, place commercial concerns above all others and mold all their musical

decisions towards that goal and away from the imperative of self-expression. Keir

Keightley notes this process is one of “stratification.” Whereas once high culture set itself

off from mass culture, now rock ideology creates tiers with pop below rock on a value

scale, forcing a distinction between High and Low within mass culture. As Keightley puts

it:

Prior to rock, high and low cultures, cultural mainstreams and margins, were seen as clearly distinct. Once rock broke the symbolic link between mass culture and mindless conformity, it became possible to build new distinctions within and upon the terrain of the popular, to express oppositional sensibilities via commercial, mass mediated culture. Rock helped to reorder the relationship between dominant and dominated cultures, producing something that was simultaneously marginal and mainstream, anti-mass and mass, subordinate and dominant. (Keightley 141)

This does not mean that pre-rock audiences failed to make value judgments nor that

music and capital enjoyed a smooth relationship in the first half of the twentieth century.

But the rock era recast such tensions as forever oppositional and raised them to the level

of the ideological. In Lisa Lewis’s estimation, the kind of stratification outlined by

Keightley apotheosizes long-standing tensions surrounding questions of authorship,

originality, and creativity in the clash between art and commerce:

69

Musicians must constantly reconcile their artistry and craft with their record company's main objective, the accumulation of capital. This unstable condition has generated a new ideological value structure that retains the ideology of romantic artistry but expresses opposition to industry involvement in music creation. Musicians are considered to be either authentic authors of their music (and positively valued) or puppets of the industrial system (and devalued). The historical preoccupation with what constitutes creativity in music making is met with a new question, “What constitutes 'creative control' within an industrial mode of production?” Musicians are evaluated against the ideological standard of whether they control their own creations or allow their creations (and by extension, themselves) to be controlled by industry interests. (Lewis 63)

This new question thus opened up popular music to endless processes of authentication.

And it did indeed forge a new relationship to popular music in that it shifted the terms of

evaluation from sincerity to authenticity. Sincerity refers to a performance successfully

brought off in the moment of experiencing it. As Simon Frith defines it, “ sincerity…

cannot be measured by searching for what lies behind the performance; if we are moved

by a performer we are moved by what we immediately hear and see” (Frith 1996, 215).

But authenticity must be sought in what lies behind the performance and thus requires

further investigation at a time apart from the moment of experiencing it: e.g., inquiries

into who performed/composed what; the amount of interference from producers

engineers, or business personnel; the personal histories of the artists and the dues they

have paid, etc. And, of course, endless comparisons are made with other music.

Authenticity can be granted only once such inquiries have come to an end. Those

performers who fail these tests of authentication are guilty not only of aesthetic crimes

but often moral ones as well. Their actions have resulted in deceitful, selfish, or just plain

wrong behavior worthy of contempt if not punishment, e.g. the various woes visited upon

Milli Vanilli after the revelation that they did not perform on their records.

70

The pop genre that consistently failed such tests of authentication when rock

ideology enjoyed its greatest potency in the late 1960s was, of course, bubblegum.

Rock’s quintessential Other, bubblegum targeted the pre-high school set via short,

absurdly catchy songs with lyrics usually referencing children’s games (“Simon Says,”

“1, 2, 3 Red Light”) or the pleasures of oral consumption (“Yummy, Yummy, Yummy,”

“Chewy, Chewy”) and a backbeat suitable for dancing above all other concerns.

Producers and record business impresarios called most of the shots in bubblegum,

assembling non-existent or ever-shifting groups for a quick cash turnaround. Accounts of

bubblegum usually begin by highlighting this aspect: “The Archies never toured, never

appeared with Ed Sullivan and were never interviewed by the press. The Archies also

never existed” (Bronson 258). Or: “Dean Kastran and Joey Levine never performed side

by side on a stage, nor have they ever recorded a song together. Yet simultaneously

throughout the late 1960s, both were members of [the] same band, and each could claim

some responsibility for its success” (Ebenkamp 81).

The latter quote refers to the Ohio Express, a band put together by Buddah

Records production team Jerry Kasenetz and Jeffrey Katz (also credited with naming the

genre). The Ohio Express began life as a Mansfield, Ohio, band called Sir Timothy and

the Royals with Dean Kastran on bass. When Kasenetz and Katz signed them to a

contract, the production team insisted on a name change to the Ohio Express. Not only

that, their first hit, “Beg, Borrow & Steal,” was already recorded and released by a group

called The Rare Breed well before the ink on the contract dried. Kasenetz and Katz

simply re-released the exact same Rare Breed song with the Ohio Express name. Studio

musicians performed their two biggest hits, “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy” and “Chewy

71

Chewy,” and were sung with stuffed-up brattiness by Joey Levine who also produced the

sessions and co-wrote the songs with his songwriting partner Artie Resnick. The band

that became the Ohio Express had the much more arduous task of taking the act out on

the road with Kastran nominated to impersonate Levine on stage. Sometimes both parties

would have to hear an Ohio Express song on the radio to know it was even released.

Kastran & Co. were allowed to record more psychedelic fare to fill out the Ohio Express

full-length albums which satisfied their rock aspirations as Cream and Jimi Hendrix fans.

As Becky Ebenkamp notes, however, these tracks “were more in keeping with serious

musical peers of the period, but it was hard, no doubt, for listeners to appreciate them

when bumped up against something as exuberant and AM radio-marketable as “Yummy,

Yummy, Yummy”” (83).

Even farther from the norms of rock ideology were The Archies assembled by

Don Kirshner. Kirshner was well-poised to create the ultimate bubblegum group (or

“group”). His Aldon Music publishing firm, formed with Al Nevins in 1958, enlisted the

talents of such songwriters as Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Barry Mann and Cynthia

Weil, Neil Sedaka and Howard Greenfield, Bobby Darin, and Neil Diamond who

together helped design what became known as Brill Building pop, the music of the teen

idols and the girl groups in the frequently maligned years between the twilight of rock ‘n’

roll in 1958 and The Beatles conquering of America in 1964.20 Under Kirshner’s tough

tutelage, rock ‘n’ roll became a professional, assembly-line craft that provided continuity

with the Tin Pan Alley era. In Greg Shaw’s words, “no larger gap could be imagined than

20 Although the actual Brill Building was located at 1619 Broadway across the street from Aldon Music.

72

that between the sophisticated cocktail music of Tin Pan Alley and the rude street music

of rock & roll, yet it was this very gap that Nevins and Kirshner set out to bridge” (143).

After providing successful hit songs for The Monkees’ television show and group,

Kirshner was hired in 1968 to do the same for a Saturday morning cartoon based on The

Archies comic strip/book. Jeff Barry (who co-wrote many Brill Building classics with

Ellie Greenwich and produced The Monkees’ enormous hit “I’m a Believer” written by

Neil Diamond) produced and co-wrote Archies’ songs with Andy Kim. Aldon songwriter

and demo singer Ron Dante sang Archie’s vocals with Toni Wine as Betty and/or

Veronica. With studio musicians performing the instrumental tracks, they provided the

music for the cartoon band and hit number one on the Billboard singles chart with

bubblegum’s fight song “Sugar, Sugar” which became the biggest-selling single of 1969.

For all intents and purposes, the cartoon band was the band since the actual performers

almost never made public appearances.21

Obviously, bubblegum did not sit well with the keepers of rock ideology. A 1971

review by Paul Gambaccini in Rolling Stone of The Archies’ Greatest Hits reads in its

entirety, “Lord, no. Contained within the grooves of this album are twelve convincing

arguments against the capitalist system” (Bangs 452). A curious measure of the negative

reaction to bubblegum can be found in The Zig Zag People album Take Bubble Gum

Music Underground (Decca 1969) which “corrects” bubblegum hits by covering them in

presumably more authentic rock styles – a bluesy “Indian Giver” with LSD-damaged

chipmunks mewling the chorus; a Santana-fried “Simon Says”; jazzy takes on “Hanky

21 Recently, however, a clip of Ron Dante performing “Sugar, Sugar” has resurfaced as a VH-1 Classic. And to provide yet another stark contrast with rock ideology, it features several Ron Dantes in the frame simultaneously playing different instruments.

73

Panky” and “Chewy Chewy”; “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy” sped up to resemble Spirit’s

psych-rock classic “I Got a Line on You”; loads of fuzz guitar solos throughout. The

album closes with yet more fuzz guitar on an original called “Peel It Off Your Face”

which calls out Kasenetz & Katz and songwriter/producer Bo Gentry by name and serves

as a summary of everything wrong with bubblegum. After telling us that we need to take

out some insurance on our soul if we listen to bubblegum, the band launches into a chant

of “1650, 1650, you’ve been 1650-ized” in reference to 1650 Broadway, the location of

Aldon Music and Buddah Records but also the number of tracks The Zig Zag People

imagine it takes to create a bubblegum hit. They claim the guitars used to record

bubblegum are programmed to play mainly in the key of C, presumably the easiest key in

which to play because it contains no sharps and flats. And before the minute-plus of

freakout guitar that ends the 3:15 song, we hear sardonic calls for “Echo! Reverb!

Gimmicks!” In an irony worthy of the contradictory pleasures of rock, studio musicians

already recorded the music for all the songs save for “Indian Giver” before The Zig Zag

People signed on to the project to provide the vocals.

But the very anonymity at the heart of bubblegum accounts for a great deal of the

pleasure so many audiences take in the genre. Bubblegum evinces none of the potential

heaviness of rock’s communicative model whereby an artist hands down a message that

the listener must then interpret. Instead, it offers an attractive void onto which listeners

can project themselves. It also free up listeners from certain responsibilities. Rock gives

off the suggestion that listeners must do something with the music, e.g., use it to forward

a political agenda or foster change or, at the very least, pin it to the authentic self of the

performer bringing it into existence. There is a lot of emotional heaviness in bubblegum –

74

the joy of “gee what love can do” in 1910 Fruitgum Company’s “Goody Goody

Gumdrops” or the hurt in the accusatory “oh yeah that’s what you said” in their “Indian

Giver.” But because these emotions are pinned to a rather shady persona at best, the

music frees us of the responsibility of having to do anything about these states of mind.

We feel the joy and hurt but those feelings can die with the song if so desired.

Nevertheless, the extreme stratification between bubblegum and rock points to a

distrust if not blatant fear of technology, especially in the hands of various record

industry personnel (executives, producers, engineers, etc.), that exacerbates tensions

between art and commerce in rock ideology. But again, the reasons for this distrust/fear

becomes clearer when it is recalled that recording technology threatened the well-being

of musicians and lead to the defeat of performers’ rights. Quite understandably, then, by

the time of the rock era, many performers either wanted to distance themselves from

technology or control it utterly, bending it to their own individual purposes. And, after

all, they were only building off of long-standing fears that oppose technology to nature,

community, and art. Nevertheless, this attitude housed one key contradiction:

The continuing core of rock ideology is that raw sounds are more authentic than cooked sounds. This is a paradoxical belief for a technologically sophisticated medium and rests on an old-fashioned model of direct communication—A plays to B and the less technology that lies between them the closer they are, the more honest their relationship and the fewer the opportunities for manipulation and falsehoods. (Frith 1986 266-7)

That model of direct communication stems from rock’s roots in folk music. Because folk

musicians traditionally eschewed amplification and aimed to perform in close proximity

to their audience (in the raw, so to speak), their music gave the effect of direct

communication.

75

But if amplification brought the sounds of rock ever closer to its fans, it also

created an undeniable visual, if not ideological, gap between performer and audience.

Rock musicians could still access some of the folk ideal, however, if they wrote and

performed their own songs and did not allow technology or business shenanigans to

distort their messages. This is how the figure of the merged professional as rock musician

managed the tensions between art and commerce. The obvious example here is, of

course, Bob Dylan who began his career as a folkie but suffered the infamous charges of

“Judas!” for betraying his acoustic-guitar-and-harmonica roots when he went electric

(even though he had almost always to use some sort of electric amplification to reach his

audience before this date). But he still wrote his own songs and performed along with

various other musicians (most notably The Band) thus easily securing a place as rock’s

premier poet despite the hard line folk fans who jettisoned him along the way. Even

though technology came between Dylan and his audience, more and more music fans

believed this particular performer/audience relationship was an honest one (if often

evasive and even hostile) free of manipulation and falsehoods.

As rock and roll morphed into rock in the late 1960s, “cooked” sounds, from

those artists who aimed to control technology, could give off the aroma of authenticity.

But that authenticity had roots in the innovations of pop music production:

It was pop producers, unashamedly using technology to “cheat” audiences (double-tracking weak voices, filling out a fragile beat, faking strings) who, in the 1950s and 1960s, developed recording as an art form, thus enabling rock to develop as a “serious” music in its own right. It was pop producers, straightforwardly employed to realize raw musicians’ ideas as attention-grabbing commodities for the teen mass-market, who developed recording as a new form of communication, thus enabling rock to give its own account of “authenticity.” (Frith 1988 22)

76

And one need only look back to The Zig Zag People to glean the contradictions within

that account of authenticity. “Peel It Off Your Face” ridicules bubblegum for its use of

studio gimmickry. But the cover songs use psychedelic gimmickry and the ubiquitous

fuzzbox guitar effects pedal to “correct” bubblegum. And, of course, recording

technology allowed the band to record vocals over tracks that had already been laid down

by studio musicians.

These contradictions surrounding technology usually play themselves out in one

of two ways – either through a turn towards history that downplays the role of technology

in the development of rock or a tighter embrace of technology as a way to assert better an

artistic personality. Keightley offers a succinct summary of the first method:

Rock mythology asserts a creation story whose primal scene is beyond the mainstream: the illicit coupling of marginalized blues and country traditions spawns a bastard wild child, who, after a fleeting, authentic childhood, is captured, co-opted, and corrupted by the music industry. Rock, originating organically outside of mass culture, is thus tamed in the process of its mass distribution (called “commercialization”). (Keightley 125-6)

Or to put it more precisely, commerce perpetually threatens to tame rock. Rock musicians

could therefore protect themselves from co-optation by never losing sight of their roots in

blues and country. Rock ideology evinces a strong obsession with history and origins,

then, to restore authenticity to the loss of aura occasioned by the mass production of

culture that Walter Benjamin analyzed in his “Work of Art” essay. Because “rock culture

is not confined to ceremonial occasions but enters people’s lives without aura,” the

denizens of that culture obsessively locate rock’s authentic roots in blues and country,

genres supposedly more geared to ceremonial occasions rather than the demands of the

record business and its manipulative technologies (Frith 1981 50). As Auslander puts it,

77

“rock ideology…attempts to arrest the process described by Benjamin in which the mass-

produced object loses its historical specificity: authentication requires that the recording

be positioned within historical discourse (e.g. the story of the musicians that produced it,

its relation to the history of rock, etc)” (Auslander 83-4). But that history has come down

to rock culture via recordings. Rarely have rock musicians and fans absorbed the lessons

of blues and country performers by living in close proximity to those performers and their

rituals (to whatever extent those rituals actually existed). Instead, records, mass-produced

products of technology, allowed that history to be accessed remotely.

Another contradiction surrounding technology, its embrace in aiding rock artists’

self-expression, comes to the fore in rock’s use of the recording studio as an instrument

with the 1967 release of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band still

serving as the most controversial example. On one level, Sgt. Pepper was a rock

apotheosis, raising the long-playing record to the level of an art form and using magnetic

tape, microphones, and other trapping of the studio to vent irrepressible artistic

temperaments. But on another level, it signaled a steep decline in rawness and

spontaneity and is still blamed (or praised) for the pretentious excesses of progressive

rock, particularly for the genre’s propensity towards concept albums and rock operas.

More than a decade after its release, Greil Marcus compared it unfavorably to the

subsequent single “I Am the Walrus” in these terms:

Sgt. Pepper strangled on its own conceits; after those conceits were vindicated by world-wide acclaim, John, Paul, George & Ringo made this single, radical where The Greatest Album of All Time was contrived, passionate where it was brilliant. It stands as a signpost to a future never quite reached; Sgt. Pepper was a Day-Glo tombstone for its time. (Marcus 1978 258)

78

For Marcus, at least, the 1970s failed to produce many, if any, examples of arty,

progressive uses of studio technology that did not skimp on raw passion. Or, put in other

words, a fusion of the R&B-driven intensity of the early Beatles with the meticulous

studio sorcery of the psychedelic Beatles. Others have found such fusions in the bashing

bottom of “The Garden of Earthly Delights” by The United States of America or the

motorik rhythms of Krautrock bands like Can, Neu!, and Faust or perhaps the space jams

of Hawkwind. In any event, it was clear that by the 1970s, there had to be some sort of

reconciliation of the studio-as-instrument with rock ideology:

Progressive rock set a problem for the received ideas of authenticity: the rock’n’roll ideals of spontaneity, energy and effort were faced by new emphases on sensitivity, care and control. 1970s rock offered two solutions. On the one hand, effort and control were combined in the spectacular displays of art-rock groups like Pink Floyd and stadium rockers like Led Zeppelin; on the other hand, singer/songwriters like Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, and John Lennon used studio devices and sonic collages to reveal themselves more openly, making music a matter of individual sensibilities that couldn’t be engaged in the crude, collective setting of the concert hall. (Frith 1986 272)

Whether or not either solution worked sufficiently depended upon where one positioned

oneself within rock ideology. For some, the studio-as-instrument could not be reconciled

with the ideals of spontaneity, energy and effort. For others, it forged a new art form as

legitimate as classical music.

The point here, though, is that rock ideology can accommodate contradictory

accounts of technology and its relationship to authenticity. Keightley has located two

kinds of authenticity within rock ideology that roughly correspond to the

downplaying/embracing technology positions outlined above – a romantic authenticity

valorizing the natural, traditional, and spontaneous and a modernist authenticity

79

upholding experimentation, innovation, and an épater la bourgeoisie spirit. As always,

each of these attitudes can be traced back to the defeat of performers’ rights and the

subsequent wariness surrounding technology which manifests itself in either

downplaying technology to keep its effects at a distance or embracing it in order better to

control it. Between those two poles (which roughly correspond further to rock & roll on

one side and rock on the other) falls a shifting sense of which artists have successfully

handled the tensions between art and commerce. This is how both the snarliest garage

punk band who could barely afford studio time and the most virtuosic, excessive, and

studio-bound prog rock band can lay claim to an authentic use of technology. It is also

how Ken Emerson can claim that the Brill Building songwriters “who calculatedly

cranked out hit after hit with assembly-line efficiency also brought to popular music a

new authenticity” (xv). And it explains why a critic like Lester Bangs, commonly

understood as the spokesman for the raw, noisy, Dionysian aspect of rock, was chosen to

write the bubblegum entry in The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll.

Assembly-line efficient, bejeweled with gimmicks, utterly anonymous, bubblegum was

still, in Bangs’s assessment, “the bottom line of rock & roll” (454).

Community

However one assesses the authenticity of bubblegum, the one thing The Archies,

for instance, could not share with either garage punk bands or prog rockers (or indeed

most rock bands of any stripe) was the ability to perform live. Even the bubblegum band

that called itself the Ohio Express for live engagements did not feature the studio

80

musicians who recorded their biggest singles (“their,” of course, being a rather vexed

term in this instance). This is an important difference to note because live performance

serves a crucial role in reinvesting the aura to rock lost through mass-media technology.

After all, it satisfies many of the requirements of aura including historical specificity (a

concert happening at this particular time and place) and distance (the miles needed to

travel to bring performer and audience together). But rock ideology does not see the aura

as residing only in live performance even in a last instance. Rather,

the aura must be seen as existing between the recording and the live performance. The aura is located in a dialectical relation between two cultural objects—the recording and the live performance—rather than perceived as a property inherent in a single object, and it is from this relation of mutuality that both objects derive their authenticity. (Auslander 84-5)

Indeed, the live performance offers a welcome opportunity to authenticate the labor that

went into the recording. But the large replay quotient of recordings can bring certain

elements of live performance into sharper focus. And I would tweak the above assertion

slightly and state that live albums and live footage in videos or on film, television, and

the internet can reasonably approximate the experience of live performance and thus its

signifying practices. Nevertheless, recording and live performance (in a variety of guises)

enrich one another to help reestablish a sense of the aura.22

22 Sometimes the two sides blur provocatively such as in the phenomenon of bootlegs which helps explain their importance in rock culture. Bootlegs possess a decided romantic aura due both to the relative rarity (and hence high prices) of the recordings, especially before the advent of peer-to-peer file sharing programs, and the unauthorized moments caught during a live performance or in the studio (and here the full implications of the term “unauthorized” truly come to the fore as something that escapes the purview of the rock auteur). The maverick bootleggers themselves, conceived as renegades outrunning the record business and giving the people what they really want, only add to that romantic aura. A band like The Grateful Dead, most of whose mythos stems from

81

But the main reason why live performance remains so important to rock ideology

is that it dramatizes the other key tension in rock ideology – between the individual and

the community. Here the question of which audiences that ideology interpellated moves

to the fore and necessitates a look at the folk roots of rock discussed above. The ideal of

close proximity to the audience in folk performance gains renewed force in rock

ideology. One of the goals of folk music performance is to preserve sometimes authorless

songs via oral transmission, a goal made easier through more intimate, campfire-like

settings. Most rock performers aspire to similar conditions during live concerts largely by

remaining in contact with the audience throughout the performance - song introductions;

exhortations to sing/dance along; the eternal “I can’t hear you” after the audience has

been asked if they are having a good time. Undoubtedly these attempts at direct

communication succeeded in fostering the feeling of a collapse between performer and

audience: “There existed a strong bond between performer and audience, a natural

kinship, a sense that the stars weren’t being imposed from above but had sprung up from

out of our ranks. We could identify with them without hesitation” (Jon Landau quoted in

Frith 1981b, 49). But if sometimes they seem desperate, it is largely due to the tensions

inherent in an individual’s attempts to forge a community out of a mass-mediated group

of people: “The paradox of rock ideology in the 1960s was that performers' claims to

represent a community (unlike the usual ‘plastic’ pop singers) were supported by the

marks of their individuality. The myth of community remains central to all the arguments

about rock's cultural significance” (Frith 1981a, 164). Both live performances and

their myriad (and sometimes free) live performances, gained a revolutionary profile by allowing fans to record their shows.

82

recordings work together to bring this myth into existence. Examining that myth in

greater detail offers a clearer picture of the rock community and its attendant tensions

when confronted with the marks of rock artists’ individuality.

The myth of community in rock usually revolves around the idea that a consensus

greeted first rock and roll in the mid-1950s and then rock in the late 1960s. Recollected

from subsequent eras when fragmentation has supposedly exploded the popular music

audience into warring but ever-marketable tribes, that consensus was applied to an

extraordinarily broad range of people if not “everyone.” Hamm claims that 1950s rock

and roll was “as close as the world had come to a universal musical language” by

recourse to the fact that Elvis Presley, The Everly Brothers, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny

Horton succeeded in capturing the pop, rhythm and blues, and country and western

markets (Hamm 1981, 126). Marcus extends the language analogy by claiming both rock

and roll and rock as a lingua franca. In 2007, for the introduction to Marooned, an

anthology of essays by youngish writers about desert island discs, most of which were

released in the 1980s and 1990s, he wrote:

Whatever pop music might be between the covers of this book, it isn’t lingua franca. In the fifties, young people woke up to find that, somehow, they’d been born knowing the pop language that was taking shape all around them. How was it that, for a white, teenage girl on a farm in Iowa no less than for an eight-year-old African-American boy in Tulsa, Little Richard needed no translation? That was the pop world; it isn’t any longer. (Marcus 2007, xi)

Writing fifteen years earlier, in part about Nirvana, a band many people believe was a

galvanizing force in the early 1990s,23 he comes to a similar conclusion about rock. The

23 As Eric Weisbard wrote of Nirvana’s lead singer Kurt Cobain, “(he) had a way of making his I’s resonate like We’s” (1995, 271).

83

difference here, though, is that he does not suggest that the audience for rock comprises

only young people:

The myth of the ‘60s…is a myth less of unity, or even rebellion, than of a pop lingua franca…The rock audience began to break apart as far back as the early 70s. As the center of pop gravity, the Beatles had validated every form of the music both as commerce and as art; with that force gone, both listeners and genres spun out in all directions. (Marcus 1995 741-2)

In a Village Voice obituary for Presley, Bangs summed up 1970s popular music fans as

characterized by a “contemptuous indifference to each others’ objects of reverence” and

saw only more fragmentation on the horizon. He therefore concluded his piece with a

farewell to an entire generation: “I can guarantee you one thing: we will never again

agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won’t bother saying good-bye to his

corpse. I will say good-bye to you” (Bangs 1987, 216).24 Christgau conceived of the

1960s rock audience as a “monoculture” and in 2000 asked “Who can possibly believe

that Madonna and the Wu-Tang Clan mean as much to the Culture at Large as the Beatles

and Aretha Franklin?” (Christgau 2000 x).

That these writers could talk of universality, lingua franca, and the Culture at

Large, despite a tinge of parody in the capitalization of the latter, stems on one level from

the increased massification of popular music -- records selling in numbers undreamt of in

the sheet music era with the crucial addition of television to radio and film for wider

exposure. But on a more decisive level, the sheer number of Baby Boomers with

disposable income enlarged the impact of both rock and roll and rock. As Keightley puts

it:

24 Compare this to the opening line of Robert Christgau’s review of My Blue Heaven --

The Best of Fats Domino (Volume One): “Domino was the most widely liked rock and roller of the '50s--nobody hated him, which you couldn't say of Elvis” (1990).

84

Rock emerged because one segment of the popular mainstream was associated with a particular demographic anomaly—a huge increase in the number of affluent youth born in the wake of the Second World War. Paradoxically, the baby boom's numbers magnified—rather than 'massified'--youth culture…The baby boom's own grand, generational narrative became the story of the epic struggle of outsiders who, nevertheless, occupied the very center of society. Their purchasing power gave legitimacy and significance to teen music, even as that musical culture was defined by its antipathy to commerce. Rock's sense of entitlement and legitimacy stemmed largely from the massive generational support accorded it, a support that led rock musicians and fans to believe that they could quite seriously 'revolutionize' the world around them. (139-40)

What is missing from the universalizing accounts above is a deeper feeling for that world

around them, a sense that rock and roll and rock counted for one segment of the popular

music audience rather than its entirety.

In his history of rhythm and blues, Nelson George paints a much different picture

of these eras and chips away at their myths of universality. For George, the story of rock

and roll as lingua franca is told from a white perspective. He writes, “if rhythm & blues

was ghetto music, rock & roll, at least in name, was perceived to be a ‘universal music’ (a

key term in the history of black music’s purchase by whites),” concluding that “the term

‘rock & roll’…(was) the perfect emblem of white Negroism” (George 67). And George’s

analysis of the black reception of rock provides an explicit contrast to Marcus’s history of

the music. In addition to The Beatles, Marcus uses the 1964 concert film The TAMI Show

and its diverse roster of artists (the Beach Boys, Chuck Berry, James Brown, Marvin

Gaye, Gerry and The Pacemakers, Lesley Gore, Jan and Dean, the Miracles, the Rolling

Stones, the Supremes, etc.) to prove that rock “seem[ed] to speak in unknown tongues

that turn[ed] into new and common languages” and that the artists listed above were

“indisputably, whatever the word meant, all rock” (Marcus 1995 741). But George notes

85

that the audience blanketing the soundtrack with fanatical screams was made up of

“predominantly white girls” (92). Furthermore, that they screamed equally for each act

(including “such foul English products as Gerry and The Pacemakers and Billy Kramer”

as well as the Rolling Stones in this instance since they had the misfortune to go on after

James Brown’s legendary, incendiary performance) was less a sign of racial harmony

than “a dangerous lack of discretion. To applaud black excellence and white mediocrity

with the same vigor is to view them as equals, in which case the black artist in America

always loses” (George 92).

Missing from The TAMI Show was, of course, the consensus-making Beatles. But

well before their break-up in 1970, much of the black audience had already spun away

from them:

With the coming of the Beatles, blacks, too, in an extension of their fifties attitude, saw rock & roll as white boys’ music that didn’t reflect their musical taste of cultural experience. That doesn’t mean no black teens or adults bought Beatles records. Nor does it means that they wouldn’t eventually be influenced in some way by them. But by and large, black record buyers and black musicians were moving in another direction, one that would dominate their musical, cultural, and, to some degree, even their political style for the rest of the 1960s. (George 93)

That direction traced the move from rhythm and blues to soul, instigated earlier by Ray

Charles but brought to full fruition by Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett,

Percy Sledge, and others. and the work of the musicians and producers at Atlantic, Stax,

etc. Interestingly, George positions soul as a kind of lingua franca itself and claims that

the genre “would in its day rival ‘rock & roll’ for social currency and commercial

exploitation” (93). Wherever one places the greater consensus, it was clear that as rock

and roll morphed into rock, fewer black artists would be gathered under its aegis: “For

86

the baby-boomers, rock became, after 1965, white music made by white people with the

occasional black old-timer thrown in” (George 93).

In his definitive history of country music, Country Music U.S.A., Bill C. Malone

places the date much earlier, immediately after the birth of rock and roll, in language

strikingly similar to George’s:

Although black influence was obvious, rock-and-roll became essentially a music performed by white people for white audiences. Even the wide variety of black performers (such as Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, and the Platters) who worked with the rock-and-roll idiom generally presented smoothed-over or toned-down versions that would be palatable to white audiences. (247)

Given the success of this music, however, many country artists tried their hands at rock

and rolling the white country idiom which caused a decline in the use of such traditional

instruments as the fiddle and the steel guitar and cleared a path towards the country-pop

fusion known as the Nashville sound. But historical events of the late 1960s, particularly

the ongoing war in Vietnam, placed rigid dividing lines between the cultures of country

and rock. Against a soundtrack of rock music, the counterculture protested America’s

involvement in the war. Conversely, country music became the music of the silent

majority, the much less magnified segment of American society that helped vote

Republican Richard Nixon the thirty-seventh President of the United States in 1968.

Malone described some country songs of this period as “protesting the protestors” (318),

the most famous being Merle Haggard’s 1969 “Okie From Muskogee” which castigated

the unpatriotic young people who took drugs, burned their draft cards, made free love,

grew their hair long, wore unmanly sandals, and disrespected their college deans. The

follow-up, “The Fightin’ Side of Me,” was even more pointed in its critique of the

87

counterculture, “clearly calculated to capitalize on the ‘silent majority’s’ fear and disgust

for hippies, peaceniks, and radicals” (Malone 319).

What unites rhythm and blues and country in opposition to rock is that they

created no significant or world-historic rift between adults and youth whereas first rock &

roll and then rock, which extended the category of youth beyond the merely young,

fashioned youth as eternally combative with their elders. Curiously, in another context,

Marcus explains this best in relation to country:

Country music (like the blues, which was more damned and more honestly hedonistic than country had ever been) was music for a whole community, cutting across lines of age, if not class…How could parents hope to keep their children if their kids’ whole sense of what it meant to live – which is what we get from music when we are closest to it – held promises the parents could never keep? The songs of country music, and most deeply, in its even, narrow sound, had to subject the children to the heartbreak of their parents: the father who couldn’t feed his family, the wife who lost her husband to a honky-tonk angel or a bottle, the family that lost everything to a suicide or a farm spinning off into one more bad year, the horror of loneliness in a world that was meant to banish that if nothing else. (Marcus 1975 133)

Country avatars like Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams provided a link to the outside

world, sometimes the big city, for those communities, and many of their songs were

awash in the sins of the itinerant life. But whether riding the rails or ramblin’ down that

lost highway, always a sense of guilt or loneliness pulled the music away from an

unquestioning celebration of that life, the key ingredient necessary for the creation of

rock and roll, according to Marcus. Rodgers or Williams could convey the abandon of a

honky-tonk on Saturday night or the exciting gamble of life on the road. But Monday

morning (if not Sunday morning) constantly hovered over the good times.

88

A similar community function applies to rhythm and blues. Especially with the

rise of the civil rights movement, black youth had much more to lose in forsaking home

and hearth as young white people increasingly did after the advent of rock and roll. To

whatever extent rhythm and blues reveled in juke joint thrills and double entendre

carnality, then, the music always pointed to the larger black community. As George puts

it:

The generational schism and teen-eye view that has always been the crux of the rock & roll ethos was mostly foreign to black consumers, young as well as old. That is not to say that all blacks rejected rock & roll, both as a business term and a social attitude, but R&B made a connection to black listeners that was both musical and extramusical…Rock & roll was young music; R&B managed to be young and old, filled both with references to the past and with fresh interpretations, all at the same time. Furthermore, in the battle for self-awareness and black solidarity, rock & roll’s concerns seemed frivolous indeed. (68-9)

George goes on to note the crucial role of the church, and of course Martin Luther King,

in the development of the civil rights movement and the transformation of rhythm and

blues idioms into soul music by the late 1960s. The fusion of the sacred with the secular,

gospel music with rhythm and blues, that resulted in soul mirrored a coalition between an

increasingly activist clergy and a wider spectrum of the black community – Marxist

intellectuals and artists but also young people who found political allies in the church and

not only a bank of finger-waving adults attempting to stomp down on their good times

and self-expression. Most of these developments took place alongside, if not completely

outside, the sphere of rock.

A sense of an adult world is missing from Hamm’s account of the universality of

rock and roll in the 1950s. For sure, his account of consensus feels the most convincing

since he backs up his assertions with hard figures from Billboard. But the overly

89

romanticized fact of Elvis hitting number one on the pop, country, and rhythm and blues

charts obscures the entire campaign against rock and roll outlined in the previous chapter

as if the Mitch Millers and Arthur Schwartzs of the era had never existed. And it ignores

the music sold to adults on LPs, often in the form of Broadway cast recordings and movie

soundtracks. To the extent that adults define themselves through music, it was through a

continuation of the Tin Pan Alley aesthetic. So if rock and roll was lingua franca for

young people, it was a language designed, sometimes explicitly, so that their parents and

other authority figures could not understand it. And as rock and roll matured into rock,

more than merely white adults had a difficult time decoding its languages. With recourse

to Billboard charts again, Hamm notes how the black audience for soul and the white

audience for country greeted rock with indifference and sometimes outright hostility:

American blacks, by and large, have remained cool to music by white performers. Even the Beatles sold poorly in retail outlets catering for blacks and were rarely heard over radio stations featuring ‘soul music; not a single disc by the Beatles has ever been listed on the ‘Rhythm and Blues’ and ‘Soul’ charts. One searches these charts in vain for anything by the Byrds, the Jefferson Airplane, the various ‘heavy metal’ groups, the Who, America, the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt and now the punk and new wave groups. Black faces were difficult to find at Woodstock, and are no more common at rock concerts today…Billboard’s ‘Country and Western’ charts of the 1960s and 70s have no listings for the Beatles or any other American or English rock performers. (Hamm 1981, 127)

By the 1970s, these points had become moot. Much of the white rock audience was

feeling the fragmentation that had always characterized the audiences for soul and

country music. And whether or not they were bona fide adults in the 1960s, the rock

audience became on the one hand, the adults who would buy America, the Eagles, and

Linda Ronstadt albums in the 1970s and, on the other, part of the smaller audience, at

least initially, who fell for punk and new wave in the late 1970s.

90

Nevertheless, it was the rebellion against the adult world that formed the heart of

the individual/community tensions that would plague rock culture by the end of the

1960s. As the music of a youth audience enjoying an unprecedented amount of leisure,

rock and roll aimed to get rid of the guilt surrounding the good times of Saturday night if

not the imperative of having to wake up Monday morning to go to work. In fact, what

prevented Elvis from becoming “just another country crooner or a footnote in someone’s

history of the blues [was] the idea (and it was just barely an ‘idea’) that Saturday night

could be the whole show” (Marcus 1975, 133). Rock tried to harness (or, to use a more

pessimistic critical theory term, package) that idea in their recordings and live shows and

on the radio. And they succeeded whereas most country and rhythm and blues artists

would not even attempt to forge such an unlikely reality. Even when it came to rhythm

and blues artists who repeatedly proclaimed “what life doesn’t give me, I’ll take”

(Marcus 1975, 131), Elvis surpassed them in hubris. Every cover Elvis recorded for Sun

Records in 1954 seemed to say “what life doesn’t give me, I’ll take more than anyone

has ever had.” According to Marcus, where Wynonie Harris, in his 1948 version of

“Good Rockin’ Tonight,” “seem[ed] unable to exploit the stomping promise of the lyrics

in rhythm or phrasing,” Elvis’s take on it is “raw, pleading and pushing…he can barely

keep up with himself” (Marcus 1975, 148). Where Little Junior Parker’s original

“Mystery Train,” with some lyrics originating in The Carter Family’s country classic

“Worried Man Blues,” was about “the uselessness of action, the helplessness of a man

who cannot understand his world, let alone master it,” Elvis sang his version “with shock:

he rebels against [the song]” and thus “escaped the guilt of the blues – the guilt that is at

the heart of the world the blues and country music gives us” (Marcus 1975, 173).

91

If the worlds of blues and country and even the more celebratory world of rhythm

and blues centered on either knowing one’s place or knowing to turn to community for

sustenance, then rock and roll concerned refusing one’s lot in life and giving fate no

quarter. With all that guilt those worlds had known removed (or at least the potential for

it to be removed), Elvis helped usher in a music perfectly suited to teenagers with

disposable income burning in their pockets and sexual desire burning in their pants. And

as he influenced more and more performers, together they created a culture that appeared

to give in to whatever their id craved right now: "What links the greatest rock 'n' roll

careers is a volcanic ambition, a lust for more than anyone has a right to expect; in some

cases, a refusal to know when to quit or even rest" (Marcus 1975, 135).

For many teenagers, that refusal of limitations translated into a refusal to mind

their elders and sublimate their desires towards some unimaginable payoff, for

themselves as much others. Instead, rock and roll offered them the opportunity to channel

all of their energies into having fun, into an eternal Saturday night, forsaking family and,

in the best scenario, gainful employment. Where Little Junior Parker was helpless to

bring back his baby from that mystery train (and, by implication, helpless to change his

fate), teenagers were helpless to resist their urges -- if not an endless array of products,

rock and roll chief amongst them, then their own burgeoning sexuality and desire to

break out from traditional roles. Compare Marcus’s comment above about the futility

dripping from Parker’s version of “Mystery Train” with this analysis of Dan Graham’s

concerning the centrality of fun to rock ideology:

[The] rock ideology of “fun” was born of the futility of deferred pleasure. In a world that seemed doomed as the specter of the A-bomb haunted teenagers, sex was no longer linked to family responsibility or

92

reproduction...Anti-Oedipal, rock mocks parental belief in sexual sublimation, marriage and work as necessary. Rock heroes are unrepentant sinners. (2) The obvious problem with this non-stop pursuit of fun is that it amounts to an

extremely individual quest. With a marked lack of self-consciousness, rock culture could

critique everything but its own unique, quite favorable, conditions of existence. As

Marshall puts it:

Without constructing a genuine political alternative to its own sites of privilege, rock culture is confined to disrupting the rhythms of its everyday existence through a celebration of instability, transitoriness, and insecurity...Rock itself is therefore a culture of transitions, a form of permanent instability that secures the comfort of post-war society but maintains itself as an other, an in-between, a way of gaining control of one's life by abandoning the control provided by the welfare state. This means that, within rock ideology, keeping on keeping on is a crucial motif both for individuals and rock culture as a whole. (99)

But therein lies the central contradiction between the individual and the community, the

“rock culture as a whole.” Some individuals find it easier than others to celebrate

insecurity, to keep on keeping on. And due to their varying degrees of success, rock stars

are usually those individuals, writing numberless songs about life on the road or the

inability of anyone to hold them down. As they bring communities together through their

intense individuality, a sense of inequality threatens to overwhelm the music if the rock

star fails to contain the contradictions in some fashion. When the record is over and the

live performance comes to an end, responsibility beckons and someone has to clean up

the mess. So for instance, while much has been made of the split-screen innovations of

the film Woodstock (1970), serving the ideological function of bringing the performer

and audience together as one in the same frame, an equally if not more important aspect

of the film (and event) is the interview with the Port-O-San man, a middle-aged father

93

who cleans the portable toilets on the premises. He provides a portion of the

responsibility quotient needed to pull off “3 Days of Peace & Music,” to pull off, that is,

the contradictory tenets of rock ideology in all their life-affirming glory. Crucially, one of

his sons is enjoying the concert; the other is in Vietnam.

Because most of the rock stars in the 1960s were men, however, they tended to

reinforce long-standing gender inequalities. Rock stars made it their province to traverse

space, across the globe or within themselves with the help of psychedelics. But that left

many women, even those who aspired to rock stardom, tied to a particular place,

especially in the time-worn image of the girlfriend at home while the boyfriend goes out

on tour. This dichotomy extends further into gendered notions of production and

consumption, the road and the recording studio associated with the production of music

and the home with its consumption. Sara Cohen summarizes these ideas thusly:

Rock is commonly associated with “the street” and opposed to the bedroom. The street, like “the road,” is associated with live performance, male activity and rebellion, and with public spaces that women are not supposed to frequent, whilst the bedroom is associated with the consumption of recorded pop music and with women, passivity and private domestic spaces. (30)

So for many women, rock stars’ attempts to birth a community via their individuality fell

flat in light of these inequities. As always, the success of such attempts depended on how

effectively performers handled such contradictions.

All of these tensions come to a head with the rock group. And here I would like to

address how the individual/community tensions play themselves out in the rock group by

extending the discussion of the contradictory place of women in rock ideology. I choose

to explore these avenues with Janis Joplin, at once utterly typical of 1960s rock culture

94

and, as practically the only woman to scale the heights of rock stardom, a pointed

challenge to its ideology.

Rock groups became one way to smooth out the tensions between the individual

and the community in rock ideology. They subsumed the individual into a model for

communal living, a family when your biological counterpart proved too stifling if it did

not reject you outright. But because each aspect of the merged professional (composition,

lyrics, singing, performing) impacts each individual in the group, the family dynamic

often shifts beyond mere familial affection and support:

Bands demand of their members relationships more akin to family than to a co-worker. This means that ridicule and shame born of intimate awareness are always potential; however, the lifelong experience at accommodation developed in family relationships is lacking. The work involved in writing, arranging, practicing, recording and performing music is also more apt to bend egos than is more conventional work. Each individual musician's ego is on the line to some extent at every little artistic decision. It's more common for the music or the money to keep a band together than it is for camaraderie. For even when that is strong it tends to be quickly overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of time involved, particularly in touring. (Carducci 7-8)

The paradox here, however, is that no matter how hard a bands works,25 some audiences

will always have a nagging sense that the band is somehow getting away with something,

indulging in an eternal Saturday night free from the day-to-day drain of a nine-to-five

job. In the film, X: The Unheard Music, Exene Cervenka of the Los Angeles punk band

X recalls how a fan, after seeing the band perform their song “We’re Desperate,”

questioned her as to how they could possibly be desperate when this fan paid them x

amount of dollars to see their show. Even in the pop realm, suggestions that an act might

25 For a grueling account of one band’s toil, see the chapter on Black Flag from Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground,

1981-1991.

95

be touring too hard sometimes fall on deaf ears. Here is Sherwin Bash, the manager of the

MOR brother-sister duo The Carpenters, discussing their extensive mid-1970s tour

schedule:

I’m not comparing The Carpenters to most people who get up and work nine to five in an office, five days a week for something like fifty weeks a year and have a two-week vacation…I think a reality check of how much they actually worked during the time I represented them would make most people in this world say: “What are they talking about?”…In my vocabulary, these people were retired! (Coleman 136)

Nevertheless, extensive touring, coupled with a sweat-throwing performance each night,

tries to mitigate such feelings of resentment.

But even in the most egalitarian collectives, one individual tended to outshine the

others in talent or attention grabbing which usually led to the group breaking up. Often

that individual is the singer:

There is usually some amount of tension between a band’s players and their singer. It’s usually in part a product of envy but also rooted in musical issues. However, when the sex groupies and the mind groupies both line up after gigs in front of the singer it tends to turn off the players who may have written the music and in any case played it…In the politics of a band a singer without an instrument is unarmed and outnumbered, and must turn his back to the players at the precise moment their resentments are made concrete by the live audience. (Carducci 10)

This was especially the case with Joplin. Joplin achieved stardom as a member of the

rock group Big Brother and The Holding Company. And indeed their first two albums

(the self-titled debut from 1967 and Cheap Thrills from 1968) are credited to the band.

But today, if not at the time, they feel like Janis Joplin records (with Big Brother as her

back-up band), so incandescent was her personality. In 1968, she left Big Brother to

pursue a solo career. Many criticized her decision as a move away from hippie-freak

intensity towards a more rounded-edged, professional sound (with her subsequent bands

96

Kozmic Blues and Full Tilt Boogie). But on a deeper level, it reflected irresolvable

tensions between the individual and the community within rock ideology. In order to

draw out the full implications of those tensions, however, it is necessary to first look at

Joplin the individual and the attendant contradictions when that individual is a rock star.

Had Joplin come of age in the Tin Pan Alley era, she most likely would have

wound up, in Ellen Willis’s words, “a provincial matron -- or a lonely weirdo” (Willis

62). Because Joplin did not conform to any of the impoverished gender roles for women

in the pre-rock era, her high school years in Port Arthur, Texas, were particularly

humiliating despite baiting classmates with intimations of sexual promiscuity and finding

temporary solace with a group of fellow misfits (Echols 17-18). Rock offered her a

chance to retain her individuality and create new models for women. In Willis’s words:

For Janis, as for others of us who suffered the worst fate that can befall an adolescent girl in America -- unpopularity -- a crucial aspect of the cultural revolution was its assault on the rigid sexual styles of the fifties. Joplin's metamorphosis from the ugly duckling of Port Arthur to the peacock of Haight-Ashbury meant, among other things, that a woman who was not conventionally pretty, who had acne and an intermittent weight problem and hair that stuck out, could not only invent her own beauty (just as she invented her wonderful sleazofreak costumes) out of sheer energy, soul, sweetness, arrogance, and a sense of humor, but have that beauty appreciated. (62-3)

Joplin’s escape from Port Arthur to the rock paradise of San Francisco (not to mention

her subsequent touring) presented another example of the importance of mobility and the

road to rock ideology. For the “’country club’ girls in the pricey front row seats of her

concerts,” for instance, Joplin’s wild persona was appalling (Echols 17). But for other

women, her embodiment of the freedom of the road brought them closer to a potentially

97

fulfilling life outside of the home already enjoyed by so many men, rock stars most

definitely included:

Women can contrast rock expression to the respectable images they are offered elsewhere -- hence the feminist importance of the few female rock stars like Janis Joplin, hence the moral panics about rock's corrupting effects. The rock ideology of freedom from domesticity has an obvious importance for girls, even if it embodies an alternative mode of sexual expression. (Frith and McRobbie 381-382)

Indeed, this is exactly how someone like Willis responded to Joplin, admitting that "it

was seeing Janis Joplin that made me resolve, once and for all, not to get my hair

straightened" (63). So for many women, Janis Joplin’s attempts to birth a community via

her individuality absolutely succeeded.

That success explains why there are few greater, more cathartic measures of

rock’s victory over Middle American staidness than the footage from the 1974

documentary Janis: The Way She Was of Joplin’s return to her ten-year high school

reunion on August 14, 1970 in Port Arthur. Here, she had the chance to rub her success in

the faces of those who made her an outcast. The reunion news conference reveals the

zany spirit that caused rifts between her and the town in the first place. But it also catches

her stumbling for words (a surprise) and eventually tearing up as she talks about how no

one asked her to the high school prom. However difficult it is to watch this interview, the

hurt Joplin evinces makes the victory all the sweeter.

But the reunion also exhibits some of the individual/community tensions of rock

ideology. For like so many rock victories, Joplin’s return home was a pyrrhic one. What

the documentary does not reveal is that the reunion was a disaster for Joplin. To begin

with, Joplin in interviews had long excoriated Port Arthur and its treatment of her. In

98

1969, she told the New York Times “Man, those people hurt me. It makes me happy to

know I’m making it and they’re back there, plumbers just like they were” (quoted in

Echols 287). Comments of this sort obviously did not sit well with Port Arthurians even

those who supported her such as the mother of her friend Karleen Bennett whose family

owned a plumbing business (Echols 287). They also marked the distance between rock

and country music (despite undeniable country tinges to Joplin’s music). By the end of

the 1960s, Haggard, Tom T. Hall, and countless performers of truck-driving songs were

aggressively pinning a working-class profile to country music (Malone 319-21), fans of

which would clearly not appreciate Joplin’s plumbers comment either. Joplin had also

offended her parents who caught a clip of the interview in which she stated that they were

not accommodating to her and the entourage she brought along for support. The interview

heated up already deep-seated tensions with her family, particularly her mother who

reportedly told her, “I wish you’d never been born!” (Echols 290). The reunion itself

brought little of the apologies and love Joplin so clearly craved. And even a stop at the

local Pelican Club to see Jerry Lee Lewis perform proved disastrous. (Crucially, at this

point in his career, Lewis was pursuing the country market.) Joplin met Lewis after the

show. But when Lewis told Joplin’s sister Laura that she could be good looking if she

stopped trying to look like her sister, Janis moved to hit him. Instead, Lewis punched her

after responding that “if she was going to act like a guy he’d treat her like one” (Echols

290).

I go into this anecdote at length because it uncovers a great deal about the

contradictory positions in which Joplin was placed as a female rock star, contradictions

that undermine myths of rock’s universality. For the rock energies that released

99

individual expressivity was never meant to be the sole province of the counterculture.

Quite to the contrary, it was supposed to create worldwide, permanent revolution.

Available to one and all, those energies could do away with any need for repression and

ultimately no one would have to endure a life of loneliness and rejection as Joplin did

during high school. But the altercation with Lewis points to the fact that in actuality,

there was a limit to the kinds of individual expressivity rock would allow: “Joplin's revolt

against conventional femininity was brave and imaginative, but it also dovetailed with a

stereotype -- the ballsy, one-of-the-guys chick who is a needy, vulnerable cream puff

underneath -- cherished by her legions of hip male fans” (Willis 63). This conundrum

meant that Joplin had to “act like a guy” in order to succeed in rock culture, a reality

which complicated her attempts to forge a community via her individuality. It also meant

that in its own way, rock culture essentialized gender and sexuality as much as Port

Arthur culture:

What makes music particularly susceptible to essentialist notions of identity is that music has often been valued within rock ideology precisely for its ability to release repressed desires, to strip away the layers of “artifice” and reveal the core personality, the essence of race, humanity or sexuality obscured underneath…While this may be powerfully felt in certain quarters, its attempted universality masks its situatedness, and frequently sexual authenticity in rock has been underpinned by a particular heterosexual and masculine discourse. Therefore, the discourse of authenticity may serve to erect a false naturalism (with masculinity as its center), sustained by a sex-gender essentialism that maintains unequal power relations and closes off other ways of envisaging identity, other possibilities of pleasure and performing. (McLaughlin 268-69)

For instance, rock had little room for conventional femininity. Neither could it effectively

accommodate alternative sexualities as evinced by Joplin’s relative silence about her

bisexuality. And as even a surface perusal of her music suggest, rock even failed to

100

deliver Joplin from loneliness. "Onstage I make love to 25,000 people, then I go home

alone," she once said (Willis 64), echoing the solitude felt by many individual rock stars

who have brought communities into existence.26

But as her music also suggests, Joplin was well aware of these contradictions. She

knew that she had achieved the near impossible as a woman in rock which means she

knew what it would take to remain a woman in rock. The more conventional sound of her

later records (1969’s I Got Dem Ol' Kozmic Blues Again Mama! and Pearl posthumously

released in1971) reflects a more conventional concern with her career rather than

fostering a community hellbent on cultural revolution: “She had less room to maneuver

than a man in her position, fewer alternatives to fall back on if she blew it. If she had to

choose between fantasies, it made sense for her to go with stardom as far as it would take

her” (Willis 66). It was the kind of decision that would characterize the 1970s as a decade

plagued with “probably enduring changes in the white American consciousness --

changes that have to do with something very like an awareness of tragedy” (Willis 61).

The final image from the Janis documentary summarizes these

individual/community dilemmas succinctly. At a 1969 show with the Kozmic Blues Band

in Germany, Joplin sings “Piece of My Heart.” In the middle of the song, she starts to

pull people up on stage with her from the audience. So many audiences members quickly

fill in around her that the band becomes invisible. Joplin directs the line about how a

woman can be tough directly to a shy young woman clearly embarrassed to be on stage.

As the crowd either shimmies awkwardly or wonders what to do with their temporary

26 Elvis Presley: "I get lonesome sometimes. I get lonesome right in the middle of a crowd." From ‘The Truth About Me.” Words and Music (Payless 2007).

101

moment in the spotlight, Joplin outshines everyone in a magnificent performance. The

song ends and Joplin has at least attempted to erase the gap between performer and

audience. But then the image becomes smaller, receding into the blackness surrounding it

and eventually disappearing altogether before the final credits roll. What we never see,

then, is what happened afterward. How did Joplin negotiate parting ways with her

audience? Did she make it backstage without problems and within a reasonable time

frame? And did she take anyone along with her backstage, that space of ultimate

privilege and libidinal fantasies come true? Did any of the revelers onstage resent her

return to a life of privilege the next day, perhaps feeling that she may not deserve it? Or

did their ever so mild taste of stardom push at least one of them to achieve what Joplin

did, if not more?

These questions testify to the centrality of the individual in rock ideology. But

with Hollywood’s increasing dependence on rock music to drive up profits from a youth-

dominated audience, such questions would necessarily influence how music was used in

films. And given how anxieties surrounding technology provided the foundation for the

merged professional, and hence rock ideology, what impact did rock have on the musical,

a genre with a unique take on technology not to mention its own tensions between the

individual and the community? In short, to what extent is it true that rock killed the

Hollywood musical?

102

Chapter 3 – No Point Being Ashamed of It: The Spontaneous Outburst

of Song

If rock ideology concerns both an intense individuality (manifested in the

imperative for the merged professional to write his/her own songs) and a vexed

relationship with technology due to the defeat of performers' rights (manifested in either

downplaying technology to keep its effects at a distance or embracing it in order better to

control it), then why exactly would this ideology abrade against the musical? Was this

ideology powerful enough to kill off the musical in the late 1960s? It is my contention

that the dominance of rock ideology brought to an end not so much the musical as it did a

specific kind of musical number, one that many audiences and theorists in the rock era

have understood as the defining feature of the musical. And even here, I would temper

my language somewhat and state that rock ideology did not so much kill off this specific

kind of musical number as it sowed a enormous amount of anxiety around it even though

these numbers do indeed disappear from Hollywood films for years at a time, particularly

in the 1980s and 1990s.

Most theorists of the musical would call this kind of number the integrated

musical number. But they have never used the term with much consistency. Moreover,

the very concept of integration seems rooted in a sense of shame that results in denying

how these numbers actually work. Even the most sainted creators of musicals have

employed integration theory in a campaign to turn a collective deaf ear towards the

genre’s most identifiable marks, if not the most identifiable mark. The ashamed

distortions of integration theory thus prevent an understanding of how precisely rock

103

ideology impacted the development of the Hollywood musical. In order to draw out the

full force of that impact, then, I propose to call the kind of number in question the

Spontaneous Outburst of Song.

Before analyzing the Spontaneous Outburst of Song in detail, however, the first

half of this chapter will lay out some of the contradictory claims of integration theory in

order better to grasp how many musicals operate. It should become apparent in this

section that anxieties surrounding the motivation of musical numbers existed long before

the advent of rock ‘n’ roll. The second half of the chapter, then, will outline the

Spontaneous Outburst of Song and how it abrades against rock ideology.

One caveat, however. Some of the theorists discussed below are writing about

theater and not Hollywood and, as Rick Altman has shown, it pays to be careful in

assuming that Hollywood musicals simply imported generic terms and even practices

from Broadway musicals (Altman 1999, 31-4). Nevertheless, the operations of both types

of musicals are similar enough to warrant enlisting musical theater theory to analyze the

Hollywood musical, especially since many of those theorists were composers and

lyricists who created musicals for both Broadway and Hollywood. And a discussion of

the differences between film and theater and how they impact the musical will

accompany the material on the Spontaneous Outburst of Song.

Integration Theory

Arthur Knight traces the first use of the word “integrated” to a positive New York

Times review of the play Oklahoma! in 1943 (13). But actually, the word appears in the

104

same publication several years earlier in relation to the film musical. In a June 19, 1938,

article called “Musicals Without Rhythm” discussing in part the problem of switching

from talking to singing, Janet Graves writes: “If film-makers would give equal attention

to all the music throughout, it would be possible for the music film to achieve a musical

continuity as logically integrated and smoothly flowing as the story continuity of a good

dramatic film” (quoted in White 149). And even earlier, a form of the word appears in a

1931 article for Etude called “Present day musical films and how they are made

possible.” Author Verna Arvey reports on actor (and “splendid musician”) Ramon

Novarro’s excitement about the development of the musical and how he looks forward to

“the time when music will be an integral part of the picture, not incidental to it” (16).

Regardless of the appearance of the word “integrated,” however, the concept extends far

back in the musical’s history.

The integrated musical number as a theoretical construct registers a sort of panic

concerning the disjunction between narrative and number, an embarrassment over the

musical’s very structure. To minimize these feelings, those who wield the integrated

musical number proclaim its absolute necessity in one of two ways: 1) it creates smoother

transitions between narrative or number or, in the best scenario, it obliterates the

distinction between narrative and number; 2) it achieves the operatic ideal of music used

to establish atmosphere, convey character, and advance the story. Thus, the number

becomes seamlessly integrated with all of the other elements of the musical, creating an

organic whole. Show-within-a-show numbers or numbers in a backstage musical

generally do not count as integrated musical numbers since they explicitly mark off the

distinction between narrative and number.

105

No less a revered figure than composer Richard Rodgers has written on the matter

of smoother transitions between narrative and number in his autobiography Musical

Stages. Along with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, Rodgers created Oklahoma! (1943),

generally considered the epitome of the integrated musical. So his words carry a great

deal of import. In Musical Stages, he discusses how the film musicals he worked on with

lyricist Lorenz Hart attempted to navigate the bumpy road between narrative and number:

Hallelujah, I’m a Bum [1933] gave us the opportunity to expand on the innovation, already tried out in Love Me Tonight [1932] and The Phantom

President [1932], of what was then called rhythmic dialogue, though a better term might be “musical dialogue.” We simply used rhymed conversation, with musical accompaniment, to affect a smoother transition to actual song and to give the entire film a firmer musical structure. It was similar to recitative in opera, except that it was done in rhythm and was an authentic part of the action. (Rodgers 156)

Rodgers makes it clear that this musical dialogue he created with Hart feeds into the

concept of the integrated musical when he remarks on how their working method meshed

perfectly with the ideas of Love Me Tonight’s director Rouben Mamoulian: “Like us,

[Mamoulian] was convinced that a musical film should be created in musical terms – that

dialogue, song, and scoring should all be integrated as closely as possible so that the final

product would have a unity of style and design” (Rodgers 149). And Hammerstein would

echo these concerns years later when a press release for Oklahoma! gave him the

opportunity to reflect on his craft:

The art of this thing is to get in and out of the numbers so smoothly that the audience isn't aware that you are jumping from dialogue to singing. The art, you understand, is not to jump but to ooze...The play has a good and a realistic story, so every song and dance has to be motivated and placed so well in the story that it's completely natural for the people to be singing and dancing wherever they are. (Carter 26)

106

Certain of the complete naturalness of their songs and dances, Rodgers and other

architects of the integrated musical made it a point to educate the public on integration as

a musical ideal. In interviews and even playbills, they advertised the seamlessness of

their creations. For instance, Rodgers made no secret of his modus operandi in Chee-

Chee, a stage musical he composed with Hart in 1928:

To avoid the eternal problem of the story coming to a halt as the songs take over, we decided to use a number of short pieces of from four to sixteen bars each, with no more than six songs of traditional form and length in the entire scene. In this way the music would be an essential part of the structure of the story rather than an appendage to the action. The concept was so unusual, in fact, that we even called attention to it with the following notice in the program:

NOTE: The musical numbers, some of them very short, are so interwoven with the story that it would be confusing for the audience to peruse a complete list. (118)

Presumably the audience were to disregard any numbers that stood out, including those of

traditional form and length, despite the best efforts of Rodgers and Hart. Thus the

program tried to solidify the organic wholeness of the production even if the particulars

of the performance did not.

Critics helped spread the word on integration in reviews and treatises as Geoffrey

Block notes of the composer/critic Lehman Engel:

Engel, an astute and sensitive Broadway critic and a staunch proponent of the integrated musical, writes that when he sees a musical for the first time “the highest compliment anyone can pay is to not be conscious of the songs.” The absence of such awareness “indicates that all of the elements worked together so integrally that I was aware only of the total effect.” (Block 2004, 241-2)

And in his New York Times review of Brigadoon (1947) Brooks Atkinson furthers the

cause of integration by extolling the virtues of a musical which erases the distinction

107

between narrative and number: “For once, the modest label ‘musical play’ has a precise

meaning. For it is impossible to say where the music and dancing leave off and the story

begins” (quoted in Long 46).

All of these comments on the smoothing over or obliteration of the distinction

between narrative and number speak to a desire to move beyond the crass commercialism

of using stage and screen to generate hit songs and promote stars. Both critics and

creators aimed to raise the cultural profile of the musical to the status of high art in

general and the opera in particular. Indeed, as Block as shown, the criteria for inclusion in

the Broadway canon mirror those of the opera canon:

With the notable exceptions of Show Boat [1927] and Porgy and Bess [1935], the pre-Rodgers and Hammerstein musical offers striking parallels with Baroque operas, where composers and librettists serve larger-than-life stars who arrest the action with their show-stopping arias. After Oklahoma!, canonic musicals frequently aspire to and often approach Joseph Kerman’s dramatic standard of European operatic excellence and use music to define character, generate action, and establish atmosphere. (1993, 526)

With this standard given such a prominent place in the development of both musical

forms, their histories start to resemble one another as an inexorable move towards

integration. The shift from speech to song posed just as many problems to the creators of

opera. Recitatives attempted to address this problem as a style of singing somewhere

between song and speech. The recitatives in the operas of Mozart, for instance, feature

minimal accompaniment (sometimes only a harpsichord) and little, if any, melodic

interest as the characters talk-sing through information that moves the story forward,

most of which is conveyed in these moments. The arias and ensembles, then, enjoy full

108

orchestral accompaniment and showcase the full range of the composer’s melodic talents.

But nineteenth-century opera did away with recitatives to foster a more unified work of

art which reached an apotheosis with Wagner’s idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, a total

integration of music, words, and theater. Consequently, Wagner had a great deal of

influence on critical discourse in America, particularly the new criticism of writers such

as Kerman and Eric Bentley: “The leading aesthetic theory at the time Rodgers and

Hammerstein were becoming popular was the new criticism, which sought an organic

wholeness in works of arts” (McMillin 3). The critics of this school of thought, however,

ignored the musical when they were not ridiculing it, so Rodgers and Hammerstein and

other supporters of the integrated musical knew they had to aspire to the

Gesamtkunstwerk in order to elevate the musical to high art (McMillin 4-5; Carter 208).

Of the three criteria for operatic excellence (music establishes atmosphere,

conveys character, and advances the story), theorists invoke “advancing the story” most

often in definitions of the integrated musical. There is no poverty of literature on this

matter. Stanley Green, for instance, mentions all three:

Musical numbers can be integrated in three general ways: by creating the proper mood, by revealing character, and by advancing the plot…Writers can overcome the problem of getting people to break into song in the midst of a story by dealing with theatrical themes and creating a show within a show. (4)

But in her book Dreaming of Fred and Ginger: Cinema and Cultural Memory, Annette

Kuhn uses only “advancing the story” in her definition while further elucidating Green’s

comments on musicals that feature a show within a show:

At one end of the spectrum lie musicals where the numbers are entirely irrelevant to the plot, while at the other are “integrated musicals” in which

109

the plot is advanced by the content of musical numbers. By this definition, popular musicals of the early 1930s like, say, the Warner Bros. ‘backstage’ musicals 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933 are not fully integrated, because while in these films the existence of musical numbers is by definition relevant to the plot, their actual content is not…The films of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers (are) all…integrated musicals. (168-9)

Curiously, later in the book, she calls the song-and-dance numbers in the Astaire-Rogers

musicals “attractions” which invokes Tom Gunning’s well-traveled notion of the “cinema

of attractions,” a concept used to distinguish the spectacular nature of early silent

American cinema from the more narrative-driven, feature-length films becoming

prominent in the 1910s (Kuhn 181). Thus “attractions” strongly suggests these numbers

do not, in fact, advance the story but rather operate as non-narrative spectacles that halt

the forward motion of the story.

Other authors have insisted on the Astaire-Rogers musicals as integrated musicals

whose numbers advance the story. James Chapman notes that “Astaire…along with

producer Pandro S. Berman and dance choreographer Hermes Pan, pioneered what has

come to be termed the ‘integrated musical’ in which song-and-dance routines were used

to advance the plot rather than being presented as staged numbers before the footlights”

(2003, 187-8). He includes the MGM productions of the Arthur Freed unit from the

1940s and 1950s in his definition (Chapman 2006, 55). Laurence Bergreen states that

director Mark Sandrich was equally concerned with integration for the film Top Hat

(1935): “Sandrich insisted that the songs had to be integrated into the movie and advance

the story in some way, or failing that, not bring it to a standstill” (345). Bergreen goes on

to suggest that all of the numbers in Top Hat advance the story save for one: “Only the

last (number), the monumentally silly “Piccolino,” threatened to bring the proceedings to

110

a halt, but by that time the movie was nearly over, and it was time to let out all the stops,

anyway” (348).

Of course, Sandrich was not the only director charged with a concern for

integration. John Anthony Gilvey notes a similar ethos in the work of Mamoulian, whose

career straddled both screen and stage including the original Broadway production of

Oklahoma!: “Master of the integrated musical in which all the elements of a production

work together to advance the plot, Mamoulian was able to visualize an entire work in

musical terms and give it unity of style” (68). And all of the canonical Broadway

musicals have received claims that their numbers advance the story. Of Show Boat, John

Bush Jones writes that “[each song] is a direct, logical extension of the action or

dialogue, divulging aspects of character, furthering character relationships, helping move

the story along, or, at the very least, establishing the ambiance of a scene” (76). These

definitions and claims create a hierarchy amongst the criteria for the operatic ideal with

“advancing the story” superceding “conveying character” which in turns supercedes

“establishing atmosphere” in an effort to proclaim the absolute necessity of the number

for the narrative and the organic whole of the entire theatrical or film experience. Taken

together with the goals of blurring or destroying distinctions between narrative and

number, they create a legible portrait of integration. But a problem arises when

proponents of integration theory apply it to some musicals over others or in the

comparatively rare instances when they try to exemplify the theory by analyzing specific

examples from theater or film musicals.

111

The Integrated Musical Number and History

One can already glean a vague history of the Broadway musical from the

comments on integration above and the shortcomings of integration theory become

evident when trying to flesh out this history. Most histories of the Broadway musical

claim either Jerome Kern and Hammerstein’s Show Boat or Oklahoma! as the first

integrated musical. The latter then ushers in the “Golden Age” of the Broadway musical,

when the integrated musical becomes the standard, which starts to fizzle out around the

time of the appearance of West Side Story on Broadway in 1957. Of Show Boat, Miles

Kreuger has famously written that ''the history of the American music theater, quite

simply, is divided into two eras; everything before Show Boat and everything after Show

Boat” (1988). Stacy Wolf claims that “Oklahoma! opened the era [of the ‘Golden Age’ of

musicals] with the first ‘integrated’ musical.” In the next sentence, however, she allows

that “Kern first articulated the notion of the integrated musical with Hammerstein on

Show Boat in 1927” (26-7). She goes on to note that the integrated musical did not catch

on until Oklahoma! but does not explain why it should therefore receive the designation

of the first integrated musical. These comments beg the question of what happened to

integration in the first third of the twentieth century and the years between Show Boat and

Oklahoma!.

Three forms of musical theatre dominated the era before Show Boat: operettas,

musical comedies, and revues. Most historians liken operettas to light opera but the form

112

does not possess strong kinship to nineteenth-century opera due to its penchant for satire27

and showcasing popular social dances (McMillin 11-12). Operettas had a decided

European flavor, with settings in exotic locales and virtuoso singing passages, which set

them apart from a show like Show Boat. Nevertheless, according to many commentators,

the operetta was a highly integrated form: “Operettas tell stories and provide greater

potential for music to aid an integrated dramatic narrative” (Block 1993, 527). Barry

Langford notes that operettas were “amongst the most integrated of all forms of the

musical” (85). And Jones argues that the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan had a great

deal of influence on the integrated musical (10).

Historians usually peg musicals comedies before Show Boat as shows in which

specialty numbers and star turns impeded any attempt at integration. If stars had enough

clout, for instance, then they could make decisions that caused difficulties for the creators

of a musical. As Hammerstein recalled about Cliff Edwards (aka Ukulele Ike), star of the

1925 Kern/Hammerstein musical Sunny, “[Edwards’s] contract required that he do his

specialty between ten o’clock and ten-fifteen! So, we had to construct our story in such a

way that Ukulele Ike could come out and perform during that time and still not interfere

with the continuity” (Fordin 62). But as several historians have noted, the musical

comedies that Kern produced with playwright Guy Bolton at Broadway’s Princess

Theatre from 1915 to 1918 were well-integrated. Mark N. Grant writes that “The books

were well-plotted, realistic drawing-room comedies, and the lead-ins were cued by

27 In fact, as McMillin notes, nineteenth-century opera was one of the things operetta frequently satirized (11-12).

113

dramatic situation rather than by extraneous costumes or comedians” (31).28 Jones states

that the so-called Princess Theatre musicals exemplify a rudimentary form of the

integrated musical (46). He attempts to demonstrate their lesser importance in relation to

Show Boat by stating that “in addition to tackling serious issues like bigotry, spousal

desertion, and alcoholism, Show Boat was the first large-scale, successful integrated

musical on Broadway” (Jones 76). But he neglects to explain the significance of the

show’s large scale to the history of the integrated musical. And several years before Show

Boat, another Hammerstein musical, Rose Marie (1924), featured a serious murder story

and aired its pretension to integration in the playbill (in a fashion similar to Chee-Chee):

“The musical numbers of this play are such an integral29 part of the action that we do not

think we should list them as separate episodes” (Green 36).30

Revues were an important antecedent to the musical and stand as the exact opposite

of what the integrated musical was trying to achieve. In fact, Green and Kuhn’s

discussion of show-within-a-show numbers quoted above correspond to the revue-style

28 Grant continues with a musical description of how the Princess Theatre musicals differ from operettas: “Kern’s songs for these shows are not riff tunes, and they are not soaring operettic [sic] melodies. Rather they are the first successful amalgamation of the two…But unlike most of [operetta composer Victor] Herbert’s melodic lines, Kern’s never tax a singer’s chops to the point of slurring consonants into unintelligibility and losing the lyric” (31). 29 Notice that a form of the word “integrated” is being used as early as 1924 several years before Show Boat and almost two decades before Oklahoma!. 30 Somewhat confusingly, the next sentence of the program reads: “The songs which stand out, independent of their dramatic association, are “Rose Marie,” “Indian Love Call,” “Totem Tom-Tom,” and “Why Shouldn’t We?” in the first act, and “The Door of My Dreams” in the second act” (Green 36). But as Grant argues, the claims of integration were largely unfounded in a show which “included among its dances a Charleston, a black bottom, tap dancing, adagio ballet, and a gigantic precision chorus line number entitled ‘Totem Tom-Tom’ featuring synchronized armies of female dancers dressed as totem poles” (250).

114

numbers since the former do not have to advance the story forward. Scott McMillin

groups several forms of musical entertainment under revues: “the burlesques, the

vaudevilles, the extravaganzas, the travesties, the music hall shows, the variety shows,

the minstrels, the burlettas” (10). None of these forms contains a book that organizes

numbers into a narrative. Instead, they proceed as a succession of unrelated performances

in aggregate. A theme may string through the performances. But it would not place them

in a chain of narrative events leading to a resolution of an enigma or any other kind of

conclusion meant to tie up loose story threads. Integration tries to distance itself from the

revue format as much as possible. But as will become clear later, all musicals bear a trace

of their heritage in revues, a much larger trace than most will admit. In short, though, the

integrated musical predates Show Boat so decisively that it becomes murky as to how

exactly Show Boat relates to the specific history of the integrated musical.

As for the years in between Show Boat and Oklahoma!, Cole Porter’s name

dominates this era as a composer/lyricist who displayed little concern for integration and

showed much more interest in creating show-stopping number for stars, most consciously

for Ethel Merman. According to Gerald Mast, “his early shows pulled songs out of the

trunk to squeeze them anywhere they might fit…[and] his will granted explicit

permission to take any Porter song from any Porter show and use it in any other” (194).

“The Man I Love,” the George and Ira Gershwin standard written in 1927, “was yanked

in and out of three different musicals” (Furia 41). And, in one of the most assured

assessments of the era, Jones would probably agree that Porter, the Gershwins, or really,

any Broadway or Hollywood tunesmith failed to achieve (or even strive for) integration:

115

Why, then, were there no other integrated musicals like Show Boat (not even by Kern and/or Hammerstein) for another sixteen years? Audiences had to wait until 1943 for Oklahoma! to finally establish the integrated musical as the norm for musical theater writing and production in America…The American musical stage would have to wait out the Great Depression and half of World War II for the full flowering of integrated musicals depicting concerns of real significance to contemporary audiences. (77-8)

But Jones fails to explain how the most celebrated musicals of the time (celebrated for

their integrated musical numbers, that is) failed to achieve Show Boat levels of

integration, most notably Kurt Weill’s musicals, such as Lady in the Dark (1940),

Rodgers and Hart’s Pal Joey (1940), George and Ira Gershwin’s Of Thee I Sing (1931),

and the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess (1935), written with DuBose Heyward.31

Even when it comes to Oklahoma!, no one seems to agree on how exactly the

show is integrated. Historians often single out Agnes de Mille’s choreography for the

show, particularly the dream ballet, as an example of how all theatrical elements

converge into an integrated whole:

Despite pre-1940 harbingers, the integrated musical only really happened when de Mille’s use of ballet transformed the art form. For the first time, movement assumed parity with book, music, and lyrics as a carrier of the dramatic through-line of a show. It was de Mille’s discovery that tap, ballroom, and acrobatics were too expressively limited to open up the form, to convey subtext and character, to reveal that there could be meaty depths hidden under the entertaining surface of musical comedy. (Grant 259)

But Robert Emmett Long comes to a quite different conclusion concerning de Mille’s

contribution to the show and suggests that West Side Story fourteen years later attains a

higher degree of integration:

31 Block includes Porgy and Bess and Pal Joey in his list of the twelve canonic Broadway musicals (1993, 532).

116

De Mille helped to create the integrated musical but her musicals were still not fully integrated. Her dream ballet, for example, may have brought dance into the musical more fully than ever before, but it stood out from the rest of the show as dance, and it did involve bringing in a dance chorus and lead dancers who filled in for the non-dancing actors. In West Side

Story there is no dance portion to the show; it is all dance, all movement. Robbins blurs the line between dance and dramatic action, so that it is hard to say where one ends and the other begins. (110)

The evidence against the claims that the numbers in Oklahoma! advance the story

is even more damning. As McMillin so astutely establishes, not a single number in

Oklahoma! advances the story. In fact, he maintains that few numbers in any musical

advance the story (McMillin 8). This is because they fail to achieve the highest level of

integration as laid out by John Mueller: “numbers which advance the plot by their

content” (30). Mueller calls only these numbers “truly integrated”: “During these

numbers something happens which changes the character or the situation, and a test of

integration in this sense is whether a number can be left out of the musical without

leaving a noticeable gap” (30). McMillin spends almost an entire chapter demonstrating

how the number in Oklahoma! are not truly integrated in this manner.

I verified McMillin’s contention by watching a version of Oklahoma! (the 1999

London production starring Hugh Jackman) with the numbers edited out. Indeed,

noticeable gaps occur when Laurey references “The Surrey with the Fringe On Top”

immediately after Curly finishes singing about this mode of transportation he wishes to

use to take Laurey to the box social. But it cannot be said that the content of the number

advances the story since modes of transportation are discussed before the number and the

principals discuss the surrey afterwards (which at this point of the show is only a figment

of Curly’s imagination anyway). And the same holds true for every number in the show.

117

They either repeat information already conveyed or, less often, the book will reiterate

information conveyed by a number. As McMillin puts it, “usually the book sets forth the

turn of the plot and the number elaborates it, in the spirit of repetition and the pleasure of

difference…” (8) but certainly not in the interest of integration.

In his book-length study Oklahoma: The Making of an American Musical, Tim

Carter suspects that under close inspection, Oklahoma! cannot sustain the extravagant

claims of integration made on its behalf:

Any argument for serious drama in Oklahoma! is weakened, to say the least, by the seeming superficiality of a plot that focuses primarily, we might think, on who gets to take Laurey to the Box Social. There is not much action in Oklahoma! and its concerns do not seem to be particularly great. No one expects Shakespearean tragedy in a Broadway musical - at least before West

Side Story (1957) - but one is left wondering whether Oklahoma! can bear the weight of its reception history. Perhaps we should not ask too much. 174

So despite dedicating many pages to how smoothly Rodgers and Hammerstein integrated

each number into the story, Carter chalks up Oklahoma!’s ecstatic reception to wartime

escapism in the end rather than a widespread thirst for the integrated musical. But the fact

remains that we ask too much of Oklahoma! because so many proponents of the

integrated musical have claimed too much for it.

The shortcomings of integration theory in relation to the history of the Hollywood

musical will be discussed in detail later. But two examples will suffice to demonstrate the

insufficiency of applying the theory to individual film musicals. All of the comments

above on the numbers in Astaire-Rogers films claim that they advance the story in

accordance with the definition of an integrated number. But a closer look at Top Hat

(1935) reveals otherwise. The story concerns a case of mistaken identity in which model

118

Dale Tremont (Rogers) believes that dancer Jerry Travers (Astaire) is the husband of her

friend Madge (Helen Broderick). Complications arise when Madge pushes Dale to dance

with Jerry. As they dance, Dale continually looks over at Madge who winks at her and

gestures for them to dance closer together. Dale is understandably stunned at Madge’s

tolerance for letting another woman become intimate with her “husband.” But eventually

she succumbs to the scenario largely because she has fallen in love with Jerry. At this

point, she says “Well, if Madge doesn’t care, I certainly don’t.” Jerry replies, “Neither do

I. All I know is that it’s…heaven,” “heaven” being the first word of the song “Cheek to

Cheek” which he sings to Dale before they both launch into one of their most famous

dances.

But the “Cheek to Cheek” number works exactly the same way as the numbers in

Oklahoma!. Instead of advancing the story, it repeats what the narrative has already

conveyed, instantiating the love we already know Dale has for Jerry.32 In fact, Kuhn

herself perhaps counterintuitively admits as much when she notes that Dale’s move from

shock to complicity in a taboo affair “is acknowledged firstly and explicitly at the level of

story and dialogue, when Dale decides to stop worrying that she is, as she imagines,

dancing with another woman’s husband; and secondly when the song duet segues into a

pas-de-deux, a displaced representation of courtship and the sexual act” (186). Purely as a

method to propel the narrative forward, then, “Cheek to Cheek” is unnecessary since the

32 And certainly the lyrical content of “Cheek to Cheek” does nothing to forward the story as it conveys little more than Jerry’s pleasure in dancing in the titular manner.

119

story and dialogue have acknowledged Dale’s mood shift before the number begins and

has done so explicitly.33

Thus it should come as no surprise when Hugh Fordin suggests that the Astaire-

Rogers musicals miss the mark somewhat when it comes to integration:

An Astaire-Rogers musical or a Busby Berkeley production number had wonderful goodies, but they were self-contained, so little affected by the total environment of the film that they were as charming removed from the film as they were in it. An integrated musical had popped up from time to time, since Show Boat, on the screen and on the stage, but it was not widely accepted as an example of what the musical ought to be until 1943, when Oklahoma! burst upon the scene. (147)

To verify the charm of these numbers when removed from their filmic casings, one need

only visit YouTube where song and dance routines from Astaire-Rogers (and other)

musicals have been uploaded with little respect for the total environments of the films

that originally housed them. As of this writing, I count at least ten posts of “Cheek to

Cheek.”34 And tellingly, most of them begin where the song begins rather than include

any bits of a story-forwarding dialogue.

Other film theorists have applied the term “integrated” as confusingly as have

theorists of the Broadway musical. Sean Griffin makes a distinction between Twentieth

Century-Fox’s “backstagers” or “vaudeville-influenced” musicals and MGM’s integrated

musicals which he defines as:

33 Even before Dale stands up to dance with Jerry, she acknowledges the potential for giving herself entirely to the affair when she states her fear of forgetting about Madge’s presence altogether. 34 http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cheek+astaire&search_type (September 5, 2008).

120

The term refers to musical numbers that are “integral” to the plot—either by revealing important character traits or by furthering the narrative itself. Thus, in integrated musicals, characters break into song when they should be talking, instead of only when they are “putting on a show” (as in the “backstager” subgenre). (22)

Griffin uses this distinction to argue that Fox musicals offered an opportunity to upset

dominant constructions of race and ethnicity since they placed all performers on equal

musical footing. For instance, MGM musicals denied Lena Horne the supposedly deeper

subjectivity available in integrated musical numbers whereas Fox musicals granted the

Nicholas Brothers a more equal musical expression since subjectivity was much less on

display in the numbers:

Horne was a “guest star,” singing at nightclubs in films in which white characters broke out into song and dance during normal conversation; the Nicholas Brothers performed “specialties” in films in which everyone else, regardless of race or ethnicity, was performing on stage. No one at Fox at this time sang or danced whenever they felt like it. While Horne stood out as “a problem” in MGM musicals, the Nicholas Brothers did what everyone else was doing in the musicals made at Fox. 22

But Pin Up Girl (1944) challenges the notion that “no one at Fox at this time sang or

danced whenever they felt like it.” The film’s first number, the title song, servicemen and

waitresses at the USO sing for no discernible reason other than “they feel like it.” They

are not on stage and sing back and forth to one another. In fact, the waitresses sing about

exactly what they are doing during the song – serving a variety of food to the men.35

35 A bit of intriguing ambiguity in this number somewhat allows it to straddle Griffin’s diametrically opposed categories. In the first shot of the scene, a band is visible in the extreme background (but barely so – it took me several viewings to notice it). As the number progresses, the camera dollies over to Lorry (Betty Grable), dressed in the USO waitress uniform, who is seated in front of the band and surrounded by a large group of people waiting for her to sing (accompanied in part by unseen strings). When she

121

And not all of the MGM films in which Horne appeared featured white characters

breaking out into song and dance during normal conversation. Ziegfeld Follies (1946) is a

revue musical and thus even more “vaudeville-influenced” than most of the Fox musicals

Griffin discusses. Till the Clouds Roll By (1946) and Words and Music (1948) are biopics

(of Kern and Rodgers/Hart respectively), and in keeping with the usual musical biopic

form, all of the numbers are either performed on stage in front of an audience or are

explicitly marked as a performance as in the many scenes in Words and Music when

Rodgers (Tom Drake) and/or Hart (Mickey Rooney) try out songs at the piano or when

Hart jokingly asks Judy Garland (playing herself) for a tryout at a party and they perform

“I Wish I Were in Love Again” together. No one in any of these films bursts out into

song and dance during normal conversation.

Of course, Horne still had no narrative agency in these films. This made it all the

easier for censors to edit out her scenes (and those of other black performers) so as not to

offend white audiences. For instance, Lloyd Binford, chairman of the Memphis Board of

Censors, routinely edited out Horne from musicals and one paper reported that her scene

in Words and Music had been “Binfordized” which apparently meant more than a film

edit: “In the case of Words and Music, all newspaper advertising and theatre billboards

finishes, the Condos Brothers do a tap routine. But there is no explicit performer/audience divide. Almost everyone sings and/or dances. And no one is explicitly marked as a performer. In fact, the story revolves around Lorry pretending to be a musical comedy star when she is really a stenographer. The absence of black musical performers in the film may reinforce Griffin’s argument (the Internet Movie Database lists an uncredited Nat “King” Cole as the Canteen Pianist but I have been unable to locate him in the film; the pianist at the USO is Lorry’s friend, Kay [Dorothea Kent]). Nevertheless, the statement “no one at Fox at this time sang or danced whenever they felt like it” needs some qualifications. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037175/fullcredits#cast (September 5, 2008).

122

omitted any mention of Miss Horne, although her billing by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was

equal to other stars” (“Lena Clipped,” 1).36 So even given its other definitions, it is clear

that integration is an inappropriate term for the musical.

Critiques of Integration Theory

It is time to jettison integration as a theoretical construct through which to

understand how the musical operates. The failure of the term to describe adequately the

musical points to the fact that quite the opposite occurs in the genre. Rather than fuse

together in an integrated whole, narrative and number interrupt one another. The musical

is a disjointed genre and any attempts to motivate numbers via so-called integration or

even backstager or show-within-a-show conventions merely try to avoid this fact.

Furthermore, such attempts distort the uniqueness of the genre in the imperative to wedge

it into other, antithetical dramatic traditions.

Fortunately, several superb studies, most of recent vintage, have dealt

unflinchingly with the incongruous nature of the musical. D.A. Miller’s Place for Us:

Essay on the Broadway Musical traces the glorious trajectory of the gay male Broadway

fan from listening to original cast recordings in the family basement as a youth to singing

along with other gay men at piano bars and finally to experiencing the shows themselves

on Broadway. In gorgeous, semi-autobiographical prose, he captures the disdain so many

gay Broadway lovers feel for the imperative of integration:

36 Indeed, the opening credits list Horne in the same-sized font as June Allyson, Perry Como, Garland, Gene Kelly, Rooney, and Ann Sothern. She is billed before Drake who, it bears repeating, plays Rodgers, the principal narrative agent of the film.

123

What he consequently sought in the Broadway musical was the very thing that those who despised it also found there: not the integration of drama and music found on the thematic surface, but a so much deeper formal discontinuity between the two that no makeshift for reconciling them could ever manage to make the transition from one to the other less abrupt, more plausible. As often as it had numbers, every Broadway musical brought him ecstatic release from all those well-made plots. (Miller 3)

Andrea Most’s Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical discusses the

implications of a rigid separation between narrative and number in musical comedy for

Jewish identity. She likens this separation to Bertolt Brecht’s theory of epic theatre which

calls for an explicit, anti-illusionist marking of musical numbers in direct contrast to

Wagner-influenced ideas on integration. In Brecht’s words:

When the epic theatre's methods begin to penetrate the opera the first result is a radical separation of the elements. So long as the expression Gesamtkunstwerk means that the integration is a muddle, so long as the arts are supposed to be 'fused' together, the various elements will all be equally degraded, and each will act as a mere 'feed' to the rest. The process of fusion extends to the spectator, who gets thrown into the melting pot too and becomes a passive (suffering) part of the total work of art. (quoted in Most, 37-8)

But where Brecht sought an alienation or distancing effect (Verfremdungseffekt) that

would force audiences outside of theatrical illusion in order to keep their critical faculties

intact, the largely Jewish performers and creators of musical comedy sought what Most

calls an assimilation effect which “combines the self-consciousness provoked by the

separation of elements on the musical stage with emotional response and communal

celebration” (9). The assimilation effect can occur because the performer draws attention

to the number as a performance rather than fostering the illusion of inhabiting a

psychologically three-dimensional character:

124

When a character begins to sing, the actor gives birth to a new self…Each song offers the performer the opportunity to create somebody new, somebody different from the character in the dialogue scenes. The collective thrill the audience experiences is the joy of watching not just a character but also an actor invent him or herself. (Most 10)

Actors could therefore modulate their performance to work against character thus

displaying a greater degree of control over the kind of self conveyed. Such control

offered the performer an opportunity to destabilize essentialist notions of race and

ethnicity which could in turn aid in the assimilation into mainstream American culture.

But the hallmarks of the integrated musical weakened that control. Now the

performer had to serve the drama and throw out much of the self-consciousness of

performance in order to become the character supposedly given such well-defined

psychology by the show’s creators. Most casts a disdainful eye on those critics who

would deem this development as the mature era of Broadway history especially since

few, if any, plumb the disturbing implications of the preference of Wagner over Brecht in

an art form dominated by Jews. Her words are worth quoting at length for the insight they

provide into how the putative maturity of the integrated musical actually served as the

form’s death knell:

The implication is that the integration of psychological realism and the collapsing of the distinction between song and story on the musical stage represent a positive and necessary new feature of the art form. Yet, paradoxically, in favoring integration of the elements over separation, with its self-conscious emphasis on role-playing, celebrants of the integrated musical reinforced an already deeply problematic mode of understanding American identity. Musical theater writers themselves adopted the integrated mode with some hesitation. By juxtaposing characters whose songs were realistically embedded in the plot with characters who used numbers more theatrically and self-consciously, writers clearly expressed

125

ambivalence about the transformation they were depicting. And their ambivalence was well-founded. Not only was the assimilable/unassimilable divide created by this new form deeply troubling, but the increasing dependence on realism in the musical theater ultimately undermined the theatrical form itself. By adopting – however hesitantly – the standards of film, television, and realist stage dramas, writers of musicals ventured into an arena in which the musical form simply could not compete. And so, after a brief heyday that lasted into the 1960s, musicals quickly decline as the popular American cultural form. (Most 31)

In his book Can’t Help Singin’: The American Musical on Stage and Screen,

Gerald Mast links this decline of the musical to the drive for integration as well. For

Mast, the success of Rodgers and Hammerstein led to the loss of “the great song hits

from Broadway shows (fewer and fewer with every passing season since Oklahoma!) and

the great top bananas and belting mamas to put them over” (203). The suggestion here is

that the integrated form compels the creators of musicals to give in to their dramaturgical

urges at the expense of writing catchy tunes that could travel outside of their immediate

contexts: “In building steadily toward a unity of dramatic tone, musical form, and moral

statement, the shows of Rodgers and Hammerstein just as steadily sacrificed the variety,

the surprises, the virtuoso performance ‘turns,’ the witty songs that had brought

audiences to American musical shows for a century” (Mast 213).37

Steven Cohan’s Incongruous Entertainment: Camp, Cultural Value, and The

MGM Musical bears down upon the camp logic of the MGM musical. In doing so, Cohan

suggests a replacement of integration theory with aggregate theory. With aggregate

theory, the number exceeds the narrative and it is within this excess that Cohan locates

much of the musical’s camp ethos. Cohan thus sees no reason to continue to deny the

37 For an enthusiastic approval of Mast’s theory, see Christgau, 1998.

126

musical’s status as an aggregate form, an incongruous entertainment that interrupts rather

than enhances narrative flow. Indeed, he plucks out many numbers from their narrative

casing (however flimsy the support was to begin with) to embrace the spectacular excess

within.

But the most sustained and brilliant critique of integration theory is McMillin’s

masterful The Musical as Drama: A Study of the Principles and Conventions Behind

Musical Shows from Kern to Sondheim because he largely refuses to accept that anything

resembling integration occurs in the so-called integrated musicals, even (in fact,

especially) in the works of Rodgers and Hammerstein: “The (most) important feature (of

the musical) is the incongruity between book and number, between what I describe as

two orders of times, the progressive time of plot and the repetitive time of music, yet the

theory that usually attends the musical would iron out this incongruity in the name of

integration” (McMillin 8). McMillin embarks on his project by noting that the

forerunners to the musical, the revue and the operetta, were incongruous forms. While the

revue had no book, “operetta plots always made room for comic routines and other kinds

of show business, and they did not take integration of music and book as a main issue”

(McMillin 13). The revue and the operetta (and an ever-shifting list of musical comedies)

then become the repressed consciousness of the musical, something to be warded off and

denied as fervently as possible with the help of integration theory. But McMillin’s

ostensible argument is that “the principles of disjunction between book and number, and

between one number and another, that organized the revue and operetta formats still

inform the musical, and there is no point being ashamed of it” (13).

127

Of course, rock ideology will make a point of shaming the form which will be

discussed later. For now, though, it is important to look deeper into McMillin’s

distinction between book time and number time. Book time progresses forward from a

beginning to an end. But while number time emulates a certain kind of progression,

mostly in the Tin Pan Alley AABA form, it moves quite differently: “It is lyrical, it gives

the pleasure that follows from rhyme, melody, and meter, and it takes effect not because

it blends into the plot in the spirit of integration but because it stands apart and declares

that there is another order of time in the theatre, not just the cause-and-effect sequencing

of plot but the lyrical repetitions of song and dance” (McMillin 9). Such repetitions could

not enter book time without a mind-numbing effect (or perhaps deliberately so for an

avant-garde effect) but number time renders them pleasurable, even desirable. As

McMillin notes of “The Surrey with the Fringe On Top” from Oklahoma!, they become

the engine for the musical drama:

Curly singing can repeat himself extensively and variously without being countered. To be exact, he manages the repetitions that are built into the music. The melody repeats in one way, the rhythm in another, the verse in another. His management of the repetitions becomes the dramatic focus, and Laurey becomes a listener. She may indicate her reactions to the song, but she cannot speak for herself without entering the song and making it a duets, or halting it for a moment. (34)

Therefore, the story has not been advanced. The inability of other characters to do little

more than listen relieves the drama of the dialectic that allowed time to progress forward

in the book. It will resume once the song has completed. But not even the character who

sings can bring about a change in lyric time despite song conventions suggesting

otherwise:

128

Lyric time has reached its conclusion, creating the illusion that it was the plot that was moving along. It wasn’t, it was the performance of the number, but illusions count for a great deal in the theater and deserve to be taken seriously. One technique is to make a number refer to a crucial recognition on the part of the singing character. The singing character cannot do anything about the recognition while the song continues (apart from sing about it, which is the other dimension), but the recognition belongs to this character alone, and it is important. (McMillin 42)

But what exactly are these song conventions which foster the illusion of

advancing the plot? The drama of numbers inheres not only in the character managing the

song’s repetitions but also in bringing the song to its end. However, this does not mean

that the character needs to do so for any dramatic reason, least of all to advance the story:

The refrains of popular songs are all around us, and there is no reason for them to be there, no other reason. The song gives reason enough. There is something internal to the repetitions in a song that justify the song’s projection, regardless of context. What is it? Words in a song pretend to refer to something outside the song – the dying of a lovely flame, the special face one looks for in a romance, the best meat pies in London – but the repetition of the words several times brings the lyric around to itself as another point of reference. It refers to itself as well as to the other things…Refrain seeks to become its own signifier through repetition, and this approach to transparency – where the words and tunes being heard refer to themselves through repetition – lifts the song to another layer of reference above the normal agony of being ‘about’ love, or ‘about’ the blues. The other layer makes the song about itself. (McMillin 109-110)38

And McMillin makes it perfectly clear that this process occurs just as much with what he

calls diegetic numbers, numbers that are called for as performances within the book (e.g.

in backstagers or during shows-within-the show). “[They do] the job most songs do in

musicals, which is to provide moments of lyric elaboration and suspension for song-and-

dance performance to become the center of the show. A pause is a pause even when the

38 Heather Laing comes to a similar conclusion: “[Music] lacks a denotative verbal content. As such, it does not necessarily refer to anything outside of its own content, structure and sound world.” (6)

129

characters in the book hear it as a pause” (105). Even in the rare instances when a number

does manage to advance the story the advanced information must struggle with refrain for

dramatic potency. The song’s repetitions threaten to abstract any concrete references

and/or functionalities given the refrain’s propensity to unsettle semiosis by referring to

itself.

McMillin’s notion of what these repetitions in lyrical time do to characterization

is even more groundbreaking. According to integration theory, a seamless fusion between

narrative and number creates a deeper psychological profile for characters in order better

to define them and/or uncover hidden, more fundamental kernels of personality. But this

assumes that book time operates in a similar fashion to number time the latter of which

elaborates characters into musical versions of themselves rather than defining them more

deeply: “The effect of breaking into song (or dance) is to double the characters into the

second order of time, the lyrics time of music, so that they gain a formality of expression

unavailable to them in the book…The musical gives its characters a dimension that lies

beyond realism and increases the range of their presentation” (McMillin 20-1). Doubled

characters thus carry multitudes within them instead of defining a single, irreducibly

unique person.

These doubled characters then weave in and out of other doubled characters

which further chips away at any strong sense of their singular psychologies. Number time

can have this effect because it allows characters to sing along with one another. McMillin

calls this “the ensemble effect,” a musical voice that supercedes any one individual

character:

130

They sing their way into the “voice of the musical” – a voice that is not exactly their own but in which their voices can join…The similarities of melody and harmony shared among different characters are not psychological or sociological similarities. They are aesthetic similarities…A well-composed show has a style of its own, a voice for its own range of character and incident, which works its way into the voices of many characters (especially the lovers), works its way into the orchestrations, works its ways into the ensembles, the dances. (68-9)

The ensemble effect poses problems for those who expect a modicum of realism in their

entertainment. For in the numbers, characters become people who can perform a song or

dance and bring it to its conclusion. A Oklahoman cowboy suddenly becomes someone

who can sing as beautifully as Alfred Drake or Hugh Jackman. If any kind of realism

enters the equation here, then it is the reality of number time which inheres in the

character’s ability to perform the song. The song’s performability moves to the center of

the drama of the musical and makes hay of the standards of character realism in not only

non-musical entertainment but in integration theory as well:

There is a drive for ensemble performance in the musical that sets this form of drama apart from realistic prose drama and its focus on the psychology of individualism. Most American literature, and most American drama, is cast in a realist mode and takes the portrayal of the individual character as the normal intention. That is not true of the musical, in which the shared formality of song and dance leads to an awareness of multiple performance as a logical outcome – duets, quartets, ensemble singing and dancing. Often a number seems to express a character’s deep feeling, as though song and dance can reach into the area of subtext and transform the private motivations found there into performability. But the private motivation does not matter so much as the performability. If subtext is to be explored by the realist actor in the legitimate theatre, it is to be changed into accessible song and dance formats in the musical. There is no subtext the musical cannot get to, and once gotten to, the hidden motive will be obvious to everyone, transformed into a different beat, into a melody that can be shared, into a lyrics others can join. (75-6)

But perhaps McMillin’s most brilliant contribution to the study of the musical is

his conceptualizing of the orchestra, an entity that most theorists simply take for granted.

131

Underneath many of the dialogue scenes in a musical, the orchestra will play looser

structured versions of the show’s songs. In most instances, this underscoring will

anticipate the next song of the show. But as McMillin notes:

Even when the song is called for by the book and the character is singing by the diegetic convention, the pit orchestra plays from out of the blue, and no one thinks this odd. It seems natural for two dozen musicians to be chiming in when some cowboy is yodeling about a fine morning, and when no one questions such an absurdity, a basic convention of musical theatre must be operating. (127)

Even odder is the omniscience the orchestra accrues in its relative invisibility. Especially

in modern productions which strive to efface the presence of the orchestra as much as

possible, the members of the orchestra (including the conductor) are protected from the

vulnerability of the stage where visible mistakes can occur. And the underscoring’s

anticipation of the number reinforces this omniscience:

The orchestra knows everything. It knows when to introduce the numbers, when to bring them to a close, when to keep the beat, when to keep quiet. It knows the difference between book time and number time, and it knows how to set the two apart, or lead from one to the other….[And it] knows what is in the minds of the characters even before the characters do. (127; 130)

The orchestra’s omniscience, then, provides further evidence against the idea that a

deeper psychology springs forth from the characters during a number. In fact, quite the

opposite happens: the orchestra invades the character’s interiority and forces it out into

the open on the stage often before a number even begins (McMillin 192).

To summarize McMillin’s work, incongruity rather than integration lies at the

heart of the musical due to the lyrical and repetitive nature of number time, the doubling

of character, and the omniscience of the orchestra. And it is this very incongruity that

attracts so many disenfranchised groups to the musical. The split between narrative and

132

number speaks both to a condition of doubling in day-to-day life (the closet, assimilation,

passing, etc.) and to a propensity for using that doubling to destabilize the assumptions

and essentializing of day-to-day life.

But if the musical can provide inspiration for some audiences by offering

identities in surplus, the same feature can provoke discomfort in others. At the very least,

the musical ups the ante for a suspension of disbelief. As McMillin notes, “if a

suspension of disbelief occurs when we watch characters in a Chekhov play, it occurs

twice when we watch characters from the book scenes of a musical open themselves into

musical performance in the numbers” (59). And the stakes grow higher when it comes to

the film musical for several reasons.

First, already an antagonistic relationship exists between a film and its audience

due to cinema’s higher reality effect, especially in relation to theater. As André Bazin

puts it, “illusion in the cinema is not based as it is in the theater on convention tacitly

accepted by the general public; rather, contrariwise, it is based on the inalienable realism

of that which is shown” (108). The mechanisms for creating illusions in theater are laid

so bare that we accept more readily their limitations. But in film those mechanisms are

largely invisible and thus foster a sense of mistrust manifested in a search for breakdowns

in the illusion (continuity errors, reel changes, visible boom mics, etc.) or a disdain for

the types of illusions offered, e.g. characters spontaneously bursting into song.

Second, in almost all instances, the songs of a film musical are pre-recorded so

that actors are essentially singing along to a playback of themselves singing. At least

three potential mismatches can occur with the use of pre-recordings: 1) The sound quality

133

of the dialogue recording usually does not match the song recordings. Alan Williams

notes that the sound of the song recordings juts out at the audience and feels closer than

the dialogue recording (150-3). 2) The actor’s film performance may not match the

various inflections of the song recording. For instance, an actor may make broad gestures

that suggest an intensity not present in the song recording. 3) The actor may not be able

to sync perfectly with the playback. At least at one point in Hollywood history, syncing

to playback was much more difficult than it may sound as Jane Powell explained in an

extra on the DVD of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954):

I always sang to my recordings. I never had any trouble with the syncing, synchronizing with it. I guess because being a dancer, the rhythms came easily for me. But if you had the speaker toob far away from the camera, there was a lag and many people didn't know that. You had to have the speaker as close to the camera as possible because the lag in the sound would certainly make a difference. You could hear it being on but it didn't come out that way. If you're just going to mouth something, there's no energy. In fact, sometimes I'd sing so loudly that I couldn't hear the soundtrack. (“Sobbin’”)

Third, for some audiences, location shooting poses a problem for the film

musical. Theater space confines the performers so that the drama of the numbers becomes

an ability to transcend the theater’s obvious spatial limitations. But location shooting can

take song and dance potentially anywhere in the world and the intrusion of song and

dance into a space not appropriate for such outbursts can seem like a travesty. Even

McMillin finds this to be the case with the film version of West Side Story (1961) where

in the opening sequence a space marked off for playing basketball in a tough New York

City neighborhood becomes a space for dancing: “The confining space has to be there,

and when a film merely roams about in its ‘on location’ freedom, dancing can seem

groundless and uninteresting” (176).

134

Finally, film itself is a medium of technological omniscience. The director is even

more invisible than the orchestra itself still very much present in film musicals. Edits,

camera movements, and special effects seem to roll before us in all their equipment-free

reality so that characters spontaneously bursting into song now have the director (and, by

extension, the film crew) as well as the orchestra reorganizing their interiorities. As will

become clear later, when rock is added into the mix, it functions as yet another mode of

omniscience.

It should be noted briefly here that not all audiences will respond negatively to the

even more intense incongruities of the film musical. In fact, I maintain that part of the

particular drama of the film musical inheres in the doublings that can occur in the

disjunctions between dialogue and song recordings as well as the tensions between

location shooting and spontaneous outbursts of song. The playback can add even more

layers of musicality to a character while the intrusion into a “real” space can create a

musical version of that environment. Raymond Knapp sees precisely this potential when

he assesses the musical camp mode of expression:

The camp dimension of musicals…provides a mode of embodiment that may be partaken of widely by performers and audiences alike. Musicals have proven to have an extraordinary capacity to overlap significantly with the lives and souls of their various constituencies, who learn to express themselves, to act, to conceive of themselves and the world around them, and often even to be themselves more fully and affirmatively by following their rhythms, living out versions of their plots, and singing their songs. (9)

That capacity compels Miller to suggest that instead of the musical having to adopt

standards of narrative naturalism, its incongruous structure should be applied to the more

realist theater of Clifford Odets and Arthur Miller (2).

135

But now the time has finally come for a term to describe these operations of the

film musical, something that will overthrow the tyranny of integration. McMillin

proposes “coherence” in lieu of “integration” for the way in which incongruent elements

manage to hold together in the musical (208). But I find that “coherence” glosses over the

incongruity too much (and would result in an awkward term like “the coherent musical

number”). Knapp suggests “Musically Enhanced Reality Mode (MERM)” but again,

“musically enhanced” does not do enough to signify the disjointed structure of the

musical (67).

The concept of diegesis at first seems to provide an avenue towards better

terminology. McMillin links diegetic numbers to integration:

What all (diegetic numbers) have in common is that they are called for as performances in the book. The diegetic number is not a case of someone “bursting into song.” Rather, someone has a song to sing, according to the book, and goes ahead and sings it. The diegetic number would seem to work wonders for the theory of the integrated musical. The number still has its own time scheme, but because it is called for in the book, it seems to be integrated into book time. (104)

But then that leaves open the question of what to call those cases when someone bursts

into song. Non-diegetic numbers? Uncalled for numbers? It also reveals the vexed

distinction between diegetic and non-diegetic in film theory in general. As McMillin

suggests above, the characters can hear the music in a diegetic number (105) or in what

Carolyn Abbate calls “phenomenal performance”: “a musical or vocal performance that

declares itself openly, singing that is heard by its singer, the auditors on stage, and

understood as music that they (too) hear by us, the theatre audience” (McMilin 104). But

to what extent can Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) not hear the music in the title number of

136

Singin’ in the Rain (1952), to choose a famous example of a character bursting into song?

He comes in exactly when he has to, hitting the first syllable of “singin’” just as the

orchestra begins a measure. And he maintains this synergy throughout the number and in

all other numbers in which he (and other characters) burst into song. As Heather Laing

surmises:

In the configuration of the conventional narrative film, only diegetic sounds and music would be audible to the characters, which would strip the musical number down to a skeletal and relatively meaningless state without its nondiegetic musical accompaniment. In order, therefore, for the whole scene to work, for the song to make sense and for group synchronization to be presented as feasible, the characters now need the presence of the music as much as the film audience does. Perhaps, therefore, we are to assume that, uniquely, they are somehow able to hear the musicians on the nondiegetic track. (8-9)

The word “somehow” here raises another question. Must the source of the music be

acknowledged or seen to count as diegetic or heard by a character? To answer in the

affirmative would be to contribute to the long-standing domination of the visual and the

narrative in film theory. It also would suggest that the character’s behavior is uncalled for

which opens up the musical to unnecessary charges of pointlessness.39

And finally, integration had an excellent chance at surviving as a useful theory

through which to understand the musical in John Mueller’s 1984 essay “Fred Astaire and

the Integrated Musical.” Mueller did not treat integration as meaning one thing – namely,

a number which advances the plot. Instead, he listed six different kinds of integrated

39 If indeed Don Lockwood can hear the music, this fact by no means diminishes the omniscience of the orchestra. Nor does it make the number any less of a spontaneous outburst of song. The precise origin of the orchestra is still unknown thus heightening its omniscience and apparently spontaneous generation. For more on the slippery slope between diegetic and non-diegetic music, see Stilwell, 2007.

137

numbers:

1. Numbers which are completely irrelevant to the plot.

2. Numbers which contribute to the spirit or theme.

3. Numbers whose existence is relevant to the plot, but whose content is not.

4. Numbers which enrich the plot, but do not advance it.

5. Numbers which advance the plot, but not by their content.

6. Numbers which advance the plot by their content. (Mueller 28-30)

Unfortunately, most theorists continued to use “integration” to signify only the sixth kind

of number instead of another admittedly awkward term such as “Level 6 integration.”

What one does encounter not just in analyses of the integrated musical number

but in descriptions of the musical in general, especially since the advent of rock, is

something about characters spontaneously bursting into song. Myriad theorists link a

spontaneous outburst of song to integration. Three will suffice. Chapman defines

integration thusly:

In the integrated musical it is natural for characters to burst into song or to start dancing, usually at moments of heightened emotion, and no narrative explanation for their action is required. In the unintegrated musical, however, there has to be a narrative reason for the song-and-dance routines (hence the frequency of the ‘putting on a show’ plot).” (2003, 188)

Langford makes the same link when discussing Martin Rubin’s theory of the musical’s

impossible conventions:

The most obvious and manifold examples of these impossibilities are the ostensibly spontaneous yet often hugely elaborate, flawlessly conceived and executed song-and-dance routines that typify the Hollywood musical, particularly in the classically integrated versions that, as we have seen, are often regarded as defining the form. (90)

138

And Philip Furia brings up integration when explaining Rodgers and Hart’s frustration in

Hollywood concerning their putative failure to fashion a new kind of musical dependent

upon rhythmic speech:

What the studios wanted, however, was simply a string of hits, performed with no relation whatsoever to dramatic context. Hollywood’s reluctance to use songs more integrally was not, however, purely commercial. It stemmed, in part, from the awkwardness of having characters suddenly burst into – and out of – song on the screen, without even the applause that cushions such outbursts in stage musicals. While Broadway moved, ever so slowly, toward the ‘integrated’ musical, ‘never, never did Hollywood get over its horror of characters singing for purposes of plot.’” (4) So for a term that describes the lyrical and repetitive nature of number time, the

doubling of character, and the omniscience of the orchestra of the musical rather than

the advancement of plot or deepened character psychology, I propose the Spontaneous

Outburst of Song or SOS.40 The Spontaneous Outburst of Song as a theoretical construct

differs from integration theory on many levels but most fundamentally in that it largely

avoids questions of narrative. This does not mean that it aims to transform the musical

into a non-narrative genre. Rather, it claims that the musical number exceeds the

narrative and thus does not benefit from a framework that seeks to wedge into the

storytelling, plot-advancing operations of the narrative. Therefore, it is necessary to spend

some time explaining the SOS in detail.

A few caveats are in order, however:

40 I am well aware of the implications of using the abbreviation SOS here just as I assume Knapp was aware of the implications of using MERM(AN) to avoid the vagaries of integration theory. But given how this project concerns the musical in the rock era, I think a term that reaches towards the sink or swim feel of the musical number which rock has exacerbated for so many audiences, I find the panicky nature of the abbreviation more than appropriate.

139

1. To make it perfectly clear, I am not merely switching the term “the integrated musical

number” for the SOS. The deficiencies of integration theory have been outlined in detail

above. Thus I seek to replace, and not to equate, “the integrated musical number” with

the SOS.

2. The following definition is not a value judgment. Spontaneous Outbursts of Song are

not necessarily better than any other kind of number.

3. The SOS is a dynamic concept. A show-within-a-show number, for instance, can cast

aside its “realistically” motivated markers as the number progresses and gradually move

towards the conventions of the SOS. Or the number can progress in the opposite direction

with an SOS gradually revealing the markers of a realistically motivated performance.

The latter type of movement occurs in the title number of Pin Up Girl as described in

note 10 to this chapter. The former type occurs in the final number of 42nd Street (1933)

in which a theatrical performance gives way to a cityscape that could not be

accommodated by the space of a theater and thus it starts to accrue the trappings of the

SOS.

The SOS

“Spontaneous” is a tricky term to define with respect to the SOS. The quotes

above featuring some form of “spontaneous outburst of song” either use the words

somewhat condescendingly or as the problem the integrated musical number was

designed to overcome. Thus most of the definitions Webster’s Dictionary provides for

“spontaneous” seem to work against the omniscience of the orchestra and even the

140

doubling of character of the SOS: “proceeding from natural feeling or native tendency

without external constraint”; “controlled and directed internally”; “developing or

occurring without apparent external influence, force, cause, or treatment”; or “not

apparently contrived or manipulated: NATURAL” (1136). But the idea here is not that

SOS numbers are spontaneous but rather that they try to offer the illusion of spontaneity

And Webster’s does provide a definition that encapsulates this idea: “produced without

being planted or without human labor: INDIGENOUS” (1136). The unseen source of

instrumentation of the SOS offers the illusion that this outburst of song was produced

without human labor. So we do not see the omniscient orchestra and we do not see the

effort put into the human labor of the performance, e.g. Debbie Reynolds’s bloody ankles

after performing the “Good Morning” number in Singin’ in the Rain. And the unseen,

omniscient orchestra works in tandem with other markers of spontaneity. Jane Feuer has

demonstrated that performers will attempt to cancel out the highly engineered production

of the numbers via bricolage: making it up as you go along out of whatever materials are

at hand as in “Good Morning” where Don, Cosmo Brown, and Kathy Selden seamlessly

incorporate raincoats and furniture into their song and dance (5).41

And the omniscient orchestra is indigenous to the world of the SOS. This means

that no playback devices or radios motivate the number. Characters in the SOS do not

sing along to a record or the radio or at the piano. The SOS does not motivate a stage or

concert performance nor is it dream, dementia, or drug-induced. All of those scenarios

41 Feuer also notes that a similar effacement of human labor is operative in backstagers which frequently disguise finished numbers as rehearsals. The guise of the rehearsal offers the illusion that we are seeing the human labor that goes into the musical number. But, in actuality, we are seeing the final polished product (Feuer 11).

141

compromise the illusion of spontaneity to varying degrees. Again, given the dynamism of

the SOS concept, dream, dementia, or drug-induced musical numbers will most likely

bear all the other traces of the SOS. But still, they do not occur in the world to which the

omniscient orchestra is indigenous.

“Outburst” refers to the move from narrative to number and thus what the illusion

of spontaneity seeks to cover up. In this respect, the two terms are in constant tension and

speak to narrative and number remaining as two distinct entities, precisely what the

concept of the SOS aims to maintain. Apart from the special cases of sung-through

musicals like Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964) and Phantom of the Opera (2004), a

narrative framework of dialogue and non-dance momement is necessary in order for the

SOS to generate. But two aspects of the move from narrative to number need to be

addressed here given their almost total neglect by theorists of the musical and for how

well they mark off number time of the SOS from narrative time: what the other characters

are doing during a SOS and the burst back into narrative.42

As McMillin mentions above, characters must wait and listen while another

character sings and dances unless they join in the song and dance. Again, this is because

the SOS has moved all the characters from the progression of narrative time to the

repetition of number time. So if they are not doubling themselves (i.e., joining in the

song), then they are left to respond silently to the song or to create bonds with other

listening characters through gestures (usually nudges and nods to signal agreement or

disagreement with the song’s sentiment). Little else remains for them to do since time has

42 Graham Wood is one of the few theorists to address the latter. See his "Distant Cousin or Fraternal Twin? Analytical Approaches to the Film Musical."

142

stopped progressing. For audiences disturbed by the SOS, the characters caught in this

temporal limbo bring to mind the embarrassment that often results from being in near

proximity to someone who is singing or dancing, especially in intimate settings without

the cushion of a stage or a large audience. The listener wonders what to do: what should I

do with my eyes? Should I walk away? Tap my feet? Do something to avoid direct

contact like take a long drink from my glass that is thankfully right there on the table?

Should I try to join in on the next refrain?

Similar questions arise once the character has completed the song. Practically all

of the theories on the musical start from the narrative and move to the number. But they

pay little attention to the mechanisms used to return to progressive time, i.e., the move

from the number to the narrative. Sometimes a fade or a cut performs this function. But

the more important question is what the listening or intermittently performing characters

do upon the song’s completion. Often they will react as an audience would at a show –

with cheers and applause as the crowd does at the end of Ted Riley’s (Gene Kelly)

performance of the “I Like Myself” number from It’s Always Fair Weather (1955). Or

there might be laughter such as when the factory employees giggle and guffaw after

Katherine Williams (Doris Day) claims “I’m Not At All in Love” in The Pajama Game

(1957). The SOS strives to transform narrative time into repetitive, lyrical time and the

narrative space of, for example, the Sleep-Tite Pajama Factory into a space for song and

dance. And in a perfect musical world, the SOS will have succeeded so well in these

transformations that the song, once completed, reinvigorates narrative time and space,

charging it with the potential for more spontaneous outbursts of song. But it is precisely

for this reason that the burst back into narrative becomes so troubling for certain

143

audiences because it brings to mind awkward attempts to ease out of the experience of a

musical performance (again, especially an intimate one in a setting not normally reserved

for song and dance) and back into the progressive time of going on with our lives.

Coupled with the doubling of character, these aspects of the SOS highlight the

incongruity between narrative and number and the potential for discomfort as they burst

in and out of one another.

“Song” lies in contrast to the looser, more amorphous nature of non-diegetic

instrumental music. It refers to an entire popular song form brought to an end or at least

the ideal of an end. For instance, in Little Shop of Horrors (1986), an advertising

executive (James Belushi) interrupts Seymour Krelborn (Rick Moranis) and Audrey’s

(Ellen Greene) “Suddenly Seymour” duet by explicitly asking them to stop singing for a

moment so they can hear his offer. Similarly, Laurey and Curly have a discussion about

the surrey with the fringe on top in the middle of the song of the same name. Finally, at

the end of West Side Story, Maria (Natalie Wood) cannot complete the “Somewhere”

duet with Tony (Richard Beymer) because he has just died. But none of these

interruptions change the status of the number as a popular song form.

Heather Laing defines the structure of the popular song form in musicals as

“relatively simple, remarkably compact and very coherent, with a solid sense of tonal

direction which makes it unlikely that anything unpredictable will happen” (9). Thus

“song” also lies in contrast to the absent-minded singing along to records or the radio. For

instance, Nick Charles (William Powell) sings along to the radio in The Thin Man (1934).

But he does not sing the complete song and his singing moves in and out of humming

which chips away at the song’s compact form (and of course, the presence of the radio

144

negates his singing as part of an SOS).

And this kind of absent-minded singing does not require radio or records to

motivate it. For instance, in Bringing Up Baby (1938), Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn)

and Dr. David Huxley (Cary Grant) try to placate the leopard Baby by singing "I Can't

Give You Anything But Love" to him. No other music accompanies their singing. But

still, they destroy the compact form of "I Can't Give You Anything But Love" by

inserting mumbles into it and singing directions like "Go in the barn stall, Baby" to the

melody of the song. Once Baby is safely locked in, Susan says "Now everything is quite

all right." David replies, singing, "No, everything is not all..." He realizes he is still

singing and exasperatedly repeats himself in plain speech. He is obviously not concerned

with bringing the song to its completion, a key requirement for the SOS.

Laing notes that an outburst of popular song can be pleasurable to certain

audiences since its form can help organize the visual excess of such a number: “While

everything else is undergoing radical disruption, the music is at its most contained,

formulaic and, by extension, familiar and safe” (10). But the fact that the song must come

to completion can provide a source of displeasure for other audiences. Again, it raises the

question of what to do until the song finishes. For example, in The Cocoanuts (1929),

Penelope (Kay Francis) must wait until Bob Adams (Oscar Shaw) finishes singing

“When My Dreams Come True” before she can start plotting (in more ways than one)

with Herbert Yates (Cyril Ring). She simply stands there and waits for the omniscient

orchestra to finish its refrain before proceeding to say her line. For some audiences, the

imperative of waiting for number time to finish can instill a sense of discomfort.

For others, however, the pleasures of the SOS inhere precisely in this way in

145

which it brings pause to the illusion of progressive time that governs our lives. As

McMillin notes, “everyone understands book time because we think our own lives follow

the progressive mode…we do not understand repetition nearly so well, even though it is

going on around us and within us, as night turns to day once again, as the heart continues

beating” (52-3). So the SOS can free us from the inexorable suck of progressive time or it

can offer us a more pleasurable kind of repetition, the repetition of lyric time that differs

from our everyday routines. Instead of the repetitive tasks of our jobs or the clockwork

activity of paying bills/taxes or attending to household chores, we encounter refrains and

a group of people repeating the same dance movements.

Similarly, the SOS musicalizes spaces not usually reserved for music. As such, it

allows for different ways to be public. The space for work or basketball becomes a space

for singing and dancing. The SOS, then, moves beyond the impoverished bank of

activities sanctioned by overly rationalized capitalist societies and provides a new,

liberating set of gestures and behaviors. This potential for liberation explains why

audiences who adore the musical do not require an explanation for an SOS or for the

source of instrumentation to be known. Chalking up the SOS to dreams, drugs, or

dementia; explaining its generation as a fantastical occurrence (as in the Buffy The

Vampire Slayer episode “Once More With Feeling” discussed later); revealing on

orchestra in the same space that singing and dancing occur – all of these are merely

rationalizations for something that does not occur in our everyday lives. But the SOS

suggest an escape from that very rationalization that orders our lives.

Finally, the incongruity of the SOS offers a set of pleasures distinct from those of

integration (or the illusion thereof). The illusion of integration offers the illusion of a

146

cohesive self. A well-constructed essay or a film perfectly tailored to the three-act

structure offers the pleasures of wild thought tamed or a unity at the center of our

existence. But the SOS offers the pleasures of disunity, of a deliciously broken entity

rather than an organic whole. And it points to a different self or perhaps even multiple

selves. No longer are we only a worker performing repetitive duties in a pajama factory;

in the SOS, we can become a self that performs the repetitive duties of refrains and

choreography.

Rock Ideology and The SOS

The reasons for the tension between rock ideology and the SOS should be fairly

obvious by this point. As Chapter Two made clear, rock ideology exists at the nexus of

recorded music and live performance and both manifestations become problematic when

imported into the narrative vs. number context of the film musical. The specialization

characteristic of Tin Pan Alley, which provided the classical Hollywood musical with its

songs, ensured that songs would rarely become the ideological property of the artist who

performed it. Certainly one can raise exceptions to this idea. Johnny Mercer and Hoagy

Carmichael wrote and performed their own songs in this era. Billie Holiday “owns”

“Strange Fruit” and many associate “September Song” with Walter Huston’s recording of

it (indeed, the association is made because he recorded it). And we all have our own

picks for the definitive versions of “St. Louis Blues” or “Stardust” or countless other

standards. But in general, composers and lyricists created templates for performers to use

symbolized by the dominance of sheet music over recordings in this era. And while The

147

Beatles’s “Yesterday” became as much a standard as any song mentioned above, the

template in this instance is a recording of a merged professional, and thus ideological

questions of ownership (which definitely includes questions of legal ownership) cluster

around Paul McCartney. Rock’s existence in recording renders it a much more static

artifact, more closely tied to individual artists as a record of their compositional and

performance labor. Therefore, in a film, rock must be marked off explicitly as a

performance or a recording. It can come off as awkward and unearned from characters

who spontaneously burst into rock song.

And it is important to keep in mind that the SOS doubles these characters who

already exist as one type of person in the narrative register of a musical film. In the SOS

they become musical versions of themselves, and rock makes this process more difficult.

As the product of the merged professional, rock is taken as a more authentic expression

of the individual artist and can work against the incongruous drama of the film musical

where it would have to account for both the narrative and number selves of the

characters.

This does not mean that rock features no doubling of its own. Many rock

performers toy with different personae and modes of sincerity. But recordings and live

concerts usually mark off that doubling explicitly as a performance. Rock rarely comes at

us in spontaneous outbursts. Thus when called upon to motor the SOS, it can lead to

feelings of embarrassment since the overt markers of performance have been jettisoned.

Tia DeNora notes that the increasingly ambient and everyday nature of music places

these overt markers all around us. But her choice of words are telling with respect to the

SOS: “Increasingly, within organizational sectors sounds are not allowed to be

148

themselves or to arise spontaneously (as, for example, when someone bursts into song).

Instead they are planned and programmed with the aim of affording organizationally

specific ends” (148). With rock everywhere around us, it can feel awkward when allowed

to burst spontaneously forth.

The live rock concert is another such marker which will be discussed in greater

detail in the material on the concert film in the next chapter. But for now, it pays to

analyze why the concert and not the theater has become the more appropriate live

medium for rock since this reality feeds into how rock works in film. Elizabeth Swados

provides an excellent explanation for the problems rock poses in the dramatic context of

a musical theater performance:

Rock's confessional nature, though fine in itself, is a real stumbling block toward writing workable dramatic songs. . . . A dramatic song is organically connected to the individuality of the character who sings it. The urgent “I” and “he” or “she” in rock are usually a standardized self and other in a situation of pleasure and/or pain, and whatever narrative there is gets dropped for the duration of the chorus in which everyone joins...Because such songs are written to be complete in themselves, they leave nothing to be developed and usually pull out all the stops for an emotional build...The very elements that made good rock make bad theatre. You should not want to get up and dance with a character who is not even supposed to know you're there. (quoted in Grant 160)

I would temper Swados’s conclusion here somewhat and state that a rock song is

organically connected to the individuality of the artist who sings it and thus cannot be

lent to a dramatic character without significant difficulty. And I would add that this holds

just as true, if not more so, for the film musical.

But the key distinction to note here is that the audience can interact with the

performers in a rock concert. Theater and, to even greater extent, film both repel such

interaction. Grant’s addendum to Swados’s words above make this evident:

149

With the rock groove, gone is the onstage expositional "I" of the foxtrot beat. The rock groove tells the audience the "l" is them, not the character onstage. But theater loses richness and power as a narrative and literary medium when it panders to the audience before it serves the play. Such a theater may well generate a carnal excitement, but it cannot function as an evoker of Aristotelian pity and terror. Paradoxically, heightened engagement of sensation and rhythm alienates the theatergoer from a true emotional engagement with the drama. It is as Brechtian as Brecht's own alienation effect, Verfremdung, which may be one reason why Brecht-Weill songs are so popular with rockers. (160-1)

The idea that the audience is the “I” may seem to fly in the face of rock ideology. But this

occurs because the artist on stage at a rock concert is an “I” that can interact with the

audience members. Thus the latter are acknowledged in their subjectivity whereas the

theater “I” must ignore them. And again, the film “I” is even farther removed.

Rock gains such an enormous amount of authority from this “I” aspect that it

actually accrues powers of omniscience. McMillin notes this aspect of rock in his chapter

on technology. He mourns the increasing dominance of technology in the megamusical

because he views the self-mobile sets of shows like Phantom of the Opera (1988) as

another form of omniscience, one that the musical cannot accommodate along with the

omniscience of the orchestra without rendering the musical overblown and ponderous. A

musical like Rent (1996) avoids this problem by using a bare bones set. But buried in

McMillin’s brief appraisal of the show lies an idea with enormous significance: “The

technology of rock music is called on, but not the technology of the self-generated set

change” (158). This remarkable phrase strongly suggests that rock is its own form of

omniscience. Since the author exists so firmly at the center of the music, it attains the

same level of authority and omniscience as the orchestra and the self-generated set

changes in the theater musical. When rock enters the narrative context of the film musical

150

in an SOS, competing with the technological omniscience of the film medium itself, the

combination of at least three levels of omniscience may result in a ponderous and

overblown film.

The next chapter, then, I will trace how this omniscience as well as other aspects

of rock have changed the nature of music in Hollywood film. But in conclusion, I want to

note two instances which reveal how central the notion of the Spontaneous Outburst of

Song has become to commentary on the musical. Box Office Mojo is a popular website

the tracks Hollywood box office figures. It also partitions films into genres and provides

definitions of each. For the musical, they offer the following definition:

Musical Live action only NOTE: This chart is for musicals -- movies where people break out into song with no on or off screen source of music or in settings other than concert venues or recording studios. That's distinctly different from concerts or movies about the music industry a la A Star is Born, The Jazz Singer or Glitter. Additionally, Bollywood masala movies are not being counted as they are a genre unto themselves. (“Musical Movies”)

Note that the website thinks it necessary to make a distinction between live action and

animated films in order to define the musical, a subject taken up in the next chapter. Also

note how it separates from the definition films in which music is explicitly marked off as

a performance or a recording.

Clive Hirschorn notes the passing of this kind of musical, or more specifically this

kind of musical number, in his introductory comments to the 1991 edition of his

indispensable The Hollywood Musical, a coffee table encyclopedia of every Hollywood

musical. In the face of fewer and fewer musicals employing the SOS, Hirschorn notes

151

that “in the high-tech nineties with its state-of-the-art emphasis on special effects, few

protagonists burst spontaneously into song, and when they do, there is usually an

orchestra or record player nearby” (17). These two comments, then, suggest that the SOS

is a much better theoretical construct through which to understand the musical.

152

Chapter 4 – The Musical as Mode

The previous chapters have provided an answer to the question “did rock kill the

musical?”. As with all such sweeping questions regarding genre, it cannot be brushed off

with a simple “yes” or “no.” To restate, the dominance of both the recording and rock

ideology rendered the Spontaneous Outburst of Song (SOS) a more vexed endeavor until

it disappears for years at a time in the 1980s and 1990s. But it seems unreasonable to

suggest that the musical’s supposedly special structures as well as the utopian energies

that powered it simply evaporated from the cinematic arsenal at one particular historical

juncture. In this chapter, then, I argue that these structures and energies comprise a mode

that has survived into the 1980s and beyond, infiltrating a disparate array of films. As

Christine Gledhill defines it, mode refers to an "aesthetic articulation adaptable across a

range of genres, across decades, and across national cultures" (229). So the aesthetic

articulation of the musical (e.g. its utopian ideals, community integration through song

and dance, paradigmatic and dual-focus structure, narrative vs. number tension)

constitutes a mode that infiltrates disparate genres and texts long after the putative death

of the musical as a genre. After an extended analysis of the difference between mode and

genre, I will trace both the various modes of musical performance as well as the

appearance of musical modality in Hollywood films of the rock era, most crucially in

their attempts to bring together a community through music.

153

Mode

Theorists of genre have typically performed two maneuvers in their analyses – a

skimming off of easily recognizable iconographical elements from the surface of texts

and a plumbing below to extract more abstract organizing structures. In film studies, the

most widely referenced example is of course Rick Altman’s proposal of “A

Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre” which corresponds to the two maneuvers

above respectively. But others have arrived at similar approaches without recourse to the

semantic/syntactic terminology. In Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of

the Horror Movie, for instance, Andrew Tudor has suggested “common sense levels” and

“ordering structures” as frameworks for analysis but does not follow through on his

suggestion in his own work (7-8). In what Altman has called “the most important

English-language genre theory of the last two decades,” however, Alistair Fowler’s Kinds

of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes forged distinctions

between “kinds” (or “genres”) and “modes” which can be linked to Altman’s categories:

while semantic and syntactic elements combine to form a genre, mode usually

corresponds to syntax (Altman 1999, 11). So while one of Altman’s goals in his essay

was to show up the limitations of relegating genre analysis to only one of these two

approaches, proposing a combination of both for a more sophisticated analysis, the

material below will demonstrate how syntax can detach from a genre to form a mode.

The usefulness of a concept like mode to the study of the death of a genre

(however contested that death) and its subsequent (or even concurrent) life in modality

becomes clearer if one looks at Fowler’s more detailed definition of mode. Several

154

aspects of his definition are worth highlighting: 1. Modes are usually described in the

form of adjectives whereas genres appear as nouns. 2. Modes have shed external forms

and are thus incomplete in some way with respect to the corresponding genre’s repertoire.

3. When mode links up with genre, the genre alone will determine the overall form, thus

rendering mode structurally dependent on an antecedent genre. 4. The extent to which the

modulation pervades the text varies. 5. Mode is often treated in a synchronic fashion

given how it has acquired a certain independence of forms and an ability to remain

constant across long periods of time. But mode and genre exist in a diachronic

relationship to one another in that genre tends to give birth to mode (Fowler 106-111).

Some modes Fowler touches on include tragedy, romance, and comedy.

Thus mode has both a historical and a transhistorical sway to it. One can glean

this from Gledhill’s notion of the “double articulation” that mode provides to the genre

system, its capacity for “generating distinctively different generic formulae in particular

historical conjunctures, while also providing a medium of interchange and overlap

between genres” (229). In this respect, mode has been of considerable use to theorists of

melodrama. Linda Williams has devoted an entire book to the subject claiming

melodrama “as the fundamental mode by which American mass culture has ‘talked to

itself’ about the enduring moral dilemma of race” (xiv). Williams defines the

melodramatic mode as “a seemingly archaic excess of sensation and sentiment” and “an

evolving mode of storytelling crucial to the establishment of moral good” (11;12). So the

mode appears within unlikely generic and cultural boundaries (i.e., within other, perhaps

even antithetical, genres), manifested in the expressive violence of a Clint Eastwood

western or the good/bad clashes in a Bruce Willis action pic. And while Janet Staiger

155

never mentions mode in “Film Noir as Male Melodrama: The Politics of Film Genre

Labeling,” it is clear that she is discussing melodramatic modality when she examines the

ways in which noirs function as melodramas in terms of formulas and aesthetic

perception and expression about the world. To summarize, the abstract organizing

structures of melodrama may detach from easily recognizable iconographical elements

(e.g. “ground-glass-in-the-porridge, poisoned handkerchiefs and last-minute rescues from

the dungeon”) and take up residency in other generic casings (Elsaesser 71).

I would not want to deny the centrality of the melodramatic mode in various

cinemas and other media. What I aim to demonstrate instead is the circulation of another

legible if not equally transhistorical mode and to suggest that the musical mode is a

particularly ubiquitous one in American cinema of the last twenty years.

The Musical Mode

In an analysis of the early years of the Hollywood musical, Altman draws on

Fowler’s notion that modes are usually described in the form of adjectives whereas

genres appear as nouns. He notes that trade papers and fan magazines did not use

“musical” as a noun to describe films which we consider musicals today. Instead, they

attached “musical” as an adjective to a bewildering plethora of genre nouns resulting in

such combinations as musical drama (Street Girl, 1929), musical romance (Sally, 1929)

musical comedy (The Vagabond Lover, 1929), and musical farce (Let’s Go Native, 1930)

(Altman 1999, 32). Altman traces the eventual use of “musical” as a standalone noun to

two moments. First, musical films declined in popularity by 1930 so much so that their

156

production significantly decreased in 1931. According to Altman, Hollywood produced

only ten musical films in 1932, a nadir not reached again until the 1960s. During this

period, however, critics began using “musical” as a noun, especially when comparing

films of the 1930-1 season favorably to similar releases of the year before. For instance,

Photoplay reviewed Palmy Days (1931) within this context: “Ten-to-one, this will bring

back film musicals in a veritable inundation. It’s that good!…If they can make musicals

like this, then there’s no reason at all why they shouldn’t come back” (quoted in Altman

1999, 33). Second, the musical achieved a more decisive noun status when semantic

elements (e.g. making music) became repeatedly inserted into a syntactic structure (e.g.

the alternation between male and female characters resulting in the formation of the

heterosexual couple so that “making music” comes to mean “making love”), a

development that occurred in 1933 (Altman 1999, 33).

At first, Altman’s theory seems to go against the idea that adjectives usually

corresponds to syntax and thus mode. But the combination of semantics and syntax forms

a genre as a stand-alone noun, e.g. “musical” rather than “musical comedy.” The

semantic and syntactic elements of the musical already existed in many early musical

films. But audiences and critics had to receive that particular combination repeatedly in

order for it to accrue generic noun status. This is why we can retroactively confer that

status upon early film musicals which at the time were granted only adjectival musical

status.

Altman notes that Fowler ignores this process in his privileging of the death of

genres:

157

Alistair Fowler is right to recognize that types expressed in noun form (which he calls kinds or genres) can eventually give rise to types expressed as adjectives (which he calls modes), but since he takes for granted both the existence of genres and the “structurally dependent status of mode vis-à-vis kind” he fails to note the importance of adjective-to-noun progression in the creation of genres. (Altman 1999, 51)

But alternately, Altman downplays the move from noun to adjective and the detaching of

syntax as a mode from the semantic/syntactic combination of genre. Placing these

theories within the context of the musical, then, I maintain that the Spontaneous Outburst

of Song functions as a semantic element in the musical. It is an easily recognizable

iconographical (and sonic, I would add) element. In fact, as the previous chapter makes

clear, it is perhaps the most recognizable element of the musical given its constant

invocation in discussions of the musical. The frequency of appearances of the SOS

declines in the rock era and disappears altogether for stretches at a time. But at least two

of the musical’s syntactical elements have largely remained: the formation of a

community through music and a regular alternation between narrative and number.

Hollywood cinema continues to revolve around the formation of the heterosexual couple.

But since the advent of rock, those formations occur less frequently through music.

The rock era films structured by the musical’s syntactical elements, then, are not

musicals per se; rather, they exist within the musical mode. Films within the musical

mode will appear both like and unlike a musical. Given the different amounts to which

mode infiltrates texts, some films will appear more like musicals than others. And more

than a few will not seem like a musical at all. As Fowler notes, "a mode announces itself

by distinct signals, even if these are abbreviated, unobtrusive, or below the threshold of

158

modern attention" (Fowler 107). This is just one of the ways to state that the musical

never really died.

So as genre gives way to mode, the musical in the rock era often reverts back to

its adjectival status. Clive Hirschhorn calls The Blues Brothers (1979) a “musical farce”

(1991, 416) and Songwriter (1984) a “musical drama” (426). Leonard Maltin bills Earth

Girls Are Easy (1989) as a “musical comedy” (369). And Colin Covert bestows the

designation “musical romance” upon Once (2007) (Covert). But a corresponding move

towards prepositional phrases akin to “similar to the musical” or “like a musical” occurs

just as frequently as an noun-to-adjective progression. Marc Raymond suggests that

several sequences in Mean Streets (1973) “are quite similar to the song and dance

numbers of a musical” (72). Jonathan Rosenbaum describes Car Wash (1976) thusly:

“Not quite a disco musical, this sure feels like one in terms of bounce, verve, and energy”

(Rosenbaum). Roland Emmerich maintains that the “tent pole” movie, a spectacle-driven

film on which a major studio has pinned all of its financial hopes, is “a little bit like a

musical. The visual effects sequences are like the dance numbers” (quoted in Bordwell

104). And David Bordwell extends this analogy to the action film: “Action set pieces are

central to the genre, but like the dance numbers in a musical, they can be integrated with

long-running lines of action…Chases and flights, like musical numbers, can be expanded

indefinitely” (105). Such statements attest to the airborne incompleteness of mode. Its

vaporous suggestion of a genre may grant a film membership into a hybrid genre (e.g. an

action film featuring elements of the musical) but nevertheless fails to take over its

generic host (it is still commonly referred to as an action film rather than a musical).

159

The key word above at this point is “commonly” because mode’s influence on

terminology need not prevent genre theorists at least from using less common genre

terms for specific films to bring out certain points. For instance, in an essay called “The

Classic Hollywood Musical and the ‘Problem’ of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” Barry Keith Grant calls

many of the films discussed in this chapter musicals albeit using the same

semantic/syntactic framework: "Musicals successfully absorbed a new music that was

both radically different in form and content from earlier popular music and that opposed

the nature of the genre itself. In Rick Altman's terms, the genre managed to incorporate a

new semantic element into its previously established syntax" (204). Nevertheless, the

Spontaneous Outburst of Song remains a problem in the rock era and serves as such a

potent structuring absence that it determines not just the usually abbreviated and

unobtrusive form of the musical post-1970 but also the use of music in film in a more

general sense. As Barry Langford notes, “contemporary musicals…have had to find

various ways to deal with modern audiences’ apparent reluctance to countenance the

staple and distinctive gesture of the classical integrated musical, the moment when a

character breaks from speech into song” (98-9).

After a section on the first death of the musical in the early 1930s, then, the

remainder of this chapter is a survey of those coping mechanisms before 1970 with the

next chapter reserved for a post-1970 survey. As an extended analysis of Rock Around

The Clock (1956), the first rock ‘n’ roll musical, will make clear, a misfit between rock

and film from the very beginning sets off a long history of hapless attempts to narrativize

the music. But the chapter will consider how rock and recordings in general take on an

160

omniscient role in film, singing for characters or providing the glue that holds together

montages.

The First Death of the Musical

One can glean the extent to which rock posed a problem for the musical by

looking at the relatively unproblematic acceptance of the SOS during the classical

Hollywood era. It may surprise readers to learn that, as suggested by Altman above, the

musical did already die once before in the early 1930s. Audiences avoided the musical

after their initial surge of popularity. Of course, strictly going by Altman’s terms, this fact

cannot be true since the musical did not gain wide currency in its genre noun form until

1933. Nevertheless, those films which we can now retroactively deem musicals died to

the extent that Photoplay could call for them to comeback in 1931 just as countless

articles trace the musical’s come back in recent years. But what exactly did audiences

object to in the 1930s?

Richard Barrios writes that “’Characters bursting into song’ or similar words turn

up frequently in mid-1930s articles analyzing the collapse of the musical market, as the

conventions of integrated music began after a time to strain the credulity of spectators

lacking the frame of reference to accept them” (326). And indeed, a May 31, 1930,

Billboard article entitled “Theme Songs Within Reason Or Producers Will Cut ‘Em”

reports on a MGM sales meeting in Chicago where general sales manager Felix. F. Feist

notes some of the mistakes the company had made with respect to sync sound film: “Feist

161

commented upon the problem presented by songs in pictures. In many productions, he

said, the characters burst into song without any valid reason. In the new pictures…there

will be a reason for a song or it will not be used” (24). Another Billboard article from the

following month called “Picture Audiences Turning ‘Thumbs Down’ on Revues” claims

that “for some reason screen patrons will not accept a melodramatic situation suddenly

bursting into song” (18).

But just scanning the titles of these articles should make it obvious that they are

not reporting on a widespread disaffection with the SOS. Most of the films mentioned in

the latter article are revues: Show of Shows (1929),43 The Hollywood Revue [of 1929],

King of Jazz (1930), and Paramount on Parade (1930). These films featured an

organizing theme but no story. Hence they cast aside the narrative/number alternation in

which the SOS resides.44 By 1930, some films were advertised as “Not a Revue” (Barrios

326).

The May 31st article concerns theme songs which provided the major studios with

handsome extra revenue as they purchased music publishing houses. A theme song often

appeared several times in one film which failed to mask the blatant promotional nature of

the song to push sheet music or recordings. It formed a portion of the score as complete

melodies rather than motifs and/or stood out somewhat from the narrative in a vocalized

version, usually as an explicit performance rather than an SOS. In the 1931 MGM

melodrama Possessed (1931), for instance, the theme song “How Long Will it Last?,”

plays in several diegetic and non-diegetic instrumental versions. More importantly,

43 Richard Barrios says that Show of Shows “likely did more damage than any other single film to taint the public’s affection for musicals” (326). 44 On With The Show (1929) has a story but is discussed as a thinly veiled revue.

162

Marian (Joan Crawford) performs it at the piano during a dinner party not once but three

times! At the urging of her guests, she sings portions of “How Long Will it Last?” in

French and German and then finally the entire song in English. Where the SOS appears

entirely unmotivated, this triple-tiered vocal rendition “seems over-motivated, while at

the same time it disrupts narrative flow for the sake of Crawford’s performance…

integrated by overly determined means” (Spring 173; 178).

MGM clearly hoped the performance would stand out well enough to compel

audiences to purchase the sheet music for “How Long Will it Last?” published by MGM

subsidiary Robbins Music Corp. and featuring a large picture of Crawford on the cover.

But despite the popularity of Possessed itself, audiences had grown weary of the theme

song phenomenon45 as two more Billboard articles make clear. One article about major

studios dropping songwriters states: “The producer visualized bags of gold in theme

songs and they plugged them overtime…Today, however, musical films are a drain on

the market” (“Dropping” 5). Note the adjectival use of “musical” here which conveys the

still-loose boundaries defining the genre. Indeed, as an article titled “Musical Films Are

Taboo” suggests, the theme song threatened to erase the distinction between all genres:

“When talking films were introduced, no matter how dramatic the story, it had to have a

song theme. The result was that the public was sung to death and action of all productions

retarded by the musical innovation” (3). Again, note the adjectival status of “musical” in

the article’s title suggesting an alternative theory of genre development: a wide scale

45 Katherine Spring found that most contemporary reviews of Possessed neglected to mention “How Long Will it Last?” with the Los Angeles Times reviewer curiously noting the less substantial French and German renditions. As Spring states, such neglect seems indicative of the overall devaluation of the theme song by the time of the film’s release (178).

163

removal of a semantic element (the theme song) had to occur in order for an already

fully-formed genre (i.e., one combining both semantic and syntactic elements) to

distinguish itself and achieve standalone noun status. More precisely, producers ceased

using theme songs in more dramatic pictures that did not call for a musical break in the

narrative. The subsequent demise of the theme song then placed the uniqueness of film

musical comedies46 into relief allowing them to acquire the designation of musicals. Or as

Katherine Spring puts it, “while card-carrying musicals justified this particular aesthetic,

song performances that appeared in non-musical films seemed to frustrate their

audiences” (186). And the card many of these musicals carried was the SOS.

So now we can trace the nearly stalled production of what we now consider

musicals to a confusion of genres occasioned by the theme song rather than to a sudden

distaste for musical comedies. In fact, even some production personnel had no intention

of abandoning the musical. A May 1930 Los Angeles Times article quotes Robert

Crawford, executive in charge of music at Warner Bros., to this effect:

There is no such thing as a theme song any more. Music is an integral part of a story. Pictures are now written with complete scores, and the music is of the highest operetta type. It is my own belief that it will not be long before we are producing something far greater in its sweep of music than grand opera, which has always been limited by the traditions of the stage. (Quoted in Spring 192)

Crawford’s use of the word “integral” here strongly suggests the necessity of the death of

the theme song to the rise of the so-called integrated musical as one of Hollywood’s most

prestigious products.

46 I use “musical comedies” here because that was the term used to describe both the many stage shows that became films (e.g. Show Boat) as well as the early sound films we now retroactively deem “musicals.”

164

Finally when attempting to answer the question of what exactly audiences

objected to in early 1930s musicals, one needs to pay attention to different kinds of

audiences. Many histories note that rural audiences and markets outside of big cities such

as New York47 had difficulty accepting the bursting out into song conventions of the

musical. But again, certain instantiations of the musical fared poorly rather than any film

featuring an SOS. Even the most successful revue films such as MGM’s The Hollywood

Revue of 1929 did lukewarm business in rural theaters. And operettas had little hope for

success in smaller markets. Henry Jenkins quotes a Florida theater owner who took aim

at The Desert Song (1929) “as an offensive example of ‘all this Broadway stagey stuff’

that ‘cluttered up the theater’” (163).

But Jenkins’s work on the films of Eddie Cantor demonstrates that factors besides

the SOS contributed to a dislike for a particular musical. For example, Whoopee (1930)

drew huge crowds in New York and other large cities. But smaller markets reacted to the

film with indifference. Jenkins suggests that Cantor’s insertion of Jewish ethnic humor

into the film came off as in-jokey and threatening, if not complete, nonsense. Outbursts

of Yiddish, then, and not song accounted for the film’s lackluster business in smaller

markets.48 So the producers of Cantor’s next film, Palmy Days, deemphasized his

Jewishness, making him a “jack-of-all-trades” rather than the “Jewish cowboy” of

Whoopee (Jenkins 179). But of the four numbers included in Palmy Days, three are SOS

47 Barrios mentions a Motion Picture Herald article that notes the success of the Fox musical My Weakness at Radio City Music Hall but then adds: “In certain communities in the hinterland, a large attendance at a New York Theatre may have the effect of an adverse reaction along the lines of ‘if New York liked it, we will not.’” (326) 48 Although Jenkins notes that the film was a “mild success” in a big market such as Chicago (66).

165

numbers.49 And still the film did better business in smaller markets despite the

incongruity of characters spontaneously bursting into song. As Jenkins puts it, “What the

regional audience rejected was not fragmentation but ‘sophistication’” (184). In sum,

there appeared to be no widespread disaffection with the SOS from either audiences or

motion picture production personnel, a situation that remained relatively unchanged until

the advent of rock ‘n’ roll.

But some signs of an impending crisis can be detected at least as early as Singin’

in the Rain (1952) in its proto-postmodern play with recording technology. And the

ironically titled It’s Always Fair Weather (1955) is barely afloat in postwar malaise.

Characters sing while drunk (“Situation-wise”) or hounded by the public (“I Like

Myself”), and the last number in the film is a ghoulish extravaganza in which Madeline

Bradville (Dolores Gray) assassinates a bank of potential suitors (“Thanks A Lot But No

Thanks”).50 However, the most prescient number, “Why Are We Here?” (sung to the tune

of “The Blue Danube Waltz”), occurs at a restaurant where three GI buddies have

reconvened a decade after WWII only to find that they cannot stand one another. But they

do not express these conflicts to one another musically. Instead, the number is played out

in their heads as thought bubbles, each character grimacing and contorting their faces but

never outright singing their dilemmas. “Why Are We Here?” not only offers an explicit

contrast to the musical’s propensity for fostering community through music; it

49 “Yes, Yes!” is reprised at the very end of the film. 50 Curiously, the vinyl soundtrack album jumbles the song order so that the album ends on the more conventional and heteronormative “Baby, You Knock Me Out” as if to compensate for the unsettling effect “Thanks A Lot But Not Thanks” would leave as the last song on the album. It’s Always Fair Weather – Music From The Original Soundtrack

(MCA 25018, 1986).

166

foreshadows the more omniscient use of popular song that would soon take place within

film music.

Rock Omniscience and The Retreat From The SOS

As previous chapters have already rehearsed, rock ‘n’ roll was indeed a problem for

various cultural guardians. And while it would be a stretch to suggest that motion picture

producers took it upon themselves to tame this new popular music beast through the

medium of film, the early rock ‘n’ roll films did have somewhat of a taming effect in that

they dramatized the problem of incorporating the music into movies. Even with Rock

Around The Clock (1956), generally considered the first rock ‘n’ roll film (or rock ‘n’ roll

musical as it is frequently called), one can already detect the perpetual mismatch of

marrying rock ‘n’ roll (and, even more problematically, rock) to film.

Rock Around The Clock was the product of infamous independent producer Sam

Katzman. Katzman’s career burrows a hole directly through the monoculture myths of

the classical Hollywood cinema and thus serves as a perfect conduit to inaugurate rock

‘n’ roll into film. In a preview of the demographic marketing that would dominate the

film and music industries by the 1970s, Katzman frequently targeted the youth market

with westerns, serials, and series such as The East End Kids and The Teen Agers

produced for Monogram and Columbia Pictures. More interested in quickly exploiting a

current event than enticing the family or a mythical “everyone” to the theatre, he built a

film around Billy Haley and The Comets’ “Rock Around The Clock” which played over

the opening credits to the juvenile delinquent social concern classic The Blackboard

167

Jungle (1955), the first film to feature a rock ‘n’ roll song as part of its score (Denisoff

and Romanowski 60). The controversial film caused such a sensation that it drove “Rock

Around The Clock” to the top of the Billboard’s Best Sellers in Stores chart on July 9,

1955, which most historians consider the first rock ‘n’ roll song to do so. So Rock Around

The Clock the film is important for the various firsts it encapsulates, including the first

rock ‘n’ roll musical.

Rock Around The Clock squeezes in a mini history of postwar popular music in its

first scene. George Hiller and Band, a big band featuring more than ten musicians, play a

mild, midtempo dance tune at a poorly attended ballroom. Hiller fails to conceal his

exasperation while Corny LaSalle (Henry Slate) can barely stay awake on his standup

bass. Manager Steve Hollis (Johnny Johnston) strolls up after the number to inform Hiller

that their booking has been cancelled, the third time on this tour. Hollis gives Hiller a

briefing on the historical changes he has been ignoring as bandleader: “All the big bands

are breaking up. People aren’t dancing anymore; they’re listening…The public’s going in

for sounds, Georgie. They want to hear small groups, vocalists, novelty combos…Take a

look at the figures on record sales and then take a look at the size of the crowds you’ve

been drawing.”

In just a few lines, Hollis touches on many of the major shifts in postwar popular

music: the demise of the big bands and the move towards smaller combos; the rise of the

singer (and eventually, the singer-songwriter); and, most importantly, the recording now

at the center of popular music experience which brings with it two attendant

developments: a public with increasingly fine-tuned listening capacities and the

exploitation of recording technology for its novelty potential. Hollis chastises Hiller for

168

foolishly soldering on in the moribund big band tradition in spite of these developments,

even going so far as to insult his backwardness. He suggests a booking in a schoolhouse

during a fire drill since his music would clear them out fast. Hiller does not even let

Hollis finish the thought and promptly fires him. The scene has built quickly in intensity

to acknowledge that a change has indeed occurred and to create a sense of urgency about

the rules for survival in this new popular music playing field. It will be the project of the

film to ease this tension, this feeling of bewilderment as previous avenues of employment

dry up. For in the next few minutes, the tables will be turned on Hollis.

Hollis and Corny, who has defected from the band, drive to New York to find work.

They stop in a small town to sleep - Strawberry Springs, Population 1,472. Both men

continually emphasize the town’s perceived backwardness. Corny suggests they look for

a barn if they cannot find a hotel. When a group of youngsters stream past them, he

wagers that the entire 1,472 must be out tonight. The elderly hotel owner informs them

that the “young’uns” are going to a dance. Corny predicts a square dance: “They’ve

probably been doing that kind of stuff up here for the last [sardonic glance at the old

man] 100 years.” Still, Hollis is intrigued and they set out to the dance. As they pull

away, the camera cuts to a close-up of the old man who starts spouting off jive talk:

“Man, them two cats don’t dig the most at all. At all.”

The dancehall is packed despite Hollis’s contention that “dance band music is

dead.” And both men are flummoxed by the music – Billy Haley and The Comets

performing “See You Later, Alligator.” At first it sounds like slaughtering cattle to them.

Then Hollis tries for a more detailed analysis: “It isn’t boogie, it isn’t jive, it isn’t swing.

It’s kind of all of them.” A girl hanging upside down off the side of her partner’s shoulder

169

informs them that “it’s rock ‘n’ roll, brother, and we’re rocking tonight.”

Hollis tries to get the name of the “orchestra” but receives only incomprehensible

jive talk from the wildly dancing youngsters. When the number finishes, Hollis asks

Haley himself the name of his band. Haley turns to his band and says “Hey, guys, we got

a couple of foreigners from the flatlands with us.” The band launch into “Rock-A-Beatin’

Boogie” and the crowd clears the dancefloor. When Hollis tries to find out why, a hepcat,

who has just been punctuating his dance with extremely rapid spins and mock falls,

repeatedly gives him incredulous looks making Hollis feel like a square (I will explain

why shortly). In the space of about five minutes of screen time, Hollis has gone from

conveying hard truths about the music business to feeling like an outsider to some

excitingly, and potentially profitable, action.

What does Rock Around The Clock tell the viewer at this point, barely ten minutes

into the film, about rock ‘n’ roll, this alien music which seems to contain all other recent

musics? 1. It bubbles up in small towns outside the purview a major cultural centers. 2. It

is a music for dancing, and a markedly wild dancing at that. 3. It works like an insider

youth language which can make someone feel square and out of the loop. 4. But it is a

language potentially available to all as evinced by the old man’s jive talking. 5. Thus it

can be learned which raises the expectation that someone will soon teach it. So right

away, in rock ‘n’ roll’s foundational film text, there is a problem. How does a movie,

especially the putative first of its kind, represent this music of abandon that draws

noticeable lines around its constituents and has already shook up cultural guardians?

With the main character and the viewer’s ostensible surrogate made to feel like an

outsider, the crowd move to the sides to allow Lisa (Lisa Gaye) and Jimmy Johns (Earl

170

Barton) on the dancefloor. Lisa and Jimmy are a brother/sister dance duo that works with

Billy Haley and The Comets. And immediately their style of dancing provides reassuring

links to earlier musicals in contrast to the feverish gyrations just witnessed. Most of their

movements are synchronized which means their dance looks much more choreographed,

rehearsed where the previous dancing is meant to look spontaneous (and most likely was

to some extent). One can trace some of their specific moves to recent musicals as well.

For instance, they perform a mock sexy burlesque with one arm across the torso and

exaggerated hip swivels that cry out “ha cha cha!” Bob Fosse choreographed (and

danced) similar moves in the brilliant “Give Me A Band and My Baby” gazebo number

from My Sister Eileen released just the year before by Columbia.51 Despite breaking out

into brief single moves, they perform most of their dance together as a duo. And although

Lisa gives Jimmy a little twirl, traditional gender lines in dance are largely maintained.

By contrast, the less controlled youngsters switch partners at random and some gals flip

their male partners over their legs. Finally, Lisa and Jimmy mark their performance as a

performance. They end their number in a freeze position with arms outstretched to the

applause of the crowd in contrast to the youngsters who were “just dancing.” For viewers

put off or bewildered by the comparatively unschooled dancing as the scene opens (as

Hollis and Corny are), Lisa and Jimmy’s dance eases them into the narrative with a more

recognizable (and containable) style of dance. The band’s somewhat improbable position

at floor level rather than raised up on a stage makes this move all the easier.

But the extent to which rock ‘n’ roll eases into the narrative remains ambiguous at

51 Although it pays to note that in this number, most of the characters (played by Betty Garrett, Janet Leigh, Dick York, and Fosse) are drunk.

171

best. Hollis again approaches Haley, this time with a moneymaking offer. Haley becomes

confused at the possibility of making a living off his music. The band performs only on

Saturday nights; the rest of the week they work as farmers, seed sellers, and tractor

mechanics. “What if every night was Saturday night?” Hollis proposes in a phrase that

perfectly captures the unsustainable transgression of rock ‘n’ roll as well as the 24-hour

pleasure principle of the song “Rock Around The Clock” itself. At this point, Lisa

intervenes. It turns out that she is the de facto manager of the band (which, it bears

repeating, includes her dance partnership with her brother). She discusses Hollis’s

proposal to become the band’s manager. And while Haley is present, the focus remains

on Lisa who seems just as surprised at the prospect of selling her talent: “I hadn’t thought

dancing the rock ‘n’ roll was talent.” Hollis suggests a 60/40 split but Lisa wants him to

come down to ten percent and leaves before a deal is made. Haley defers to her judgment:

“Don’t look at me, Mr. Hollis. If Lisa won’t go for the 60/40, there’s nothing I can do

about it.”

With this line, Haley cedes the narrative to Lisa and Hollis who fall in love while

warding off the machinations of Corrine Talbot (Alix Talton), the hard-as-nails top

booking agent who schemes to make Hollis marry her. He has very few lines of dialogue

after this point and no narrative agency. In other words, the narrative leaves rock ‘n’ roll

behind. Or, to put it more precisely, a real life representative of rock ‘n’ roll (Haley) finds

his meager narrative role eclipsed by a rather odd fictional representation of rock ‘n’ roll

(the Lisa and Jimmy duo) with closer ties to traditional forms of the Hollywood musical.

And if the style of the duo’s dance were not enough to evacuate any significant tie to rock

‘n’ roll, Lisa’s reference to “dancing the rock ‘n’ roll” certainly was since such a dance

172

never caught on if indeed it ever truly existed. The line would have struck many

contemporary teenagers as square as it definitely does today. It marks the beginning of

Hollywood’s long history of hapless attempts to narrativize the music.

With rock ‘n’ roll now uncomfortably molded into the narrative, it performs the

same function as the music in classical Hollywood musicals – it brings together a

community usually on the heels of the formation of a heterosexual couple. All throughout

the film, Corrine’s role in the narrative is to stall these various unions. She still believes

she can make Hollis marry her despite an earlier, amicable rejection from him. Now

Hollis needs her help in getting some choice bookings for the “Haley combo,” i.e. Billy

Haley and The Comets and the dance duo which he describes as “Lisa Johns and her

brother.” Corrine immediately suspects a romantic interest and asks Lisa’s age (there is a

twenty-year age difference between Lisa and Hollis). Jealous of his obvious infatuation

with Lisa (“looks great, young, fresh, sparkles”), she first suggests booking the band and

not the dance act which makes Hollis bristle. So she books them to play at the prom for

the posh Mansfield School for Girls in Hartford, Connecticut, “the most exclusive in the

country,” says Corinne’s lackey Mike, assuming that the high class crowd will hate them

and ruining Hollis’s career in the process. But her plan backfires. The rock ‘n’ roll spirit

takes over practically everyone in the room including one of the elderly teachers

(although two others disapprove fuming “Infamous! Barbaric!”). It even infuses other

musics. At the end of the scene, Tony Martinez and His Band, the “novelty combo”

Corrine commanded to play slow cha-chas before Haley hit the stage, launch into the

more sprightly "Bacalao Con Papa (Codfish And Potatoes)” during which Martinez sings

“rocking and rolling the cha cha cha.”

173

Corrine decides to sign the band and the dance act together but writes in a clause

that Lisa is not to marry for the life of the three-year contract. However, Hollis and Lisa

foil her plans by marrying before the contract is signed. At a live taping for television

hosted by Alan Freed, Corrine graciously admits defeat before Bill Haley and the Comets

play the title tune one more time. Lisa and her brother run onto the dancefloor along with

two other acts that have performed throughout the film, Freddie Bell and the Bellboys

and The Platters, the latter a black vocal combo that enjoyed enormous chart success with

plush ballads and covers of standards such as “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” (Tony

Martinez and His Band are curiously absent.) They are joined in a celebratory dance by

the studio audience as “The Living End” pops up on the screen, the word “living”

dancing in its position. Because of the half-measures it took to incorporate rock ‘n’ roll

into the narrative, it is now a music that one-ups a manipulative executive woman, joins

in matrimony a heterosexual couple of considerable age difference, and brings together a

community of dancers which by implication extends to the television audience.

So why exactly was Bill Haley and his music, and by extension, rock ‘n’ roll, so

ambiguously incorporated into the film? More than anything else, “Rock Around The

Clock” existed as a recording prior to the film. It did not signify as a song standard

template awaiting potentially infinite interpretations. And The Blackboard Jungle pinned

the song more absolutely onto Bill Haley and The Comets by featuring it outside of the

narrative over the opening credits so that no character burst out into it. Therefore, it had

to remain at some sort of remove from the narrative proceedings of Rock Around The

Clock. But also, rock ‘n’ roll had already accrued some of the ideological residue of the

merged professional. The film reinforces this aspect by going to great lengths to establish

174

rock ‘n’ roll as the product of small-town America placing it outside of the Tin Pan Alley

hotbeds of Broadway and Hollywood. Hollis and Corny’s constant remarks about the

backward perception of Strawberry Springs creates ties to similarly misperceived small

towns, particularly Southern ones where various strains of country music had long since

been the province of artists who wrote, performed, and sang their own songs. And on

November 12, 1955, Billboard published an article entitled “Virtual Surrender 1955: The

Year R&B Took Over The Pop Field” which claimed that “despite covers by top pop

artists, more and more original versions of tunes…are making it in all markets” (quoted

in Denisoff and Romanowski 20). These original recordings created a new popular music

standard, one that made it difficult to incorporate into a film narrative, most of all via the

SOS.

The historical break engendered by “Rock Around The Clock” should not distort

the fact the song itself provided reassuring links to past musical traditions. An ASCAP

lyricist, Max. E. Freedman, wrote the song with music publisher Jimmy DeKnight (aka

James Myers). Session players helped with the recording of the song, most significantly

Danny Cedrone who performed the famous guitar solo. As they appear in the film, The

Comets number seven members, not all that smaller than George Hiller’s already pared-

down “big” band at the beginning of the film. The youngsters dance to The Comets’

music in a style reminiscent of the lindy hop which many moviegoers had already seen

performed by Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers (a professional group of swing dancers from

Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom) most famously in the Marx Brothers’ film A Day at the Races

(1937) and most wildly in Hellzapoppin’ (1941). Another Savoy graduate, Dean Collins,

danced the lindy hop in several of the Teen Agers films produced by Katzman. Finally,

175

and most intriguingly of all, Decca Records released a ten-inch LP by Bill Haley and The

Comets in June 1955 called Shake, Rattle and Roll which read “Fox Trots with Vocal

Chorus by Bill Haley” on the sleeve. Mark N. Grant has nominated the fox trot as the

music form most adaptable to narrative purposes. Indeed, most of the Broadway

standards are fox trots. And yet here the term is dragged out to send off rock ‘n ‘ roll into

the LP era providing a much smoother continuity to the popular music that came before it

than most histories allow.

Nevertheless, one cannot discount the fervor both song and movie caused. Rock

Around The Clock cost $300,000 to produce but grossed $2.4 million worldwide winding

up “as impressive as larger-grossing but far more expensive productions such as Guys

and Dolls and The King and I, the box office champions of 1956” (Doherty 81). And

perhaps the single most important factor contributing to the film’s success was the sound.

Motion picture theater sound could blare out a rock ‘n’ roll recording at a volume that

most teenagers had never experienced before. Frank Zappa’s comment on The

Blackboard Jungle to this effect applies to all of the early rock ‘n’ roll films:

When the titles flashed up there on the screen Bill Haley and his Comets started blurching "One Two Three O'Clock, Four O'Clock Rock..." It was the loudest sound kids had ever heard at that time. I remember being inspired with awe. In cruddy little teen-age rooms across America, kids had been huddling around old radios and cheap record players listening to the "dirty music" of their life style. ("Go in your room if you wanna listen to that crap... and turn the volume all the way down.") But in the theatre, watching Blackboard Jungle, they couldn't tell you to turn it down. I didn't care if Bill Haley was white or sincere...he was playing the Teen-Age National Anthem and it was so LOUD I was jumping up and down. Blackboard Jungle, not even considering the story line (which had the old people winning in the end) represented a strange sort of "endorsement" of the teen-age cause: "They have made a movie about us, therefore, we exist..." (85)

176

This focus on volume suggests that rock ‘n’ roll transformed the cinema into a mega

visual jukebox foreshadowing the critiques of some key 1980s films as little more than

badly disguised music videos. And Zappa’s comment about the weak impression of the

story line has a corollary in the New York Times review of Katzman’s next rock ‘n’ roll

outing Don’t Knock The Rock (1955) which noted that “the dialogue couldn’t even be

heard above the restless din” due to raucous dancing in the seats and up and down the

aisles (quoted in Denisoff and Romanowski 57-8). So if movies tried to tame rock ‘n’ roll

by evacuating much of it from the narrative, the overpowering volume of the theater

sound system helped rock ‘n’ roll take its power back.

And the ways in which rock ‘n’ roll is shot in the film will influence the use of the

music in Hollywood cinema to this day. For instance, it already starts to take on the

markings of an omniscient role. In almost every scene in which rock ‘n’ roll plays, a band

is present. However, the few shots where the camera frames the dancers close enough so

that that band is no longer visible suggest that rock ‘n’ roll’s visual presence can be

cleaved from the narrative altogether since it has such a vestigial relationship to the

narrative anyway. In this is a premonition of the dancicals that will be discussed later.

Three of Haley’s songs play over montages, further cementing the music’s omniscient

role in film. Outside of these moments, the film explicitly marks off rock ‘n’ roll as a

performance. Thus the music never bursts forth from a character in the narrative

suggesting that rock ‘n’ roll will never be prone to the SOS. And it would acquire further

power as it moved more firmly towards its omniscient role and remained at a distance far

from the SOS.

177

Two films illustrate this development. Rock, Rock, Rock (1956), the fourth film of

the year to exploit rock in its title, is particularly instructive in that it features both SOS

numbers and explicitly marked rock ‘n’ roll performances. But while the latter showcase

the incendiary rock ‘n’ roll of Chuck Berry and Johnny Burnette as well as more soulful

variants of pop such as The Moonglows and Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers, at least

four of the five SOS numbers use music few would mistake for rock ‘n’ roll much less

anything resembling R&B. Dori (Tuesday Weld) sings two string-laden horrors which

Weld lip syncs to Connie Francis’s voice. Tommy (Teddy Randazzo) serenades Dori

with a schmaltzy ballad. The two remaining SOS numbers have “rock” in their titles - a

cutesy Shirley Temple-like number called “Rock Pretty Baby” sung by Dori’s young

sister Baby (Ivy Schulman) with “four unmiked male backups” (Denisoff and

Romanowski 46) and a mildly rocking number from Tommy called “We Are Going to

Rock Tonight.” Unsurprisingly, both contain more explicit markings of performance with

a crowd gathering around to witness the song and erupting into applause at the end. So in

general, Rock, Rock, Rock relegates rock ‘n’ roll to the performance scenes while giving

off the strong suggestion that this music is not appropriate for an SOS.

And Rock, Rock, Rock holds the rather dubious distinction of being the first rock

‘n roll film to have a soundtrack album. In a practice that remains standard today, the

album further suggests tensions between rock ‘n’ roll and film by including only some of

the music from the film and adding many more cuts that did not appear in the film at all.

Only Chuck Berry, The Moonglows, and The Flamingos appear on the album and only

four of the album’s twelve tracks appeared in the film. Chess Records released the album

and needless to say, all three of the above artists were signed to Chess. And while the

178

remaining eight cuts are far from filler (“Roll Over Beethoven” and “Sincerely” were

signature cuts for Berry and The Moonglows respectively), the practice of larding up a

soundtrack album with instrumentals and inconsequential cuts/artists from the label that

released it placed blatant promotional effort before listenability.

Most rock ‘n ‘ roll soundtrack albums from this era died an early commercial

death. Therefore, A Hard Day’s Night (1964) is perhaps even more important than Rock,

Rock, Rock for it signals the shift towards teenagers buying full-length records, in this

case the soundtrack album for the film which spent fourteen weeks at number one on the

Billboard Best Selling Albums chart. Especially given the immense critical and

commercial success of both the film and its soundtrack, the omniscient presence of rock

‘n’ roll in A Hard Day’s Night had a great deal of influence on the use of music in film.

In a scene near the beginning of the film, The Beatles play cards with Paul’s grandfather

(Wilfrid Brambell) in the storage compartment of the train. As Ringo deals, “I Should

Have Known Better” quickly raises in volume on the soundtrack. The song plays over the

entire first verse as they continue to play cards. Apart from a brief (and bizarre) moment

when Paul mouths the second half of the line “That I would love everything that you do”

as if he were distractedly singing along to it on the radio, the music comes from a non-

diegetic nowhere as no one registers its presence. A cut shows George in the same

location playing guitar in the background with John closer to the camera on harmonica

just as the song comes to the between-verse harmonica bridge. A cut to a longer shot

reveals the entire band now performing the song we are hearing on magically

materialized instruments. They play out the song in this manner until the fadeout during

which a cut brings the film back to the card game. Thus the song has moved from its

179

omniscient role to an explicitly marked performance and then back again. To paraphrase

Scott McMillin’s theory of the orchestra in Broadway musicals, “I Should Have Known

Better” knows everything including what is in the minds of The Beatles even before they

do (130). Only here the song is not orchestral accompaniment but a popular music

recording. Its ability to weave in and out of omniscience lends the recording an enormous

amount of authoritative weight. And its relatively unmoored status granted director

Richard Lester the freedom to engage in a variety of discontinuous camera and editing

techniques, most famously in the “Can’t Buy Me Love” sequence, that would influence

music video.

But if rock ‘n’ roll attained a level of omniscience due to the authority accrued by

the merged professional, any popular song recording could command almost as much

omniscience. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the theme song which

understandably came roaring back with the increased popularity of recordings. The

independent producers who rose in the wake of Hollywood’s postwar crises liked the

theme song because it provided de facto advertisement for the film. They especially

encouraged multiple recordings of the theme, an odious practice which reached the

heights of ridiculousness with Never on Sunday (1960), the theme of which appeared in

around four hundred recordings in 1960. The theme song generated tension between the

film and record companies in that the advertising function of the theme song did not help

the record business as much. Instead, they depended on LP sales to generate their largest

profits (Smith 51).

Still, the theme song remained extremely influential throughout the 1960s and

would remain so at least through the 1990s. One rather curious but nonetheless crucial

180

byproduct of this phenomenon was the introduction of Scopitones in the mid-1960s.

Scopitones were the forerunners of music videos – small musical films shown in film

jukeboxes placed in hotels, restaurants and upscale bars. They were a resounding flop in

America by decade’s end mostly due to its failure to tap into the youth market. The acts

filmed had ties to old-fashioned musicals (Debbie Reynolds, Connie Francis). And there

was a significant dearth of English-language product, most noticeably from rock

performers, not surprising since a French company invented Scopitones in 1960 (Smith

142-46). But Scopitones are important because within these three- or four-minute films,

image was always subservient to sound. This flip-flopping of the traditional sound/image

hierarchy influenced the way theme songs were used in films. For instance, Claude

Lelouch directed over four hundred Scopitones and clearly transferred these sound/image

techniques into his international megasmash A Man and a Woman (1966). In that film,

several sequences function like music commercials. The music is non-diegetic but it does

not rest in the background. Rather, it takes over the narrative and tends to pause the

forward pull of the story. The sound-image reversal reached its apex in the films of

Sergio Leone who had the actors respond to Ennio Morricone’s score for Once Upon a

Time in the West (1968) rather than tweak the score to suit better the visuals.

Eventually, this modus operandi would meld with rock and serve an important

role in films targeted to youth audiences in the late 1960s. One could see the Scopitone

mentality at work with songs moving closer to rock in the use of BJ Thomas’s

“Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head” in Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid (1969),

Harry Nilsson’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” in Midnight Cowboy, Steppenwolf’s “Born To Be

Wild” in Easy Rider (1969), several Lovin’ Spoonful songs in You’re A Big Boy Now

181

(1966), and, most famously, the Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel songs in The Graduate

(1967). In each of these instances, the music is non-diegetic. It does not emanate from the

story world of the film either via a radio or performance. And most crucially, they are not

sung by the characters in the film in an SOS number. Because ideologically, they cannot

be sung by the characters. Only the original performers can sing them. The omniscience

of popular song existed in the classical Hollywood era, particularly in westerns. For

instance, The Sons of The Pioneers sing voiceover commentary in John Ford’s

masterpiece Wagon Master (1950).“The Legend of Chuck-a-Luck” winds its way

throughout Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious (1952). And Tex Ritter singing “Do Not

Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin’” (aka “The Ballad of High Noon”) contributed to the

prestige of Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952).52 Soon the practice would become more

widespread so that by the 1970s it became a standard method of incorporating music into

film, from Leonard Cohen’s brooding artsongs in McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) to the

teen rock and ironic pop of OK Go and Junior Senior respectively in She’s The Man

(2006) and the childlike amateur folk of The Moldy Peaches in Juno (2007). But it served

as only one mechanism through which the musical as mode flourished after 1970 once

the ideology of rock grew to hegemonic proportions.

52 I owe these insights to Blake Lucas.

182

Chapter 5 – “Pass The Salt!”: The Musical Mode Post-1970/The SOS

Under Duress

This chapter will continue the discussion of how rock and recordings in general

take on an omniscient role in film, namely in the compilation score. It then looks at how

the album form has invaded certain films before analyzing three popular and more

accepted forms of incorporating music into film in this era - the dancical, the concert film

(as well as films that explicitly mark performances), and Disney feature-length

animation. Finally, the chapter ends with an inquiry into the vexed status of the SOS.

Despite the general anxiety surrounding the SOS in the rock era as well as the lame

attempts to incorporate rock into film, most of the films discussed in this chapter either

use a narrative/number alternation or pivot on the formation of a community through

music thus strengthening the case that the musical as mode has been quite vibrant since

the advent of rock.

The various developments in American popular music since the late 1960s made

little room for the SOS. Heavy metal, funk, soul, R&B, disco, punk, post-punk, country,

new wave, hip-hop, house, techno, etc. all found their way into films. But almost never

did they generate an SOS. And when they did, such as with The Rocky Horror Picture

Show (1975), The Wiz (1978) or Hair (1979) or Cop Rock (1990) or Carmen: A Hip

Hopera (2001) the results tended to be tepid approximations of these developments.

Either they stinted or rhythm or noise or sometimes both. And even the songs used for

non-SOS numbers were often characterized by the same shortcomings as I will make

clear below.

183

The Compilation Score

Soon a collection of popular songs would replace the traditional score entirely or

dominate the musical portion of the soundtrack. What Jeff Smith calls the compilation

score has its roots in Kenneth Anger’s infamous, brilliant underground classic Scorpio

Rising (1963) which features thirteen rock ‘n’ roll and pop song as its entire soundtrack

(apart from a few sound effects). But again, the songs fill an omniscient role in that they

seem to know more about the characters than the characters do themselves. Of course, the

most famous example is the footage of leather stud Scorpio as he dresses. Anger places

Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet” on top of the imagery to bring the homoerotic subtext

closer to the fore and to mock gently the overwhelming machismo of Scorpio’s dressing

ritual. The film proceeds in this manner with each cut of the “compilation” hovering over

the image in commentary. This juxtaposition conveys authority upon the chain of popular

songs that plays throughout the film, upsetting traditional sound/image hierarchies in a

manner common to much avant-garde cinema. More conventional narrative films would

make this approach more common in commercial Hollywood cinema by the late 1960s.

The compilation score can work in a way quite similar to the unheard melodies of

traditional Hollywood scoring. Popular song, especially rock, would seem to work

against this goal. Even it does not mean to march out of its context and grab our ear, it

still possesses a compact structure and tonal direction that guides the listener’s ear more

closely. As Melissa Carey and Michael Hannan put it, “ popular songs, particularly in

their lyrics and hooks, draw attention to themselves; in addition, they appear to be

184

particularly unsuitable for underscore (as distinct from their diegetic use) because their

naturalistic use is constrained by listener expectations of structure, duration, meter, and

mood consistency” (163). The structures internal to popular song do not make it easy to

atomize certain musical phrases into the leitmotifs so crucial to the traditional Hollywood

score. Nor do these structures allow popular song to blend easily into the background so

as not to distract from the story. In Smith’s insightful words, “[rock music] failed to

support the story and mood because it was story and mood” (164).

Another complaint lodged against popular song and its inappropriateness for film

scoring concerns the music’s supposedly greater fixity to history. Popular song conjures

up memories of the era in which it was most popular. Or it triggers in the listener/viewer

certain times and places associated with a song, thus lending it the potential to pull the

listener/viewer out of the narrative:

In the case of popular music, this associational element is exacerbated by the music’s close connections with its historical and social context. Unlike classical music, which is often regarded as having a kind of universality, the perpetually changing fads and fashions of popular music furnish a kind of built-in obsolescence to the idiom, which in turn imparts a certain historical specificity to individual styles, performers, and songs. Because of this specificity, popular music is an especially effective means of denoting particular time periods. (Smith 164-5)

Indeed, the music in a movie like American Graffiti (1973), where popular rock ‘n’ roll

and pop songs of the late 1950s and early 1960s play almost continuously on the

soundtrack, means to evoke a bygone era. But especially if the songs are famous enough,

their lyrics and structures need not disrupt the narrative proceedings. As Smith notes, “if

the song is already well-known, then the matter of song lyrics becomes more a question

of recognition rather than cognition. Instead of deciphering lyrics, viewers simply apply

185

what they already know – a title or chorus – to the specific dramatic context that is

depicted in the film” (166). This cognition can occur because of the ambient nature of

popular music in the rock era. With a wide variety of delivery systems all around us in

postmodern space, a song can become as familiar and taken for granted as air. In

particular, Motown songs show up on soundtracks in an almost rote fashion given their

constant transmission in oldie radio formats and in countless films that have already

come before us. Thus it comes as no surprise that Smith uses Marvin Gaye’s Motown

classic “I Heard It through the Grapevine” from the beginning of The Big Chill (1983) as

an example of the importance of recognition over cognition in the compilation score

(166-67). Smith correctly estimates that the song rather easily supports the narrative of

the opening scenes in which a group of friends “hear through the grapevine” that a friend

of theirs has committed suicide. Thus the actual infidelity narrative of “I Heard It through

the Grapevine” does not detract viewers from the narrative if indeed they were ever

aware of the song’s actual narrative in the first place. The ambient transmission of

popular music means that we often receive it in a distracted state to begin with.

Therefore, we do not necessarily bring to the film a deep understanding of the song

anyway. In fact, even calling “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” (and many other songs)

a “classic” seems somehow inappropriate because the song has attained the kind of

universality Smith associates with classical music.

But two other factors aid in the compilation score’s ability to function similarly to

the traditional Hollywood score. Often the music is inaudible as songs fluctuate in

volume on the soundtrack. For instance, in The Big Chill, the group of friends chat in a

living room while music plays on the stereo. It is difficult to ascertain the song since it

186

plays under the dialogue at a low volume. Only when Michael (Jeff Goldblum)

sarcastically requests music from this century does the music raise in volume slightly to

reveal Procol Harum’s “A White Shade of Pale.” And even then, the volume does not

raise so high to insure that every viewer who knows the song will recognize it on the

soundtrack. In this respect, the compilation score mirrors the ambient nature of popular

music. In a wide variety of films from American Graffiti and Goodfellas (1990) to

numberless recent teen-oriented movies such as Empire Records (1995), Bring It On

(2000), Love Don’t Cost a Thing (2003), and She’s the Man music plays almost

constantly. If one tries to concentrate on the music, the narrative thread will indeed be

lost. But the compilation score means to immerse us in popular music’s amniotic flow, to

evoke not just specific times and places but the ever-present use of music as well.

And if some rock and pop songs have managed to attain the universality of

classical music, then the recording industry has belched up megatons of filler under no

threat of distracting anyone from anything. Many utterly characterless songs find their

way onto soundtracks in the hopes of promoting a lesser song or artist. And usually, these

bland contributions fail to make a deep enough impression in lyrics, sound, or structure to

stand out too baldly on a film soundtrack. A good example occurs in Weird Science

(1985) as Cheyne’s “Private Joy” (a cover of a 1981 Prince track) detracts not one iota

from the scene in which Lisa (Kelly LeBrock) readies the house for a party. The

unfortunate fact that soundtrack albums become the dumping ground for rightfully

187

obscure songs/artists makes the act of actually listening to most of them a disheartening

experience.53

Montages

The compilation score also provided films with songs to hold together the

compressed time of a montage. By the 1990s, the practice had become so common that

South Park’s Trey Parker and Matt Stone could parody it in their marionette action

comedy Team America: World Police (2004) with a song titled appropriately enough

“Montage.” Montages positively choked the most average and utterly forgettable films

imaginable reinforcing their unquestioned, seemingly necessary appearance, especially in

films meant to invoke the recent past. For instance, the rote coming-of-age film Outside

Providence (1999) features at least five musical montages which double as a nostalgia

factory for 1970s rock tunes. Paul McCartney and Wings’ “Band on the Run” plays over

a montage of Timothy “Dunph” Dunphy (Shawn Hatosy) hitchhiking. Bandfinger’s “No

Matter What” provides the soundtrack for Dunph’s blossoming relationship with Jane

Weston (Amy Smart) as they play Frisbee, juggle, hang out in an abandoned house, study

together, and hitchhike. The Doobie Brothers’ “Long Train Running” sutures together

scenes in more far-flung locales and times -- Dunph starting to do well in his classes,

frolicking on the beach with Jane, and even more hitchhiking. Steppenwolf’s “Magic

Carpet Ride” scores a montage of scenes at a party. And Tower of Power’s "So Very

53 And, admittedly, an opportunity to unearth some fine gems. Even that aspect becomes annoying, however, because almost always one has to purchase a full-length album of dreck just to hear one song (which will no doubt be used at a later date to lure fans into purchasing the artist’s greatest hits album or career-spanning box set).

188

Hard to Go" strolls over a montage after Jane is expelled. Dunph thinks about Jane as

flashbacks transport him to the first time he saw her and various other moments in their

relationship (including the beach footage from the “Long Train Running” montage). All

of these montages appear in the film in addition to other songs that provide bridges

between scenes or function as part of the compilation score. Crammed with popular song

as a run-of-the-mill example of the compilation score and its use in montages, Outside

Providence alternates so regularly between narrative and (montage) number it suggests

that while the musical (understood in its generic noun form) may have diminished in

importance, films of the 1990s were even more musical (understood in their modal

adjectival form) than those of the classical Hollywood era.

The Album and The SOS

One can glean how central the album became to popular music experience by the

1970s when looking at several films which ape its form. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts

Club Band (1978) was a hapless attempt to narrativize the music of The Beatles.

Produced by Robert Stigwood in the wake of his enormous success with Saturday Night

Fever (1977) and Grease (1978), the film sounds like an album due to the relative lack of

dialogue. In fact, almost all of the very little dialogue comes courtesy of the narrator Mr.

Kite (George Burns) who functions as a peculiar embodiment of liner notes. He attempts

to provide narrative links between songs that are usually not apparent on their own (and,

truth be told, still remain rather unclear even with the narration). Not only does this

strategy invoke the feel of an album but it cushions against the threat of the SOS. Mr.

189

Kite provides the dialogue mostly in voiceover so that, for the most part, Billy Shears

(Peter Frampton) and his band (The Bee Gees) do not have out to burst out from it into

song.

Barbra Streisand’s Yentl (1983) takes the album aesthetic to a fascinating extreme.

The very first song, “Where Is It Written?”, simultaneously functions as a tour of the

various modulations of popular song and forms a bridge back to the classical Hollywood

musical. It starts out as an SOS number with Yentl (Streisand) at home around the turn of

the twentieth century singing about the woes of Jewish Talmudic Law which forbids

women to receive an education. Not even a minute passes before her elderly father’s

cough interrupts her. As she goes to his room to check on him, the song continues in

voiceover, i.e., her lips are no longer moving. The song has now become a soliloquy sung

in Yentl’s head as indeed most of the songs in the film are. It continues in this mode and

accrues a sense of omniscience as she covers up her sleeping father and turns down the

light. The song then moves back into SOS mode as soon as she closes the door. She

continues singing in SOS mode while moving into the kitchen.

But then suddenly, a cut brings her to a new time and place – sometime in the

near future in a synagogue. From an upper level reserved for women, she looks down at

her father singing with other men below. With the cut, the song moves back into

voiceover mode. It still has some of the markings of omniscience since the cut has

allowed it to travel over time and space. But it feels somewhat less tied to Yentl’s

consciousness since she shares the frame with so many other people. And bits of dialogue

poke through the song. Yentl sees her father collapse and cries out which shocks the

congregation since women are forbidden to speak in synagogue. He regains his

190

composure and admonishes his daughter with a finger-wagging. The song competes with

the religious song that men sing below and the voices of women whispering about

Yentl’s transgression. Thus it takes on a bit of the functions of the compilation score in

smoothing over cuts and providing an ambient backdrop to dialogue. In other words, the

song modulates between the SOS, the omniscient use of popular song, and the

functionality of the compilation score.

Even more remarkably, Yentl/Streisand sings every song in the film despite the

fact that the love interest, Avigdor, is played by Mandy Patinkin, an accomplished

Broadway singer (he originated the role of Ché in Evita on Broadway). With such an

extreme continuity of voice, the film works more like an illustrated album than a film

enhanced with popular song. It testifies to the centrality of the recording in film music of

the rock era.

The songs in Yentl are far from rock and even the pop music of the era. With

lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman and music by Michel Legrand (composer behind the

songs of Jacques Demy’s 1964 sung-through musical Les Parapluies de Cherbourg), they

fuse the melodic focus of Tin Pan Alley with the heavier, self-involved aesthetic of rock.

But one can glean how the illustrated album works in a rock context with Neil Young’s

2003 album and film Greendale. The album is a rock opera of sorts about the fictional

small town of the title. As befits rock tradition, Young wrote all of the songs. But while

he only appears on the soundtrack of the film, his voice is the only one heard. That is, he

sings for all of the characters. The actors playing the townspeople of Greendale merely

mouth his words. Like Yentl, then, Greendale is a rather extreme example of the album

aesthetic consuming the film aesthetic. The difference, of course, lies in the rock

191

imperative for Young to be the only person authorized (in a quite literal sense) to sing his

songs.54

Dancicals

If the early rock ‘n’ roll musicals told audiences that the music was above all a

dance music, then it should come as no surprise that as the SOS declined, the amount of

scenes and entire films about dancing increased, especially by the 1980s with the famed

troika of Flashdance (1983), Footloose (1984), and Dirty Dancing (1987). The term

“dancical”55 means to express the ways in which dance sequences in films of the rock era

tend to pause the narrative just as an SOS number would and thus offer viewers some of

the pleasures of the classical Hollywood musical. However, almost all dancical numbers

are explicitly motivated performances. Very few moments in rock era cinema feature a

SOS with only dancing.56 Francis Ford Coppola’s One From The Heart (1982) has

several big production numbers that fit this category. When Tracy Turnblad (Ricki Lake)

is released from prison near the end of John Waters’s Hairspray (1988), there is a brief

SOS with no singing as Tracy and fellow well-wishers join together in a choreographed

54 Young maintained this operating procedure during the Greendale tour. The concert was an actual show with sets and characters. But the division of labor remained the same. Young sang all the songs while the characters on stage mouthed each one. The second half of the concert was a traditional live performance (not sets and actors) of older Young songs with his band Crazy Horse, underlining the entire concert as his show. 55 As far as I could determine, “dancical” is not an industry term. More likely, its origins could probably be traced to a neologism from the critical community. Besides its use by various dance troupes, the term has never attained the cultural currency of “the musical.” 56 Some claim that Bob Fosse’s epochal “The Rich Man’s Frug” from Sweet Charity (1969) constitutes an SOS with no singing. But this conclusion ignores the crucial call and response vocals in the “Big Finish” portion of the number.

192

dance. And the final “I’ve Had The Time of My Life” number from Dirty Dancing begins

as an explicitly marked performance between dance instructor Johnny (Patrick Swayze)

and his inamorata Baby (Jennifer Grey). But towards the end of the song, Johnny’s lower

class cohort follow him down the aisle in a spontaneous, choreographed version of the

supposedly unschooled dirty dancing the audience has thrilled to for the past two hours.

No one sings whereas in a classical Hollywood musical, this moment would most likely

generate an SOS throughout the entire number. As Jane Feuer notes, “the climactic

number in which Johnny reappears to dance with Baby in the final show commemorates

their summer together with the song “I Had the Time of My Life”; at one point Johnny

appears almost to sing the lyric to Baby” (1990: 234). But the key word here is “almost”

since he most decidedly does not sing the song. In general, however, dancicals motivate

all dance performances.

The trend could most profitably be traced to the gargantuan success of both the

film and the soundtrack of Saturday Night Fever (1977) which shoved disco into the

mainstream. As per dancical practice, no SOS numbers are in the film. The climax of the

film centers on a dance contest at the 2001 Odyssey club where Tony Manero (John

Travolta) comes to escape the drudgery of his working-class life. The film sets up clear

boundaries between the club and his more dreary life outside thus ensuring that no

number becomes an SOS. But while a lot is at narrative stake in the dancing during the

contest, their length (almost the duration of an entire song) and their frequency lend the

film the narrative/number oscillation endemic to the musical,

Flashdance takes this dichotomy to an extreme. However flashy the dancing and

disco lights are during the numbers in Saturday Night Fever, they are still firmly

193

grounded at the 2001 Odyssey club. Flashdance tries to pry the number apart from the

narrative as much as possible without slipping over into an SOS number. For instance,

most of the erotic dances at the club Zanzibar where Alex (Jennifer Beales) works at

night are specifically marked as performances at the club. The camera reveals an

establishing shot of the club, moves inside for some brief dialogue and/or chatter amongst

the patrons as they await the performance, and then the lights go down as a dancer enters

the stage. But director Adrian Lyne cuts into the highly stylized space of the stage so

intensely that he leaves behind the club for long stretches of the number, most evident in

the “Imagination” number. The goal is clearly to have the audience forget the club and

immerse themselves in the dance. For the duration of the number, then, the narrative

pauses as the visual register succumbs to the dictates of the song. Once the song/dance

has finished, the camera brings us back to the “reality” of the club.

The importance of underlining these techniques stems from the film’s quite self-

conscious use of the tropes of music video. MTV hit the airwaves in 1981. And although

there were many antecedents to the music video form (e.g., the Scopitones mentioned

above), its 24-hour transmission to homes via MTV boosted the popularity of the form’s

propensity for upsetting the image/sound hierarchy of traditional narrative cinema.

Flashdance, then, is one of the first films to build numbers around a narrative from the

essentially non-narrative music video form. As Feuer puts it:

Despite the emphasis on performance in most music videos, however, and despite individual instances of pastiche, music videos cannot be considered musicals if we define the musical by its dual levels of narrative and number. In the music video, everything is subordinated to the song, even the running time. In this sense, videos are more like commercials for musicals than like classic Hollywood musicals. (235)

194

Even in music videos that feature dialogue in counterdistinction to the song (and many do

usually to set up the song or to punctuate it briefly at the end), there is still no regular

alternation between narrative and number. This lack of narrative/number oscillation

accounts for the relative ease of acceptance of music videos in the rock era. Without a

narrative, there can be no SOS. And indeed, the dancicals which borrow the music video

form for their numbers rarely feature an SOS.

The most remarkable example of this aspect of the dancicial occurs about eighty

minutes into Dirty Dancing. Johnny has just been fired for developing a romantic

relationship with one of the guests (Baby) at Kellerman's, the Catskill Mountains resort

where he works as a dance instructor. Before driving off the premises, he says goodbye to

Baby and tells her he regrets nothing. The song that plays under this scene is “She’s Like

the Wind” which just so happens to be sung by…Patrick Swayze, the actor portraying

Johnny, it bears repeating. At a moment where he would most likely sing the song to

Baby in an SOS (probably occasioning a change to “You’re Like the Wind”) were Dirty

Dancing a classical Hollywood musical, he only has access to an omniscient voiceover

song even if the song contains his voice in the first place. To delve further into why

Johnny cannot express himself in an SOS, it is important to turn to the nature of explicitly

marked performances in concert films and as de facto numbers in narrative films to

determine how they cushion audiences from the potential discomfort of the SOS.

Concert Films/Explicitly Marked Performance Numbers

Simon Frith’s work in his book Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music

195

offers a useful analysis of the role of popular music performance in daily life. He aims to

uncover how songs work as texts. In his estimation, “all songs are implied narratives”

(169). The singer functions as a character in the narrative and uses the song to convey the

“story” to an audience. This explicit mode of performance raises the question of how that

performance become marked off from daily activity, how it becomes marked as a

performance. In order to answer this question, Frith quite fascinatingly raises the specter

of the musical:

To sing words is to elevate them in some way, to make them special, to give them a new form of intensity. This is obvious in the use of singing to mark off religious expression from the everyday use of words. But note also our discomfort at hearing banal conversation sung. Opera (and oratorio) composers have always faced the problem of what to do with those words which are needed to move the audience from one (heightened) scene to another: hence the stylization of the recitative, which confirms musically the conventional distinction between "ordinary" talk and the emotion of song - however realist an opera or musical might otherwise be, it is a humorous device to get someone to sing, say, "Pass the salt!" One of the few attempts to defy this convention, the Jacques Demy/Michel Legrand musical film Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, opens with a man going into a garage and singing his request for his car (which is being serviced); the uneasy (and usually laughing) audience suddenly realizes that everything here is going to be sung. I love this film (and Les

Demoiselles de Rochefort) because the effect is soon magical: sung, the most ordinary transactions seem to float across the pastel backdrops. (172)

The spontaneous aspect of the SOS, then, renders the performance/everyday divide

problematic. If a song bursts forth spontaneously, there is no time to mark it off as a

performance, no time for a performer to use everyday language to warn the listener of the

impending song. The SOS does away with that introductory cushion. Therefore, the sung-

through musicals such as Les Parapluies de Cherbourg or most Andrew Lloyd Webber

shows (Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, The Phantom of the Opera, etc.) aim to do away

with the need for any introductory cushion by making everything sung.

196

In addition to temporal matters, the spontaneity of the SOS raises questions of

space as well. If a song bursts forth spontaneously, the question of where exactly this

performance occurs becomes crucial. As Frith explains:

Another way of getting at the difference between talking and singing is our own practice. Most people are happier to talk in public than to sing; singing (in a seminar, for instance) is a source of embarrassment. There are obviously social reasons for this -- we're taught to speak in ways we're not usually taught to sing; talking has, in that respect, been naturalized (and there remain places and situations in which it is equally embarrassing to speak publicly, just as there are situations -- a drunken party or a sports event or in church -- where singing seems natural). But whatever the sociological reasons, the fact is that most of us experience singing (unlike speaking) as a performance (to see this just visit a karaoke bar). A performance in two respects: singing draws a different sort of attention to the words, the "special" effect I've already noted; and it draws a different sort of attention to the singer, hence the embarrassment. Singing seems to be self-revealing in a way that speaking is not. (172)

So the SOS becomes embarrassing for many people because it bursts forth in a setting

where attention should not be drawn to a person, a space not usually marked off for

performance, e.g. a place where one would might understandably ask someone to pass the

salt. We attend a concert fully expecting to experience a performance. But we do not

attend a food court or a garage with the expectation of song. In fact, the prospect never

crosses our minds.

Such expectations point to the fact that listening is a kind of performance as well.

Performance is a social act, a communicative act of rhetoric, and as such requires an

audience to interpret it. For Frith, this act of interpretation grows in importance with the

advent of industrial capitalism which throws many people together who do not know

each other. Everyday most of us engage in what Michael Warner calls “stranger

sociability” (122), those daily conversations we hold with store clerks, public

197

transportations operators, restaurant personnel, myriad service industry representatives, a

random person on the street, etc. These situations force us to learn the tropes of

performance in the public sphere.

But Frith maintains that we bring this knowledge of performance to the public

performance of popular song. And barring the SOS, some sort of framing device always

allows us to interpret this performance as a performance: “In most public performances

the body is, in fact, subject to a kind of external control, the motivation provided by a

score or a script or a routinized social situation, which acts as a safety net for performer

and audience alike” (206). The SOS abandons this safety net. No matter how well we

know the performance tropes of the everyday, this lack of a safety net will force us to

reinterpret public space and demand we make a rather quick (almost spontaneous)

decision on how to react to it.

Frith stresses that we bring our knowledge of everyday performance to any kind of

performance:

Performance may only make sense through the everyday, but “public performance” also describes something marked off from the everyday, something in which when the everyday does appear it is as a joke, an intruder (which also means, to reverse the argument, that when the everyday turns out to have been a performance, to have been literally framed, by a viewfinder, it comes as a shock: “Smile, please! You’re on Candid Camera!”). (207)

Given that many moments over the course of a single day require our managing the

distinction between performance and the everyday, the question of how the staged occurs

within the everyday becomes crucial. If the performance is “keyed,” as Frith puts it, then

how do we know this is a performance in the first place? How specifically is it keyed?

When does the performance start? How do we know when it is over? The answers, of

198

course, will vary along the spectrum of possible performance modes which “range from

the completely novel (spontaneous invention) to the completely fixed (a religious rite)”

(209).

When it comes to popular song, the act of singing moves to the center of this

question of keying. How do singers help us answer those questions above? How do they

let us know they are performing, that they have started to perform? How will they let us

know when their performance is over? Again, barring the SOS, a public performance of

song will always mark off its performative nature:

The “act” of singing is always contextualized by the “act” of performing; and if the latter, like any other stage role, is put together behind the scenes, the former takes place in public; we see and hear the movement in and out of character; we watch this aspect of the performance as a performance. The way singers put roles on and off -- “the next song is a slower number” -- works differently in different genres, but all methods (irony, earnestness, virtuosity, craft pride, humor) draw attention to the singers’ knowledge of what is going on, to their knowledge of our knowledge of what is happening. It’s as if the “as if” of the song performance is foregrounded in order to naturalize the “as if” of the musical performance. (211)

This is an extremely important notion in relation to the SOS. The performer of the

popular song knows that this is a performance, knows s/he is performing. But this

question of knowledge becomes vexed for the performer of an SOS. What markings exist

to signal this is a performance, especially given the unseen source of instrumentation

which gives the performance its illusion of spontaneous generation in the first place? Is

there even enough time to signal a performance of an SOS given its spontaneous

generation, i.e., its extremely brief, perhaps even imperceptible switch out of the

everyday?

As always, the way a performance is keyed can give rise to feelings of

199

embarrassment if the listener has not been able to determine the boundaries of the

performance. But even in explicitly and unambiguously marked performances, there is

always the risk of feeling embarrassment for the performer. Frith explains this in terms

that bring to the fore the power of rock ideology:

The performer’s problem here is that however carefully crafted the star persona, in performance a real body is involved: singing is not necessarily or even desirably pretty – singers sweat, they strain, they open their mouths wide and clench their throats. To make the necessary musical sounds, singers have to do things (or simulate doing things) which may not “fit” the star body, the star persona. (214)

But these signs of potential embarrassment become a sort of ideal when it concerns rock

music. The appearance of strain, sweat, and work can enhance the sense of authenticity

so central to rock ideology.

In general, though, the concert film and explicitly marked performance numbers

provide that safety net which the SOS abandons. Both delineate a public performance

usually with clear beginnings and endings. Often the performer or an announcer will

explicitly mark the beginning of a performance (“now welcome to the stage…” or “the

next song…”) or the ending (“please give a round of applause to…” or a “thank you” to

acknowledge applause). Again, this safety net does not evacuate the embarrassment

potential inherent in all public performances. But it gives rise to a different kind of

embarrassment. For instance, in Woodstock, singer John Sebastian forgets the words to

his own song “Younger Generation.” After trying twice to recall a line, he asks the

audience to help him at which point he is able to resume the song.57 We may feel

57 Interestingly, the beginning of the song serves an omniscient role to a montage of young children at the festival. However, the montage ends just in time for the footage to revert back to Sebastian forgetting his line.

200

embarrassed by this moment. But it is not of the sort that results when the SOS forces a

full-scale redeployment of the public sphere. And for some viewers, it may even add a

touch of authenticity to the performance in the sense that it contains none of the perfectly

rehearsed illusions of the SOS.

To the extent that the musical mode invades many concert films in their

narrative/number alternation, the narrative portions serve to mark the performance all the

more explicitly rather than provide a platform from which to launch an SOS. The famed

split screen in Woodstock serves this function. As Chapter Two made clear, the device

feeds into the “everybody is star” utopian strain of rock ideology by bringing together

audience and performer in the same film frame and rendering the youth crowd just as

much a spectacle as the rock stars on stage. Nevertheless, it keeps the musical

performance aspect of the event separate from the throngs witnessing it. The instruments

and performers produce the music on stage and the split screen underlines this safety net

warding off the threat of the SOS.

Wattstax (1973) presents an even more extreme separation of narrative and number

since many of the narrative scenes occur offsite. The film documents a 1972 Los Angeles

Coliseum concert performance commemorating the seventh anniversary of the Watts

riots. More generally, it documents the move of soul, R&B, and funk artists towards more

explicitly political, album-oriented work epitomized by Marvin Gaye’s 1971 What’s

Going On but bolstered by Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, Sly and The

Family Stone, Parliament-Funkadelic, and countless others including many of the artists

on the Stax label which organized the concert. Director Mel Stuart peppers the music

performances with footage shot at different locales. Interviews with Richard Pryor, Ted

201

Lange, and other commentators function as de facto narration between songs. At several

points, the music takes on an omniscient role as when the film leaves the concert footage

of Kim Weston singing the Black National Anthem, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” and

moves into a montage of key moments in African-American history. Even some of the

musical performances take place outside of the Coliseum. For instance, The Emotions

perform “Peace Be Still” at the Friendly Will Church in footage that was shot several

weeks after the Wattstax concert. The song begins with a recitation over shots of various

churches and members entering the Friendly Will Church. A cut reveals The Emotions

inside the church just as the singing portion of the song begins. After a brief introduction

by Rufus Thomas, Johnnie Taylor performs “Jody’s Got Your Girl and Gone” at The

Summit Club. Most peculiarly, a sort of music video pops into the film about halfway

through with Little Milton lip-syncing his "Walking the Backstreet and Crying" at the

Watts railroad tracks. Even though he does not perform the song live, he plays his guitar

in the sequence, explicitly marking the “music video” as a performance. As always, these

moments provide the safety net so crucial to concert films.

Jonathan Demme takes this safety net about as far as it could go with Stop Making

Sense (1984), the legendary Talking Heads concert film. From the very beginning of the

film, Demme reminds the audience that what we are seeing is a performance. He achieves

this effect by building up various elements of the show during the first twenty minutes of

the film. For the first song, “Psycho Killer,” lead singer David Byrne enters a stage with

no set. Thus the audience can see an ugly back wall, wires, scaffolding, a staircase

presumably leading backstage, and even what appears to be a window letting in sunlight.

Byrne carries a boom box and says “Hi. I got a tape I want to play.” He places it on the

202

floor and pushes play. An electronic drum beat begins on the soundtrack. But it is quite

obvious that the sound does not emanate from the unmiked boom box. Byrne plays guitar

and sings into a mic. As the song nears the end, he walks around the stage. But the beat

starts to skip which makes Byrne trip as well. He recovers his gait only to have the

skipping send him into a series of awkward lurches forward and back.

As Byrne staggers all over the stage, the crew wheels in part of the set. Bassist Tina

Weymouth enters to perform “Heaven” with Byrne. An unseen voice joins him for the

chorus. As this song nears the end, the crew wheels in a platform on which resides the

drum kit. Drummer Chris Frantz jumps on stage and takes his position at the drums to

perform "Thank You for Sending Me an Angel” with Byrne and Weymouth. The final

Head, guitarist Jerry Harrison, joins the band for “Found a Job.” The crew continues to

fill in pieces of the set as the song plays. Throughout these four numbers, Demme

illuminates the stage with harsh, low-contrast lighting. And since a curtain has yet to

separate the performance area from the back half of the stage, the lighting renders the

minimalist set all the more stark. Indeed, it looks as if the audience has become privy to a

soundcheck rather than a full-blown show.

The Talking Heads added five musicians for the film as had long been common

practice to recreate their intricate sound in a live setting. As several of these musicians

join the Heads on stage for “Slippery People,” a black curtain finally descends behind the

band. And although the lighting remains rather harsh, the curtain provides a more

attractive contrast than the unadorned back wall. By the time the entire ensemble come

together on the stage for the next number, “Burning Down the House,” the show at last

resembles a relatively traditional live concert.

203

Dave Kehr describes Stop Making Sense as “filmed in a straightforward manner

that neither deifies the performers nor encourages an illusory intimacy, but presents the

musicians simply as people doing their job and enjoying it” (Stop Making). But, like

many Talking Heads songs, the film means to critique the Yuppie ethic of perpetual work

that was in full swing by the time of the film’s release. So many aspects of Stop Making

Sense point to the harried nature of constantly striving for the good life – the jittery,

bombarded quality of Byrne’s singing and dancing; the running-in-place choreography;

Byrne’s jog around the stage which looks more like calisthenics than performance; the

meaningless businessspeak of several lyrics; his asking the audience “Anybody have any

questions?” immediately after “Life During Wartime” as if he were leading an insurance

seminar rather than a rock concert. And, of course, the steady construction of the show in

front of the audience during the first few songs plays into this concept for the way in

which it uncovers the labor that goes into a concert.

But this very concept also uncovers the limits of the concert film. A 1984 interview

with Demme in which he maintains that he intended Stop Making Sense as a performance

film and not a concert film hints at these limits:

A concert film may intend, like The Last Waltz [Martin Scorsese 1978] did so effectively, to give you a sense of what it was like to be at an event, the focal point of which was the music. In Stop Making Sense, I'd just as soon it didn't occur to people that they're watching a concert, but rather a band performing without the distancing factor of it being an event that happened once. That's why there's no audience in the film until the very end. I thought it was important if the film was to be as effective for filmgoers as it was for me watching the concert. I wanted to capture the energy and the flow and that unrelenting progression of music. (Dare)

Demme’s use of words like “flow” and “unrelenting progression” strongly suggest the

imperative of integration, particularly its apotheosis in sung-through form. And the

204

phrase “distancing factor” stands in for the concept of the safety net of most concerts

(and indeed, most concert films), that crucial element the SOS overthrows. Thus, Demme

aimed for a concert film that tried to ward off explicit markers of performance while

stopping short of SOS numbers. But the explicit markers of performance remain

especially in the opening numbers which reveal to the audience the construction of the

show. They constantly remind us that we are watching a concert. Furthermore, despite

Byrne’s quirky style of performance and audience interaction, he nevertheless uses

traditional tropes of concert behavior, e.g., thanking the audience after certain numbers.

Finally, the oft-mentioned absence of the audience betrays a visual bias in that the

audience makes its presence very much known in the applause and shouts after each

number (and besides, there are quite a few shots of the audience all throughout the film

even if they are not the typical close-ups of reveling fans).

Ultimately, Stop Making Sense reveals that a director can go only so far with what

François Truffaut calls “ventilating the play” (157), opening out a live performance so

that it utilizes the motion picture camera’s greater ability to move across time and space.

The feature-length concert film may be the apposite rock film form, a notion reinforced

by the fact that the form barely existed in the United States before the rock era (most

commentators choose 1964’s The T.A.M.I. Show as the first rock concert film). Its

document of an event that occurred at a particular time and space upholds the safety net

that separates the concert film from the musical featuring SOS numbers. But this very

fixity in time and space limits the ability of a director to exploit cinema’s potential when

bringing the concert to the screen. And even the best concert films, such as the three

discussed above, evince that irresolvable tension between rock and film.

205

Disney

Almost single-handedly, Disney kept the SOS alive during the most dire time for

such numbers in the late 1980s and 1990s via a series of successful feature-length

animated musicals including The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991),

Aladdin (1992), The Lion King (1994), Pocahontas (1995), and Mulan (1998). But the

success of these films should not come as a surprise. Animation itself functions as a

performative safety net. While indeed characters spontaneously burst into song in the

films mentioned above, the animation allows for a separation of the characters on the

screen from the actors who voiced them which cushions the SOS. And no matter how

realistic the animation, it always exists at a remove from everyday reality and thus lacks

the inappropriateness of the space upon which the SOS encroaches.

But in the 2007 film Enchanted, Disney toyed with these conventions in a manner

that sheds light on the nature of the SOS. The film begins in the animated world of

Andalasia where Giselle (Amy Adams) sings “True Love’s Kiss” in an SOS about Prince

Edward (James Marsden). One immediately senses something off about this world. Even

by Disney standards, Andalasia is sickeningly sweet almost to the point of parody with

cute animals and syrupy sentiments. This sense never lets up even as more macabre

elements enter the story. Giselle and Edward become engaged but his stepmother Queen

Narissa (Susan Sarandon) is enraged at the union. She brings Giselle to a wishing well so

Giselle can make a wish before her wedding night. As Giselle wishes she lives happily

ever after with Edward, Queen Narissa pushes her in what actually turns out to be a portal

206

“to a place where there are no ‘happily ever afters’” as per the Queen’s admission.

Giselle morphs into a live-action person and emerges from a sewer in the middle of

Times Square in New York City. The remainder of the film sets up a contrast between the

gritty “reality” of New York City and the fantastical neverland of Andalasia manifested

in Giselle’s absurdly cheery outlook and her ability to burst spontaneously into song.

Giselle encounters Philip (Patrick Dempsey), a divorce lawyer unhappily engaged to

Nancy (Idina Menzel). They stroll in Central Park while discussing love. Philip tells her

that “happily ever after” does not exist. Giselle believes that it can as long as Nancy

knows how much he loves her. Philip assures Giselle that Nancy knows he loves her.

Unconvinced, Giselle asks how.

At this point, Giselle starts singing “how does she know you love her” with no

accompaniment. Philips immediately becomes uncomfortable. He tells her not to sing and

that people are looking. As he moves her briskly through the park, a group of calypso

musicians pick up the song with one singing the same line Giselle did mere seconds

earlier. “He knows the song too?” Philip asks. Giselle runs over to them and they perform

the song together. “I’ve never heard this song,” Philip tries to interject and gives the

musicians some money, hoping that will end the song. Instead, full orchestral

accompaniment rises on the soundtrack as the musicians follow Giselle through the park.

Along the way, they amass more musicians (even though the strings heard quite

prominently on the soundtrack have no source on the screen) and eventually groups of

people who dance the same choreographed moves.

All throughout the song, Philip represents a good-natured but still mildly cranky

reality principle. He gives a baffled look to a group of brides and grooms dancing a circle

207

around him. Giselle tries to bring him into the musical fold, but he tells her that he does

not dance nor sing. While Giselle and all the brides and groups skip blissfully under a

series of flower arcs, Philip runs, nervously trying to outpace the participants. Eventually,

the entire Central Park population throws up their hands and sing in unison. An overhead

shot reveals Philip with his arms folded sitting grumpily in a sea of people who have

frozen their outstretched arms as if they are waiting for Philip to join them. He receives

the message and stands up in exasperation, raising his hands only halfway and pasting a

sardonic grin on his face. Towards the end of the song, a close-up catches him enjoying

the music before quickly shaking off the feeling in embarrassment.

The number means to bring together a community which becomes clear from the

rigidly marked racial and age groups. But Philip’s disdain for the conventions of the SOS

mirrors the similar disdain in American culture of the rock era overall. Thus he offers a

safe way in to the SOS, momentarily succumbing to its community-building charms but

pulling back when its entreaties grow too difficult to bear.

In general, animation shelters an affection for the SOS which explains why so many

SOS numbers pop up in animated sitcoms, particularly the Fox Sunday night lineup with

The Simpsons, Family Guy, and American Dad.58 It also explains the gargantuan success

of the feature-length animated musical South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut (1999).

Like Philip (and by extension, the cynics in the audience), creators Trey Parker and Matt

58 Quite fascinatingly, especially in the context of the discussion about the disdain for musicals in rural areas and smaller towns, King of the Hill, another Fox animated sitcom, almost never features an SOS. It takes place in fictional small town Arlen, Texas, and revolves around propane (and propane accessories) salesman Hank Hill’s perpetual discomfort with a world gone politically correct. However, it is worth noting that explicitly marked performances do appear on a frequent basis in the show.

208

Stone have it both ways. Together with composer Marc Shaiman, they have fashioned a

musical with numbers called “Uncle Fucka” and “Kyle’s Mom is a Big Fat Bitch.” But

they know the conventions of the SOS almost too well so that we find ourselves moved

by a love song between Satan and Saddam Hussein. In short, they can moon over the

sappiest components of the SOS while using the irreverent subject matter to shield

themselves from being transported too far. As Eric Weisbard so astutely puts it: “South

Park's Trey Parker and Matt Stone needn't show themselves to be felt…They indulge one

sappy musical number after another, long past the funny stage, just can't stop believing,

until ex-Doobie Brother Michael McDonald sings ‘Eyes of a Child’ over the closing

credits. What transparent softies” (Weisbard 1999).

Community

Almost all of the films discussed above function in the musical mode in that they

bring a community together through music, a key syntax of the musical. But whereas

musicals in the classical Hollywood era such as Love Me Tonight (1932) or Meet Me in

St. Louis (1944) build their communities around the formation of a heterosexual couple,

most of the rock era films discussed in this section do not make the formation of a

heterosexual couple a central concern. Instead, they attempt to bring different, even

antagonistic social groups together through music. Each example radiates the utopian

energy of the musical without the discomfort caused for some audiences by the SOS.

As with classical Hollywood musicals, many rock era films in the musical mode

feature endings that reconcile upper and lower classes or, more precisely, staid defenders

209

of propriety and laborers in devalued professions. In Richard Linklater’s The School of

Rock (2003), for instance, failed rock musician Dewey Finn (Jack Black) poses as his

friend Ned Schneebly (Mike White) and takes his job as a substitute teacher at a prep

school. He forms a rock band with the pre-teen students and manages to keep it a secret

from the uptight principal Rosalie Mullins (Joan Cusack). Rosalie and a group of enraged

parents discover the ruse. But the climactic concert and the considerable musical skill of

the children softens everyone up. Rosalie even sparks an interest backstage in a rocker

named Spider (Lucas Babin). Ridiculously outfitted in a leather “shirt” that covers only

his arms and shoulders and exposes a huge tattoo on his chest with the word “SEX”

immediately above the belly button, Spider could not present more of a contrast to

Rosalie’s plain black turtleneck and overall conservative business attire. He approaches

her in an overly sexual manner. But while she appears visibly nervous by the come-on,

Rosalie welcomes the advance. It stands in for the general coming together of the stuffy

prep school and rock worlds as the parents quickly become mesmerized in the audience at

their children’s performance.

Of course, the concert aspect provides that reassuring safety net against the SOS. A

similar safety net appears in Doctor Detroit (1983) about another uptight education

professional, this time professor of comparative literature Clifford Skridlow (Dan

Aykroyd) who reluctantly poses as a pimp, the titular Doctor. He saves a group of

prostitutes from the clutches of mob boss Mom (Kate Murtagh) at a climactic alumni

dinner in the Excelsior Hotel in downtown Chicago. Concurrent with the dinner in

another part of the hotel, however, is a party where a large group of flashily dressed

“unsavory” types dance to a live performance by James Brown. Clifford makes an

210

appears as Doctor Detroit and performs a choreographed dance routine while Brown

sings “Get Up Offa That Thing” with a band. Eventually the entire congregation joins in

the choreography. But always Brown and his band remain visible in the background in

yet another voice/body split that buffers against the potential discomfort of the SOS.

Soon the dance party invades the stuffy alumni dinner and with Mom vanquished by the

Doctor, alumni and prostitutes dance together to Patti Brooks’s “Get It On and Have a

Party,” the source of which remains unknown. In a similar vein, the climactic “I’ve Had

The Time of My Life” number from Dirty Dancing brings the lower-class dirty dancers

together with the rich resort patrons. The dancers simply move through the audience at

Baby and Johnny’s performance and choose new, previously disapproving partners. Even

Baby’s father Jake (Jerry Orbach), who throughout the film has voiced the strongest

resentment about the relationship between Baby and Johnny, gives the couple his

blessing while the unified classes dance around them.

Recordings can motivate such utopian musical moments as well. In The Big Chill,

for instance, Harold (Kevin Kline) plays a record of The Temptations’ “Ain’t Too Proud

to Beg” in the living room. But the music blankets the entire house so that all of his

friends can dance to the song in the kitchen. The song brings together a group of former

student radicals who have drifted apart since the 1960s. They spend the weekend together

after the funeral of a friend who has committed suicide. But their various compromises

and delusions cause friction between them. “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” then, comes at a

time in the film when they need the sort of cohesion that apparently only music can bring.

The sounds of their youth can fortify themselves against their encroaching Yuppification

as well as the supposedly more apathetic political climate of the 1980s.

211

Recordings also play a utopian role in The Breakfast Club (1985). Few would

consider the film a musical in any significant way, as with most of the films in this

chapter. One would most likely find it in the comedy or perhaps drama section of the

local video store. But writer/director John Hughes has structured the film so that, despite

its more overt and accepted generic affiliations, it nevertheless functions within the

musical mode.

Altman’s theory of the dual-focus narrative of the musical provides a useful

method for understanding how The Breakfast Club works within the musical mode.

According to Altman, structuralist analyses that seek to uncover the syntagmatic process

of classical Hollywood narrativity cannot apply to the musical since they ignore the

musical’s essential paradigmatic structure. Musicals function on a dual-focus structure

that does not proceed inexorably towards a final goal or enigma resolution. Scenes that

come early in the film, in particular, seem to waste time, to stall the forward motion of

the narrative. Altman concedes that these scenes are crucial for setting up a contrast

between the central male and female characters. With this basic structure in place,

secondary antimonies (often concerning class but also gender, dance styles,

highbrow/lowbrow affinities, age, locale, dress, values, etc.) attach to the characters in

opposition. Thus, scenes in a musical do not relate to one another in a series of causal

logic; rather, they function as parallels that highlight character as opposed to story thrust.

The successful formation of the heterosexual couple at the end of the film, then, not only

brings the central male and female characters together, but it also resolves all those

secondary antinomies. Altman uses the example of the 1940 Jeannette McDonald-Nelson

Eddy vehicle New Moon where society lady McDonald and revolutionary prole Eddy

212

eventually adopt select characteristics of one another’s class to complete their sexual

union after many scenes setting up those characteristics in opposition.

The dual-focus structure of the musical gives way to a multiple-focus

paradigmatic structure in The Breakfast Club as five high school teenagers from different

social cliques are forced to spend a Saturday in detention together. The film progresses

less towards an identifiable goal nor, most decidedly, a resolution than through a series of

comparisons among the five characters. Two scenes in particular (the lunch scene and the

dance scene) serve to set up these distinctions. What they eat and how they dance is

memorably contrasted in individual shots for each:

Eat Dance

The Princess/ Claire Standish Sushi Valley Girl-ish; (Molly Ringwald) well-executed The Athlete/ Andrew Clark Comically huge Mimics the (Emilio Estevez) “growing boy” lunch instrumental athleticism The Brain/ Brian Johnson PB&J, no crusts; Nerdy; in AV (Anthony Michael Hall) Apple Juice room The Basket Case/ Allison Reynolds Sugar and Cap’n Weird; (Ally Sheedy) Crunch on white convulsing bread The Criminal/ John Bender Nothing Thrashing; (Judd Nelson) abusing public art

213

The dance scene functions like the song and dance scenes of a classical Hollywood

musical – it strives to forge community integration through song and dance. The song

begins as Brian places the needle clumsily on a record of Karla DeVito’s “We Are Not

Alone” which then inspires a dance. Sets of two or three characters perform simple but

nevertheless synchronized and choreographed dance steps together (intriguingly, all five

are never seen dancing in the same shot perhaps underscoring the ultimate impossibility

of permanently integrating this particular community). The scene also puts in motion one

of the two kinds of impossibilities that Martin Rubin detected in the musical number -- its

unrealistic introduction into a realist narrative discourse. By this point in the film, we

know that the supervisor, Richard Vernon (Paul Gleason), can hear the teenagers from his

office next door to the library where they are incarcerated and bursts in at random

intervals to check up on them, at one point due to their shouting at one another. So the

record played at a loud enough volume to foster the dance exemplifies the number’s

unrealistic introduction into a realist narrative.

The Breakfast Club regularly alternates its narrative with musicals numbers like these.

In an earlier scene, all five spontaneously join in whistling “Colonel Bogey’s March” just

like characters in a classical Hollywood musical spontaneously join together in song.

Wang Chung’s “Fire in the Twilight” scores their forbidden race through the hallways as

if it were a music video. And the scene in which they all smoke marijuana exemplifies

Rubin’s other theory of the impossibility of the musical number -- its non-

verisimilitudinous scale and effects. A song begins in the middle of the scene. Andrew

emerges out of the smoke-filled AV room where he has presumably played the song on

the turntable. He breaks into an athletic dance to the cheers of his stoned compatriots and

214

winds up back in the AV room. He shouts and shatters the glass door that he has shut

behind him, an effect as impossible as Busby Berkeley’s overhead shots. Almost as

impossible is the fact that Andrew has chosen for his dance an instrumental rock song,

“I’m The Dude” composed by Keith Forsey. Instrumental rock is practically an

oxymoron, particularly this song which exudes none of the expansive experimentation of

The Grateful Dead, countless progressive rock, or Krautrock bands and instead simply

sounds like a conventional rock song with the vocals excised.

The prominence of “I’m The Dude” in the film brings to the forefront an aspect of

The Breakfast Club that usually goes unmentioned -- the cynical and flat-out appalling

choice of music for a film that supposedly defined a generation (e.g., Entertainment

Weekly called it “the best high school movie of all time” in their issue on the “50 Best

High School Movies”) (Pastorek 47). Only one song, Simple Minds’ “Don’t You (Forget

About Me),” became an anthem and even there lead singer Jim Kerr wavered back and

forth between disgust and mild resignation over the song. Forsey wrote it specifically for

the film and when Roxy Music’s head lounge lizard Bryan Ferry turned it down, Forsey

offered it to Simple Minds who resisted until they saw a cut of the film. But despite the

song reaching number one on the Billboard singles charts, Kerr badmouthed it in the

press, telling the Los Angeles Times that “sometimes I play it and I just puke” (Bronson

607).

No matter how dismal Kerr found “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” however, it does

not approach the assembly-line blandness of the remaining songs - musical clip art meant

to give a hurried approximation of rock. All but one of the artists (Wang Chung, the most

well-known by the time of the film’s release) who recorded these songs were signed to

215

A&M Records which released the soundtrack and whose film division produced The

Breakfast Club. Thus the songs were quite obviously chosen to promote lesser artists on

the A&M roster rather than for their ability to say anything significant about 1980s youth.

Worst of all, the ten-cut, thirty-eight-minute soundtrack album was filled out with four

Forsey instrumentals. One does not need to wait for the copout ending (which fails both

to mount a program to sustain the fragile friendship between the cliques and to imagine

the inevitable compromises on Monday morning), then, to understand that The Breakfast

Club is the product of a conservative mind with no serious commitment to portraying

1980s youth. In fact, rather than giving 1980s youth the representations so many of them

craved, the film seems better tailored to Boomers, assuring them that nothing of political

or cultural import has occurred since the 1960s. And with the ersatz rock songs sloshing

throughout the soundtrack, that falsity feels as if it has the ring of truth. In the end, The

Breakfast Club is one in a long line of hapless attempts to incorporate rock (or “rock”)

into film.

The SOS Under Duress

Despite all the methods outlined above to avoid the SOS, it still existed in rock-

era films. However, more often than not, the SOS appeared in these films in a rather

distressed form. Either it turns up as a critique of the musical’s supposedly fraudulent

form or it pops into the narrative as a joke or an expendable appendage. This section,

then, will analyze the abuse of the SOS in a revisionist musical of the so-called New

Hollywood, Peter Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love (1975) as well as its overall

216

attenuation. Next it moves into an analysis of the various forms the SOS has increasingly

taken since 1980 -- the Self-Conscious SOS, the Joke SOS, and the Closing Credits SOS.

Finally, it ends with two non-film takes on the SOS - the famous “Once More With

Feeling” (2001) episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer television series and Emma

Brockes’s 2008 memoir What Would Barbra Do?: How Musicals Changed My Life.

The New Hollywood and The SOS

Film theorists often conceive the New Hollywood (which runs roughly from the 1967

releases of Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate to the various financial failures of

several associated directors, epitomized by Michael Cimino’s 1980 Heaven’s Gate) as a

modernist critique of the classical Hollywood era. But this assertion already ignores the

considerable amount of modernist tendencies in such classical Hollywood films as

Sunrise (1927), Lonesome (1928), Freaks (1932), The Old Dark House (1932), The Bitter

Tea of General Yen (1933), Duck Soup (1933), Stella Dallas (1937), Hellzapoppin’

(1941), The Palm Beach Story (1942), Yolanda and the Thief (1945), The Pirate (1948),

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), Pandora and The Flying Dutchman (1951), Track of

the Cat (1954), Imitation of Life (1959) as well as many titles by Josef Von Sternberg,

Otto Preminger, Frank Tashlin, and Jerry Lewis not to mention countless noirs and, of

course, musicals. It also ignores the relationship of classic Hollywood history to other

histories. Miriam Hansen, for instance, upsets any rigid notion of classicism by situating

the classical Hollywood cinema as a whole within the experience of modernity (2000).

217

Another conception usually expressed about the New Hollywood is that,

especially in the wake of the reorganization of the Production Code into a Ratings

SYstem, directors were now finally free to launch their subversive attacks on Hollywood

illusion-making as well as sociopolitical norms in general. But such a conception ignores

the often retrograde attitudes of the films themselves, particularly in regard to gender and

sexuality. And when tackling certain cherished Hollywood genres, the New Hollywood

films tended to radiate a contempt for a given genre’s seductiveness as if the directors

were suddenly enraged that they ever bought into any genre’s illusions.

Nowhere is this more apparent with respect to the musical than in Herbert Ross’s

1981 Pennies From Heaven based on Dennis Potter’s 1978 BBC television drama. Steve

Martin plays Arthur Parker, a struggling sheet music salesman in the 1930s who mourns

the lies that Tin Pan Alley songs (and hence the songs that appear in classical Hollywood

musicals) tell about life. Flashy hallucinations of big budget musical numbers place into

sharper relief the “reality” of Arthur’s comically grim milieu. In all of the musical

sequences save for the title number, the characters lip-sync to obviously marked

recordings of the songs in an attempt to foster a distancing effect.

It would be difficult to better Dave Kehr’s assessment of the film’s extreme

shortcomings:

This 1981 film drips with a sense of anger and betrayal that seems wildly out of scale to its cause--the discovery (less than original) that musicals don't reproduce social reality. The point is made endlessly, though it's in the film's favor that it's made with seriousness, consideration, and a certain amount of imagination. Unfortunately the only value the film can find to range against the false romanticism of the music is a low-grade sexuality, which is itself mocked and made into the wellspring of the characters' problems. (“Pennies”)

218

Indeed, the narrative portions of the film amount to little more than a “feel bad” movie,

every bit as banal and lacking in insight as a “feel good” movie. And implicit throughout

is the suggestion that 1930s audiences swallowed whatever illusions Hollywood may

have fed them with no qualms. Like many products of the New Hollywood, Pennies

From Heaven offers a concept of history as ever-progressing with the contemporary

audience in the perfect position to receive maximum enlightenment from such

“progression.”

Much less bile rises to the surface of At Long Last Love. But the film is besieged

by an even more damaging conceit about the musical. Bogdanovich decided to jettison

the conventional method of prerecording the vocals in the production of film musicals.

Instead, he recorded the vocals live along with the dialogue. The sound department at

Twentieth Century-Fox along with Sycom Inc. developed speakers that could fit

unobtrusively in the actors’ ears. An electronic piano provided the musical

accompaniment for the actors but quietly enough so that the microphones recorded only

the vocals. Gus Levene’s orchestrations were then recorded to an edit of the film, the

vocals already on the soundtrack.

Hollywood adopted the technique of prerecording around 1932 to allow for better

sound fidelity and freer camera movement although plenty of early musicals featured a

remarkably mobile camera, e.g. Applause, Hallelujah!, The Love Parade, and Pointed

Heels, all from 1929. But in At Long Last Love, prerecording comes off as a nefarious

plot that Bogdanovich had to kill off in order to end its illusion-making tyranny. And

judging from his comments on the film, it becomes quite clear that his decision to forego

prerecording stems from a fear of the SOS. Miles Kreuger offers a telling introduction to

219

Bogdanovich’s thoughts in the liner notes to the original motion picture soundtrack

album:

In a conventional musical film, when characters begin to sing and dance during a dramatic scene, there is a certain suspension of reality; and the audience is expected to understand that in real life such musical outbursts would be expressed in everyday words. This is not so in At Long Last

Love. In Peter’s own words, ‘I didn’t want to make a musical that was about singing and dancing: I wanted to make a musical about some people who sing and dance instead of walk and talk.’ (“At Long”)

But, of course, despite the appearance of sixteen Cole Porter songs in 118 minutes, At

Long Last Love features a great deal of walking and talking, more than enough to make it

“necessary” for the audience to exercise a suspension of disbelief. In other words, At

Long Last Love features mostly SOS numbers despite the attempts of Kreuger and

Bogdanovich to deny their appearance, and live recording does nothing to dispel this

reality.

In fact, the film transforms talking and, even more so, mumbling into an idée fixe.

Muted voices and incomprehensible murmurs perpetually, drearily remind us that the

mise-en-bande here fosters no illusions and that the singing voices were indeed recorded

live along with the dialogue, rest assured. At Long Last Love was certainly not the first

film to subject Porter songs to such invasions. In High Society (1956) Frank Sinatra and

Bing Crosby punctuate “Well, Did You Evah!” with bits of chat in between sung

passages. And in “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” Celeste Holm sings into a jar, her

“I don’t” response distorted into its cavern. Sinatra sings an “I don’t” with a spoon in his

mouth, his “I don’t” muffled with a spoonful of imaginary caviar. But these brief

interjections emanate from the prerecording and certainly do not form an obsessive motif

in the film.

220

By contrast, the opening scene of At Long Lost Love sets in motion a long stream

of babble and noise that fights with the songs for our attention. The very first bits of

dialogue we hear in the film come from behind a door in the hallway as the camera waits

inside a room for Kitty O’Kelly (Madeline Kahn) and her latest conquest to enter. Only

once they have thrown open the door can we hear their dialogue clearly. Furthermore,

Kitty is drunk which motivates her unstable performance of the film’s first song, “Down

in the Depths on the 90th Floor.” She wavers off pitch, revs into a mock operatic screech,

and makes noise (stamping her feet and throwing a picture frame) that competes with her

song.

This scene, then, opens up a veritable and quickly exhausting torrent of mumbles.

Before we see Brooke Carter (Cybill Shepherd) for the first time, we hear her muted

voice from behind elevator doors as she chats with the elevator boy. As she sings

“Which,” her friend Elizabeth (Eileen Brennan) punctuates the song with mumbled

phrases. Heartthrob Johnny Spanish (Duilio Del Prete) goes out to purchase a newspaper

and the salesman at the newspaper stand is mumbling to himself. A doorman practices a

W.C. Fields impersonation to himself in a mumble. Millionaire Michael Oliver Pritchard

III (Burt Reynolds) sings “You’re The Top” and Kitty punctuates his song with yet more

drunken mumbling. At a dinner club, Brooke and Kitty start to talk to one another in low

mumbling so that the voices of Michael and Johnny can be heard better as the latter begin

to talk to one another. Michael and Johnny mumble to one another on the club dancefloor

as Brooke and Kitty launch into “Friendship.” During “But In The Morning, No,”

Rodney (John Hillerman) and Elizabeth punctuate each other’s sung lines with mumbling

chit-chat. Etc.

221

All of this mumbling feeds into the one feature in which At Long Last Love takes

most pride – the maintenance of a “realistic” sonic pace. A prerecording offers an

idealized sonic environment. Here, though, the constant interjections remind us that

Bogdanovich has maintained the space in which he recorded the vocals. When Johnny

sings “Tomorrow,” the camera follows him down the hallway and his voice gains a

“boxed in” quality due to the tighter confines of the space. Conversely, “But In The

Morning, No” takes place in a large kitchen and the voices of Rodney and Elizabeth echo

in the draftier space. Even dialogue scenes function in this manner. As Rodney and

Johnny chat after a night of drunken revelry, Johnny continues the conversation as he

walks up a grand staircase But the camera never cuts and the microphone does not follow

him. Instead, he converses in the background and the softer volume and more echoed

quality of his voice indicates his distance from both the camera and the microphone.

And Bogdanovich ups the ante of realism in several respects. All of the scenes are

shot in absurdly long takes, longer than in most classical Hollywood musicals. In fact,

several scenes are one shot in their entirety, e.g. the first one which includes Kitty’s

“Down in the Depths on the 90th Floor” number. So not only has Bogdanovich

maintained the singing voice in the space in which it was recorded but he has opted to cut

up that space via editing as little as possible in order to augment the song’s realist effect.

And in addition to all that mumbling, he places even more sonic obstacles in the way of

the song to underline further the space in which the vocals were recorded. Characters sing

while shaving, eating, coughing, riding on cars, or swimming in a pool. Finally, many

scenes remind us that the characters are indeed singing. Before Michael sings “You’re

The Top,” he clears his throat in an attempt to reveal the illusion of the performance.

222

Brooke asks Johnny if he is finished singing at one point. And the scene after the drunken

revelry at the dinner club uses the characters’ hangovers to motivate an acknowledgement

of singing. For instance, when Rodney sings a line of “But In The Morning, No” too

loudly, he not only elicits a painful wince out of Elizabeth but himself as well when he

holds his head in pain after the line. He continues to sing as he serves breakfast to

Michael. But the singing bothers the equally hungover Michael as well with the latter

interrupting his song and demanding “Why are you yelling?” The scene is replayed

immediately afterwards with Brooke and Elizabeth.

At Long Last Love approaches the musical with a virtuosic machismo that could

only have arisen in the rock era. It tries to maintain the integrity of the performers and

their voices in a manner similar to the way the merged professional aimed to integrate all

musical labor into one person. And by forgoing prerecording, it casts a disdainful eye on

the illusory propensities of technology in a manner similar to rock ideology. Ultimately,

the live recording means to uncover the illusion of spontaneity in the SOS. As Kreuger

puts it, “what was lost by the gain in control [with prerecording] was of course the spark

of spontaneity and the sometimes out-of-breath excitement of a performer’s actually

creating a song-and-dance before the audience’s eyes” (“At Long”). But the live

recording papers over the unexamined assumption that the voice is the only source of

spontaneity and hence a more reliable measure of a person’s identity. For the fact remains

that the orchestra still maintains its position of omniscience, especially through its

idealized, post-recorded existence. As with most orchestras in musicals, it knows more

than the characters do about themselves thus shortchanging in advance the more

“realistic” gains made in recording the actors singing live. Furthermore, Bogdanovich

223

never gave any consideration to the potential spontaneity of a live recorded orchestra

creating a song-and-dance before the audience’s eyes. Finally, he ignores the

incongruous, often camp potential of the mismatch between the prerecording and the

actor’s lip syncing to it weeks later. One can glean this particular misunderstanding of the

musical in Bogdanovich’s own words on his problem with prerecording: “It struck me as

a terribly difficult thing to ask an actor to sing something two or three weeks before you

shoot it and then not worry about anything when they’re doing the scene except getting

their lips in sync with what they did three weeks ago. What happens if they feel it

differently?” (“At Long”) What indeed? For in that difference lies the incongruity that has

endeared the musical to so many people who have long felt different themselves, a life-

affirming aspect that At Long Last Love casts aside in a misguided attempt to foster

realism in a place where it has no business.

The SOS After 1980

As with The Sound of Music in the 1960s, the enormous success of Grease in 1978

inspired the production of big-budget musicals with SOS numbers. And just as with The

Sound of Music, a string of flops along the lines of Song of Norway, Lost Horizon (1973),

and At Long Last Love followed in its wake: the Village People extravaganza Can’t Stop

The Music (1980), “the perfect crystallization of a 13-year-old girl's taste, circa 1980”

Xanadu (1980) (Kehr), the Broadway warhorse Annie (1982), and the inevitable Grease 2

(1982). For the next twenty years, the SOS continued along its rock-era path in films

greeting it with anxiety even in independent cinema. Eventually, it drops out of films

224

altogether for years at a time -- between Little Shop of Horrors (1986) and Earth Girls

Are Easy (1989); between Newsies and Sarafina! (both 1992) and the banner year of

1996 with Everyone Says I Love You, Evita, and Cannibal: The Musical; and between

1996 and Love’s Labour’s Lost, Dancer in the Dark, and the delayed release of The

Fantasticks all 2000.

A Chorus Line (1985) suggested a grim future for film adaptations of Broadway

smashes with an ignominious take on the musical. Director Richard Attenborough filmed

the famed opening number, "I Hope I Get It," as if the SOS were an embarrassing secret.

The first singing occurs as voiceovers of first one woman, then another hoping they get

the chorus job. Their lips do not move. The camera cuts to an extreme long shot of the

entire stage from high up above at which point we hear the entire cast of hopefuls singing

the same concerns in voiceover. But the camera shoots from so high up that it is

extremely difficult to tell if anyone's lips are moving along to the song. When the camera

finally cuts to some people singing, the cuts come very quickly. Then a tracking shot

moves from the back of the stage towards one woman. She sings about how she needs

this job. But only on the last line of her singing does she turn towards the camera so that

we can finally see that she is indeed actually singing. The entire scene plays out as a

series of nerve-wracked attempts to dance around the SOS and delay its full blossom as

long as possible.

Even worse, Attenborough evinced a profound misunderstanding of the musical’s

spirit. In an arbitrary, frankly repulsive scene in which Zach (Michael Douglas) tells

Cassie (Alyson Reed) that she is too good to remain in the background, Attenborough

transforms the chorus into an object of contempt rather than the subject of long overdue

225

praise that made the original production such a record-breaking hit. Hirschhorn describes

the scene with accuracy and the anger it deserves:

To prove his point [Zach] directs [Cassie’s] attention to a stage-full of auditioning hopefuls. What, in fact. he is showing her is a line-up of men and women with ugly, exaggerated expressions on their faces indulging in a grotesque parody of the Nazi goose-step. It is not an edifying sight and the point being made is that a chorus line is something all self-respecting dancers try to get out of, not into. This “message” is Attenborough's brainchild (he used a similar effect in Oh What a Lovely War [Paramount, 1969]) and it illustrated just how completely he ignored the fact that…A

Chorus Line…is an affectionate tribute to those anonymous “gypsies,” as they are known in the profession, rather than a condemnation of them. (429)

Independent cinema radiates a similar anxiety about the SOS. The American

Astronaut (2001), a sort of bargain basement Buckeroo Banzai, fuses the art film with sci-

fi, the western, and the musical. But writer/director Cory McAbee is clearly least

comfortable with the musical given how he prolongs the introduction of an SOS.

Records, a dance contest, and explicitly marked performances motivate numbers in the

film, and long stretches of instrumentals dominate the soundtrack. By the time the film

finally comes around to an SOS number, it lasts less than a minute and is sung-spoke by

intergalactic trader Samuel Curtis (McAbee) and The Boy Who Actually Saw a Woman's

Breast59 (Gregory Russell Cook). Curtis’s nemesis Professor Hess (Rocco Sisto) turns the

audience for The Boy’s stage performance into dust. He takes over the stage and sings a

song. But when he jumps off the stage to roll around and dance in the dust, the singing

stops as if it could only exist on a stage. Later in the film, The Boy starts to sing a song

on Curtis’s spaceship but only gets out “There’s a…” before a mechanical voice

interrupts him indicating that a phone call is coming through. Yet another number is

59 This is indeed how he is listed in the credits.

226

sung-spoke by a man in silhouette. Every number seems designed to ward off the full

impact of the SOS.

Such a hostile environment for the SOS should compel one to reconsider the few

musicals since 1980 that have managed to find some success. For one thing, Evita (1996)

and Moulin Rouge! (2001) were much less successful financially in the United States

than reports would lead one to believe. Both cost around $50 million but both barely

broke even in the United States. World sales contributed more to the films’ success with

Evita bringing in $90 million and Moulin Rouge! $120 million. Dancer in the Dark

(2000), Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001), Chicago (2002), and Dreamgirls (2006) all

enjoyed critical and/or commercial success. But most of the numbers in these films were

explicitly marked performances or the products of a dreamworld. Based on the John

Kander/Fred Ebb/Fosse 1975 musical, Chicago is especially important here due to its

Best Picture Oscar and its huge commercial success ($300 million worldwide against a

$45 million production budget). Almost all of the numbers in the film arise from Roxie

Hart’s (Renée Zellweger) imagination which impelled director Rob Marshall to aim for a

high degree of dreamlike stylization. For instance, the “Cell Block Tango” number

resembles a rather expensive filming of a theatrical performance. The high contrast

lighting and movable sets shy away from the everyday spaces that the SOS could charge

with musicality.

Even within explicitly marked performance numbers in films of the last twenty

years, there is an overall attenuation of the trappings of the SOS that such numbers could

possibly take on. Altman notes this propensity in performance numbers in his discussion

of audio and video dissolves, moments in which the relative reality of the narrative

227

dissolves into the more fantastical world of the musical numbers. His chief example is

when Elvis Presley sings “Can’t Help Falling in Love” in Blue Hawaii (1961). A music

box introduces the song as other musical elements slowly build on the soundtrack

completing almost imperceptibly the shift from dialogue to song. In fact, many numbers

in Elvis films work in this fashion. The title song from Spinout (1966), for instance,

begins with a shot of a band performing the song at a party. But the camera tracks to the

right to reveal Elvis on an island surrounded by a sea of shimmying girls. Although the

camera cuts back to the band once, it mainly follows Elvis as he roams around the party.

With the band relatively hidden in this manner, the number takes on the feel of the SOS.

More tellingly, when he is about to kiss Diana St. Clair (Diane McBain) in the woods, the

sound of acoustic guitars stops the kiss. They both glance over to discover two members

of his band, Larry (Jimmy Hawkins) and Curly (Jack Mullaney), playing the guitars.

Elvis gives a look to Diana that says “eh, might as well” and then starts to sing “All That

I Am” to her. But before he even gets the words out, Larry and Curly crouch down and

scoot backwards into a tent, all while still playing their guitars. They are never seen again

throughout the number as various unseen musical elements (violins, bass, a female

chorus) enter into the mix. By contrast, in more recent films such as The Thing Called

Love (1993), That Thing You Do! (1996), Josie and The Pussycats (2001), Down and Out

With The Dolls (2001), Rock My World (2002), Prey for Rock & Roll (2003), Music and

Lyrics (2007), and countless others featuring explicitly marked performances, the

numbers have much more clear boundaries and rarely, if ever, threaten to spill over into

an SOS.

228

Much more fascinating throughout these years are the various coping mechanisms

used to deal with the appearance of SOS numbers. The Self-Conscious SOS explicitly

acknowledges certain aspects of the SOS. For instance, in Little Shop of Horrors, as

Seymour Krelborn (Rick Moranis) and Audrey Fulquard (Ellen Greene) launch into a

reprise of “Suddenly Seymour,” Patrick Martin (Jim Belushi), a Licensing and Marketing

executive with World Botanical Enterprises, interrupts them with a moneymaking offer

that will exploit the fame of the man-eating plant Audrey II. His line “excuse me, pardon

me, beg your pardon, if you two kids would just stop singing for a moment…” cuts off

not only their singing but the orchestral accompaniment as well, stealing away its powers

of omniscience. Somewhat similarly, in Cannibal: The Musical (1996), Polly Pry (Toddy

Walters) sings “This Side of Me” on a staircase. A man descends the staircase and pauses

next to Polly. She casts her eyes heavenward as she thinks of Alferd Packer (Trey Parker)

with whom she is falling in love. He searches around for the source of the music and tries

to see what Polly is staring at in moony transport. She stares at him in annoyance while

still singing and the man quickly leaves. Finally, two recent musicals, the real estate

musical Open House (2004) and Colma: The Musical (2007), feature songs that explicitly

acknowledge that the characters are singing. In each of these instances, the songs draw

attention to the conventions of the SOS in order to placate the audience about its freakish

eruption into a narrative.

But still the SOS never seems to go away, surfacing in film after film as if it were

Hollywood’s repressed consciousness. There is the Joke SOS in which an SOS erupts

into a comedy and is played for laughs. Clerks 2 (2006) features a scene in which Becky

Scott (Rosario Dawson) teaches Dante Hicks (Brian O’Halloran) how to dance while on

229

the roof of Mooby’s fast food restaurant. Silent Bob (Kevin Smith) and Jay (Jason

Mewes) play The Jackson 5’s “ABC” on a boom box to motivate the dancing. Thus the

number starts off as an explicitly marked performance. As the number progresses,

however, employees and patrons of Mooby’s start to dance along until a group of people

rush out in front of the restaurant and burst out into simultaneous choreography. And as

with so many musical numbers in any era, it means to bring a community together by

explicitly marking the diversity of the group which features people of varied race, sex,

age, and professional backgrounds. Even a nun catches the boogie fever. And towards the

end of Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (1997), the two principal characters

(played by Mira Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow respectively) perform a spontaneous

choreographed dance to Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” with Sandy Frink (Alan

Cumming) at the titular reunion. Still others maintain the features of the SOS throughout

the entire number: “We’ve Got a Happy Ending” from Pray TV (1980), “More Gum”

from Billy Madison (1995), “I’m Gay” from Brain Candy (1996), “Prom Tonight” from

Not Another Teen Movie (2001) “Afternoon Delight” from Anchorman: The Legend of

Ron Burgundy (2004). And a few serious SOS numbers have shown up in more dramatic

films. The major characters in Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia (1999) sing along to

Aimee Mann’s “Wise Up” in different locations while Pilot Abilene (Justin Timberlake)

lip syncs to The Killers’ “All These Things That I've Done," his lips wavering off sync at

certain points, in Southland Tales (2007). In both instances, the source of the music

remains unseen. Finally, a sad SOS called “Gee, I'm Glad It's Rainin'” rather bizarrely

appears in the goofy comedy Ernest Goes to Camp (1987) sung by the titular hero (Jim

Varney).

230

Splitting off somewhat from the Joke SOS, the Closing Credits SOS shunts off the

SOS until the very end of the film or, more commonly, the closing credits roll. With all

narrative loose ends tied, no story element remains to render an SOS problematic. And its

effects will be blunted, if not eradicated altogether, by those who walk out of the theater

or turn off the DVD during the credits. Owen Gleiberman, film critic for Entertainment

Weekly, suggests that the closing credits SOS is perfectly suited to moviegoers who do

not like the musical:

I'm one of those pesky folks who has never had much use for musicals. Too precious! Too oldfangled Hollywood! In a trend I can't seem to get enough of, though, yesterday's cornball convention is today's irresistible new fangle, as actors in romantic comedies gather during the closing credits to sing and dance and send the audience home on a musical contact high. (60)

Films featuring a closing credits SOS include There's Something About Mary (1998),

Shrek (2001), Bend It Like Beckham (2002), Garage Days (2002), Down With Love

(2003), The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005), Hitch (2005), Jackass 2 (2006), Inland Empire

(2006), The Game Plan (2007), and I Think I Love My Wife (2007).

SOS Anxiety – A Summary

To gain some perspective on this anxiety-ridden environment surrounding the SOS,

I want to bring this chapter to a close by looking beyond film at first a television show

and then a book. Both the “Once More, With Feeling” episode of Buffy The Vampire

Slayer and Guardian journalist Emma Brockes’s memoir What Would Barbra Do?: How

Musicals Changed My Life look at the SOS from an affectionate distance. They

acknowledge the problematic status of the SOS in the rock era. But that status does not

231

prevent some of the characters in Buffy from discovering how it can enhance their day-to-

day existence. As a memoir about real life musical fandom, however, What Would

Barbra Do? feels embattled and exhausted by the end of its 288 pages. In other words,

both Buffy and Barbra acknowledge SOS anxiety but handle it in different ways.

Buffy

If moviegoers in the rock era have more problems accepting the SOS than did those

in previous eras, then how are they able to accept the impossible feats of superheroes, the

supernatural strength of monsters and serial killers, the scrapes with death of the action

hero, and the imaginative leaps in science fiction, all spectacular events that still manage

to sell millions of movie tickets? Brockes wonders something similar in What Would

Barbra Do?:

A character sings only when he or she is so profoundly moved, either by joy or misery, that speech is no longer adequate, just as Shakespeare moves between poetry and prose for the same reasons. It’s a metaphor, like David Banner turning into the Incredible Hulk is a metaphor for anger. Nobody complains about that, or about kung fu or zombie films being unrealistic and the musical makes as much sense within the bounds of its own conventions as they do. (94)

The reason why people complain about the unrealism of the musical lies in the genre’s

failure (or unwillingness) to explain the SOS. And it “needs” explaining for the SOS is an

abnormality. For better or worse, we ourselves cannot spontaneously burst into song in

the manner defined in Chapter Three. And if indeed something like the SOS were to

happen, its supernatural generation would absolutely require some sort of analysis,

precisely what the musical never offers. By contrast, many horror, sci-fi, action, and

232

superhero franchise films do offer explanations for their supernatural occurrences,

sometimes even obsessively so. Andrew Tudor has pointed out the importance of experts

in horror and science-fiction films (113-15). As a kind of hero in these films, experts

compete with the monster and the victims for our affections. And their importance to the

narrative fluctuates over time. For instance, 1950s sci-fi films found great use for

scientists and the like while films of the 1960s and 1970s portrayed them as

comparatively impotent. But in general, they remain a key character component in these

genres. And a genre such as sci-fi tends to spread that expertise out to producers and fans.

Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994), for instance, takes pride in assigning a

particular function or value to various bits of technology strewn throughout the show.

And the more hardcore fans come to expect a rigid consistency in that functionality.

As a show that revels in hybridity, Buffy contains elements of horror, sci-fi, and

fantasy in addition to its basic hour-long comedy-drama format. It centers on The Scooby

Gang, a group in fictional Sunnydale, California that assists Buffy Summers (Sarah

Michelle Gellar) in battling numerous supernatural demons. Most episodes spend a

significant portion of the narrative determining the nature of the particular demon and

how to vanquish it. Every member of The Scooby Gang is an expert to some extent,

especially Giles (Anthony Stewart Head), Buffy’s Watcher (a person who trains others in

battling demons). Indeed, much of the comedy stems from the Gang’s blasé, “been there,

done that” attitude towards the enormously bizarre task of slaying evil.

“Once More, With Feeling” bridges the worlds of the musical and the

supernatural because SOS numbers become a problem of supernatural proportions in the

episode. After a brief scene with no dialogue tracing the daily preparations of the Gang,

233

Buffy roams around a cemetery at night searching for demons to slay. It seems like an

ordinary evening of work for her until she starts singing, something that has never

happened before even in the fantastical universe of Buffy. In fact, she cannot help but sing

-- an SOS number called “Going Through The Motions.” Even more out of the ordinary,

everyone around her sings and dances including assorted vampires and goat demons as

well as one of their hunky victims.

The next morning, Buffy hesitantly asks the Gang if “anybody burst into song.” It

turns out they did too and quickly becomes clear that a demon has cast a spell on the

entire Sunnydale community in the form of the SOS. Their ensuing discussion about the

spell lays out the features of the SOS. Tara (Amber Benson) explains that “we were

talking and then it was like…” “like you were in a musical!” exclaims Buffy finishing her

thought. Giles now understands what happened with his evening: “That would explain

the huge backing orchestra I couldn't see and the synchronized dancing from the room

service chaps.” Anya (Emma Caulfield) confesses that “we were arguing and then

everything rhymed and there were harmonies and the dance with coconuts.” And Xander

(Nicholas Brendon) informs everyone that he found it “very disturbing…and not the

natural order of things.” In this brief conversation, the Gang touch on the seemingly

random generation of the SOS, its unseen source of instrumentation, and its use of

popular song.

Three aspects of “Once More, With Feeling” exaggerate the impact of the SOS in

the episode. As the dialogue quoted above makes clear, the episode is not sung-through.

No one can predict when an SOS will occur thus heightening its intensity. And while

many of the songs in “Once More, With Feeling” address love, doubt, fear, and other

234

staples of popular song, the SOS also infects the most banal conversation. For instance,

when Buffy looks outside to see if indeed the spell has been cast over everyone in

Sunnydale, the camera cranes back from a man holding his dry cleaning and singing

“they got the mustard out!” into an extreme long shot of a group of Sunnydale citizens

doing the same, the fresh, plastic-covered apparel undulating in the arm-flailing

choreography. Finally, the people who spontaneously burst into song soon spontaneously

burst into flames. With this device, the episode links the SOS to a common use of the

word “spontaneous” (in “spontaneous combustion”) and thus to a danger that needs to be

eradicated. No more apt and pungent metaphor for the vexed status of the SOS in the

rock era exists. And in the episode’s next song, “I’ve Got a Theory,” the Gang get down

to the business of figuring out how to end the spell.60

But while creator Joss Whedon discovered an extraordinarily clever way to

motivate the SOS through the genre of fantasy and horror, thus submitting its abnormality

to the explanatory powers of the experts in The Scooby Gang, the SOS nevertheless

possesses enriching properties. Buffy conveys a major revelation in the series61 through

song (“Life’s A Show”) which means, for once, an SOS does propel the narrative

forward. Several of the Gang actually like the spell, especially Dawn (Michelle

60 Somewhat of the opposite problem happened in an earlier episode, “Hush.” The spooky Gentlemen rob the citizens of Sunnydale of their ability to speak occasioning many exaggerated mouth movements and hand gestures. 61 Buffy died in Season Five. Everyone assumed she went to Hell but instead she ascended to Heaven. This was an escape for Buffy since she wanted to be done with slaying. Slaying is a burden because slayers do not reap the superhero rewards. They protect the commonly held idea that vampires and the like do not exist. Thus Buffy feels dead, going through the motions, as her first song in “Once More, With Feeling” puts it. However, the Gang pulled Buffy back from what they assumed was Hell. In the song “Life’s A Show,” she reveals that she was in Heaven. The Gang is understandably shocked at her revelation.

235

Trachtenberg) who finds that her math homework “seemed cooler when we were singing

about it.” And “Once More, With Feeling” itself is easily the most well-known episode of

the entire series, long a fan favorite (which will be discussed further in the conclusion)

and often the one episode a non-fan has seen. It captures the repressed desire for the

travesty of the SOS that will erupt to the surface in several successful musicals in the

years following.

Barbra

What Would Barbra Do?: How Musicals Changed My Life is not an especially

good book. Poorly structured and riddled with arch asides, it offers little insight into the

musicals it analyzes (the chapter on Xanadu is particularly disappointing, failing to

capture the film’s precious idiot energy). The book’s usefulness in discussing the SOS

under duress inheres in its tracing how music shapes the contours of everyday life.

Brockes immediately acknowledges the cultural stigma attached to the genre that

changed her life. Early in the book, she documents an interview with Lemmy, lead singer

of the thinking man’s heavy metal group Motorhead. When he finds out she likes

musicals, the interview reaches an uncomfortable point: “Lemmy looked at me, a long,

hard look. ‘You deserve to be nailed to the fucking cross’” (Brockes 7). Building from

Lemmy’s negative though hardly surprising reaction, Brockes details embarrassing

music-related occurrences in day-to-day life, moments where it becomes awkward

getting back to quotidian existence after an SOS-like pause in the day.

236

Several of these moments occur on public transportation. Brockes confesses to a

certain nervousness about accidentally broadcasting her taste in musicals: “When you

have a music collection like mine on your iPod, you have to keep a steady finger on the

volume control when you’re out in public. I recall a sticky moment when the engines of

the train died suddenly just as Ethel Merman was reaching her crescendo in “Rose’s

Turn” (19). Clearly, the incident caused some resentment on her part towards people who

are much less self-conscious about their tastes:

I have stood next to middle-aged men with soft-rock bleating from their headphones and this sucky look on their faces that you know, you just know means they’re pretending that their journey to work is going out live on E4. It’s amazing how unprotective people are of their weaknesses. If your idealized version of life has a Dido soundtrack, do you really want everyone on the Central Line at rush hour to know about it? (20)

Even when the occurrence does not concern music directly (but rather, a musical star),

the challenge of getting back to living one’s life raises its head. After an interview with

Julie Andrews, Brockes rushes to gush about meeting the Sound of Music idol to her

colleagues: “I dispensed small, heartfelt hugs until we judged the magic Julie dust to have

run out and our spirits exhausted. Then we sighed and went back to work” (Xiv). This

brief passage recognizes how the musical can enhance an environment as potentially

deadening as the workplace but nevertheless gives off a whiff a melancholy over the

impossibility of extending into eternity the gushy joy of meeting the former Maria Von

Trapp. The sigh, then, smoothes the transition back into the grind once the magic Julie

dust has settled.

Brockes seizes on these moments because their awkwardness mirrors the

discomfort so many people feel when confronted with an SOS. And according to

237

Brockes, these people are usually youngish heterosexual men (and recall that Xander

found the SOS disturbing in “Once More, With Feeling”): “They talk about lack of

realism or sentimentality or the failure in musicals to present anything but the most

reactionary view of the world” (84). In a chapter entitled “Men Who Hate Musicals,” she

recounts the horror felt by her friend Brian when taken to see the movie South Pacific at

seven years old: “The man was singing into the face of the woman, who had materialized

behind him and had an expression on her face that suggested that she, too, might be about

to…yup, there she went. What was this? Wasn’t it rude to sing into someone’s face like

that? Wasn’t it embarrassing?” (89). The incident recalls the helplessness of those

surrounding the person who has spontaneously burst into song. It evokes the question of

what exactly one should do in a situation like the SOS. And like Frith above, Brockes

suggests the problem might be mitigated somewhat by the sung-through musical:

It’s not the singing per se that’s the problem, but the transition from the talking to the singing. At least in opera – and this argument is usually furthered by people who would rather swallow a razor blade than sit through Aida – you don’t notice how silly the setup is because its silliness is consistent; when people communicate through song alone, it is easier to believe them than when they try to get by using an unstable combination of talking, singing, and barn-dancing. (93)

But all throughout What Would Barbra Do?, if not life after rock overall, the musical

remains hopelessly out of sync, a genre “for people who are too thick for opera and too

square for pop music” (40).

For instance, the integrated musical fails to win over people like Brian with its

supposedly more purposeful introduction of singing and dancing:

In the late 1920s the “integrated” musical evolved, in which songs occurred as a substitute for speech and, rather than acting as a break in the narrative, moved the action along. As Brian discovered, you could usually

238

see the song coming a mile off, like the look on a child’s face between their falling and screaming: a sort of wild-eyed outrage as the pressure trammels beneath the surface in search of an outlet. (93-4)

Compare this quote to Greil Marcus’s comment on Janis Joplin’s performance at the

Monterey Pop Festival in 1967: “By marshalling an array of blues and soul mannerisms,

she contrives an act that in certain moments – and you can hear them coming – ceases to

be any kind of act at all. The means of illusion produce the real, and the real is horrible,

but so vivid you couldn’t turn away to save your life, or the singer’s” (quoted in Firth

1997, 203). Rock cannot help but radiate authenticity despite the sometimes spectacular

nature of achieving that effect. The Monterey Pop Festival provides that absolutely

essential safety net in order for that authenticity to burst forth. By contrast, the musical

rarely manages to pull off its illusions no matter how realistically the creators motivate

the SOS. As Brockes’s memoir demonstrates, the safety net of iPod headphones or the

reassuring blanket of subway noise maintains our musical cocoons as we move through

ever increasingly rationalized post-capitalist space. And when the musical removes that

netting (even in the recollection of musical moments), the embarrassment of public

performance compromises the smooth functionality of the public sphere. Despite offering

various recipes on “How To Make Men Love Musicals” (e.g. “Deal in FACTS and

POLITICS”) (98), What Would Barbra Do? does little to dispel the anxiety surrounding

the SOS and bears witness to the ambiguous, perpetually second-guessing pleasures of

musical fandom. By the end of the book, even Brockes herself succumbs to that anxiety,

critiquing Billy Elliot: The Musical along traditional realist lines (“One minute you’ve got

a naturalistic performance, the next everyone’s broken into song and their characters have

completely changed. One minute you’re a Geordie miner shouting ‘Coal not dole,’ the

239

next you’re singing something that could’ve been written for Justin Timberlake.”) (180)

and drearily mumbling to the sing-along on The Sound of Music tour bus which brings

fans to various sites from the film in Austria (255). Only the gay-seeming men from

Kentucky maintain their lusty cheer.

Conclusion

The vexed status and general absence of the SOS in the rock era, particularly in

the last twenty-five years, did not signal a seismic shift in the needs most American

audiences expected Hollywood entertainment to fill. More films than could be mentioned

in this rather breezy survey satisfied a hankering for community and not just through any

random means but through music specifically. Still other films offered the pleasure of a

regular alternation between narrative and number even if the numbers took a form quite

different from the SOS of the classical Hollywood era. Both developments lend credence

to the notion that the musical survived as a mode in the rock-era.

But Hollywood cinema has incorporated rock ambiguously at best. If, for

instance, the concert film remains the apposite film form for rock, then some of the films

discussed above suggest that the movie theater can weaken if not flat-out negate the

music’s transformative powers. And as rock weathered challenges to its hegemony in the

1980s, challenges that still bombard the music to this day, it would have a significant

effect on how films tried to harness its powers.

240

Chapter 6: “That’s not supposed to be us, is it?”: Musical Modality,

Generation X, and Empire Records

Despite my attempt to display the complexity of rock ideology in Chapter Three, I

have been treating rock mostly as a constant with little sense of how it has fluctuated

stylistically and sociologically across time. Furthermore, I have paid relatively little

attention to how various audiences might respond to the musical as genre or mode in the

rock era. This chapter attempts to address these concerns since too often film scholars

conceive this era as a totality in lieu of a more detailed analysis of the historical shifts in

film and popular music that continually redefined the failure of the musical, particularly

in the 1980s and 1990s. The first half of this chapter, then, traces the appearance of

musical modality in Empire Records (Allan Moyle, 1995), most crucially in its attempt to

integrate a community through the use of alternative rock.

I choose Empire Records because while it flopped in its theatrical run, it has since

enjoyed a second life as a cult film on video and DVD, inspiring tribute websites and fan

fiction as well as prompting the release of the Empire Records Remix (Special Fan

Edition) DVD in 2003.62 As such, it offers an opportunity to examine the varied

modulation of the musical as both a failure and a success in the interim years between the

death of the genre (however contested) and its current popularity (however fragile). But I

concentrate mostly on the film’s status as a flop since it provides some insight into those

interim years that are the focus of this essay. By contrast, the film’s cult success

62 The version of the film that appears on the Empire Records Remix (Special Fan

Edition) DVD is reedited with “16 minutes of cool added footage not seen in theatres.” This chapter analyzes the version which was available on video and DVD before 2003.

241

corresponds more with the current spirit of relative openness to the musical. So the

second half of the chapter argues that the appearance of musical modality within Empire

Records accounts for the film’s failure to address its target demographic, Generation X

(born roughly between 1961 and 1981). It focuses on the unfortunate fact that Generation

X is an audience historically resistant to direct address solicitations – here, a solicitation

to invest in a musical community. Furthermore, the different communities represented in

the film are ambiguously integrated through alternative rock and telegraphed via a

multiple-focus structure.

Musical Modality in Empire Records

To review briefly the concept of mode, if a film is in the musical mode, then it

will appear both like and unlike a musical. As Alistair Fowler notes, “modal terms never

imply a complete external form. Modes have always an incomplete repertoire, a selection

only of the corresponding (genre’s) features, and one from which overall external

structure is absent” (Fowler 107). Empire Records is unlike a musical in that it has shed a

crucial feature of the musical genre - the Spontaneous Outburst of Song. Characters in the

film play albums and sing and dance along to them instead of spontaneously bursting into

song and dance. Also, non-diegetic songs “sing” for or to the characters such as when

The Martinis’ mournful “Free” seems to voice what Debra (Robin Tunney) cannot say as

she shaves off her hair in depression or when Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe” plays over the

scene where Joe (Anthony LaPaglia) first discovers the night deposit never made it to the

bank.

242

It should come as no surprise, then, that Empire Records is rarely, if ever, referred

to as a musical. Despite the dominance of music in the film’s advertising, Empire

Records is billed as a comedy not a musical on the back of the video box. As the synopsis

states “this comedy (is) about an eventful day in the lives of the young slackers, doers

and dreamers who work at a bustling store called Empire Records.” Indeed, you will most

likely find this film in the comedy section of your local video rental store. Both

IMDb.com and Allmovie.com list the film primarily as a comedy. And most reviewers

deemed the film a comedy with the centrality of music frequently noted. Variety labeled

the film “a teen-music effort” and “a soundtrack in search of a movie” with “moments of

comedy and drama” (Eisner). TV Guide called it “a lame comedy” (“Empire Records”).

Efilmcritic.com echoes the negative reviews with the conclusion that the film is “a lame

Gen-X ‘comedy’ that falls completely flat” (Eisner). Finally, Roger Ebert avoids specific

genre distinctions altogether and begins his review stating that “Empire Records is a

microcosm movie,” although he does hint at the film’s musical modality later in the

review: “Why did I hear eerie echoes of ‘Hey, gang! Let's fix up the old barn and put on a

show!’” (Ebert). So, in other words, with Empire Records, the musical mode has taken up

residency within the comedy genre.

But the extent to which modulation infiltrates a text varies. I contend that Empire

Records is like a musical because musical modulation infiltrates the film to a large

degree. This fact should not be viewed as incommensurate with the film’s popular status

as a comedy. After all, as Fowler explains, "a mode announces itself by distinct signals,

even if these are abbreviated, unobtrusive, or below the threshold of modern attention"

(Fowler 107). So in the remainder of this section, I will detail how distinct signals of the

243

musical (its utopian ideals, community integration through song and dance, paradigmatic

structure, direct address, “impossible” conventions, narrative vs. number tension) appear

in Empire Records and work together towards that ultimate goal of the musical -- the

creation of a utopian community through music.

Richard Dyer’s classic essay “Entertainment and Utopia” is most useful in this

regard because he moves beyond the representational characteristics of the musical

number by sketching out its more modal aspects - how it presents a better world, often in

contrast to the world “as it is now” of a realist narrative. Instead of providing a model for

how this better world could be organized, however, the musical displays how such a

utopia might feel.

Dyer outlines the utopian solutions, this feel, which the musical offers and the

needs being met in the process, as follows: Abundance for Scarcity; Energy for

Exhaustion; Intensity for Dreariness; Transparency for Manipulation; and, most crucially

for Empire Records, Community for Fragmentation. Of course, these are not the only

needs in society; racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, class antagonism, etc., could all

be included in the second part of the above equations. But musical entertainment orients

itself around only certain categories because “with the exception perhaps of community

(the most directly working class in source), the ideals of entertainment imply wants that

capitalism itself promises to meet. Thus abundance becomes consumerism, energy and

intensity personal freedom and individualism and transparency freedom of speech” (Dyer

184-5).

Quite fascinatingly, Empire Records fits this description better than most classical

Hollywood musicals because it attempts to meet the needs outlined above through a

244

fundamental component of capitalism -- work, i.e., a job at the Empire Records store.

The film puts forth the hope that alternative music (as a genre and an ideology) will

transform the workplace into a utopia and here a brief detour explaining “alternative” is

in order, particularly since lack of knowledge about music in the 1980s and 1990s has led

to a monolithic conception of the era’s films (and music). Extremely popular (and almost

synonymous) with Generation X in the early 1990s, alternative finds its roots in the

Amerindie bands of the 1980s. Popish but uncompromisingly punky and/or noisy

American groups like X, Hüsker Dü, The Minutemen, The Replacements, Mudhoney,

The Pixies, and others enjoyed critical praise and rabid devotion from fans but never

sustained commercial success despite many of them eventually moving from independent

(hence the term Amerindie) to major labels. With the breakthrough of Nirvana

(previously Sub Pop labelmates with Mudhoney) in 1991, however, Amerindie was at

last commercially validated and the term alternative helped connote the music’s vexed

relationship with Top 40 success. “Sell out” returned as a crucial buzzword in

determining whether or not a band had retained its uncompromising credentials while

seizing the mainstream (Azerrad).

Empire Records was aimed squarely at a Generation X youth audience. The video

box for Empire Records explicitly advertises a connection between youth and alternative

music. “A killer soundtrack” and “young delightful cast” scream the only two critics’

quotes printed on the back of the video box. The synopsis, also printed on the back, reads,

in part, “Gin Blossoms, the Cranberries, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Cracker, Evan Dando,

Better Than Ezra and more hot alternative rock underscores virtually every scene.” The

front of the video box displays the film’s tagline, “They’re selling music but not selling

245

out,” above the title with a “Featuring The Music Of” list below.63 Clearly, then, the

advertising suggests that the ideology of alternative, that to sell out is the most grievous

sin, will bring together the community within the film which, as with the musical, ideally

includes the audience in the theater or at home.

The narrative makes this point obvious with its paradigmatic structure, a key

characteristic of the musical genre. Night manager Lucas (Rory Cochrane) puts in motion

the forward, syntagmatic pull of the narrative when he discovers papers in his boss Joe’s

desk hinting that Empire Records will soon become a Music Town chain (clearly

invoking the ubiquitous, at the time, Musicland chain across the United States). He takes

the evening’s deposit to an Atlantic City casino in order to win the cash to save Empire

Records from a corporate takeover. But he loses it all at the roulette wheel. So the

narrative asks the question, how can Lucas raise the money to remain selling music

without selling out to Music Town?

But most of the subsequent scenes stall the progression towards this resolution. In

the meantime, the film’s project is to bring the disparate employees together so they can

ultimately band behind Lucas. Thus, Empire Records showcases a multiple-focus

structure in contrast to the dual-focus structure of most classical Hollywood musicals

which center around the heterosexual couple.64 The Empire Records employees are less

types than characters who can be identified by certain traits in much the same way as the

dwarfs in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Hand 1937): Mark (Ethan Embry billed as

Ethan Randall) -- dopey; Corey (Liv Tyler) -- overachieving; Gina (Rene Zellweger) --

63 Empire Records (Warner Home Video, 1996). 64 For the paradigmatic, dual-focus structure of the musical, see Altman.

246

over-sexed; Debra -- miserable; A.J. (Johnny Whitworth) -- romantic; Lucas -- mystical.

Some have been in conflict since before the story starts; others will be as the film

progresses. But all will be united in their desire to save Empire Records from selling out

which can happen only once the personal and intrapersonal conflicts are resolved. As in

most musicals, the paradigmatic structure overshadows any syntagmatic thrust, taking

over to demonstrate to the audience the resiliency of the Empire Records community and

thus how to sell music but not sell out. In short, it explains not only how to be alternative

but also that alternative can replace fragmentation with community.

Even before these community-building scenes, however, Lucas has already

engaged us with direct address, another characteristic of the musical. When he first learns

of the Music Town takeover, he faces the camera and says, “In the immortal words of

The Doors, ‘the time to hesitate is through.’” Towards the end of the film, he becomes a

pure narrational device, directly introducing the scene that will bring the film to its

compulsory heterosexual climax. As the climactic fundraiser allowing Joe to buy the

store winds down, Lucas looks directly into the camera and says to us, “Perfect…well,

not entirely perfect.” There is then a cut to the scene of reconciliation between A.J. and

Corey. Lucas’s direct address here is even more convincing than Lucky’s (Fred Astaire)

in Swing Time which Jim Collins uses to explain this aspect of the musical. Collins states

that Lucky addresses us, the spectators, because the diegetic audience has disappeared

(Collins 139). But Lucky never looks directly at the camera as Lucas does in this late

sequence. And Lucas addresses no diegetic audience in the first place, thus augmenting

the histoire-as-discours quality associated with the musical.

247

Mark engages in direct address as well. And here is where the film starts to shape

the Empire Records community for the viewer through this address. Although it is

perfectly clear at one point in the film that Lucas is running up the Empire Records

staircase to catch Warren (Brendan Sexton), a shoplifter, Mark nonetheless turns to the

camera and screeches “Shoplifter!” But his direct address functions to convey that

Lucas’s unique determination to catch Warren is a store ritual. Gina even goes on the

loudspeaker to direct the customers’ attention towards Lucas and to remind them that

Warren “will be caught,” the implication being of course that Lucas has successfully

performed this ritual many times before.

Roughly the first half of the film is given over to familiarizing the audience with

these various Empire Records rituals. As Corey, A.J., Gina, and Mark prepare to open the

store, they pick M&Ms to determine who will choose the music to start off the day. Mark

wins and selects Queen Sarah Saturday’s “Seems” (an obscure alternative song), the first

line of which he sings directly into the camera. Everyone has different morning tasks to

perform in different areas of the store. But they all sing along with the song, cementing

the Empire Records community through music. And in a veritable model of democracy,

everyone can exercise one veto a day, thus inflecting community-building with their own

particular tastes in music.

In scene after scene, Empire Records will present this community to the audience

through what can only be called musical numbers. But it would serve to update Martin

Rubin’s contention that the classical Hollywood musical number works by “impossible”

conventions and state that the numbers in Empire Records, at least, operate by

“implausible” conventions. Nothing in Empire Records is literally impossible in the way

248

that Berkeley’s overhead shots offered an impossible vantage point. Given that the film

takes place in a record store, singing and even dancing to records would not be an

unrealistic event in a realist narrative discourse. And given that the singing is more aptly

termed “singing along” and the dancing is off-the-cuff and “non-choreographed,” the

scale and effects of the numbers are well within realist conventions. But the way they are

employed is frequently implausible as when every customer in the store dances along to

Rex Manning’s “Say No More (Mon Amour).”

Certainly, though, there is a marked tension between the narrative and the

numbers in Empire Records. Indeed, Joe explicitly foregrounds this discrepancy as he

periodically delivers reality checks about the impending Music Town takeover to the

dancing customers in the scene mentioned above, a function he performed earlier in the

film as he stops his employees from dancing to The Flying Lizards’ “Money (That’s

What I Want)” by tossing Music Town uniforms at them. At the height of his stress,

however, Joe himself instigates a musical number when he runs to the drum kit in his

office to blow off steam. Here, we might add Relief/Stress to Dyer’s list of utopian

solutions that the musical offers. Playing along to AC/DC’s “If You Want Blood (You’ve

Got It),” he gives his employees yet another opportunity to mosh, play air guitar, and sing

along. Even the recently detained Warren joins in on the fun.

But not everyone can join the community which needs a negative example in

order to solidify its image. One character not only poses a formidable challenge to the

community but also serves to strengthen the definition of alternative. Rex Manning

(Maxwell Caulfield) is a pop star past his prime who still enjoys a rabid following and

has come to Empire Records for an in-store promotion. A contemporary real world

249

equivalent might be Barry Manilow or, even better, Tom Jones – a fortysomething

cheeseball with stiff, blown-dried hair and a black velvet suit who sings ridiculously

lascivious lyrics in his hit song “Say No More (Mon Amour).”

Everyone at Empire Records hates Rex and his music except Gina and, especially,

Corey (“I have all your albums,” she coos dreamily upon first meeting him). Corey’s

infatuation with Rex is a problem for the Empire Records community since Rex

represents the antithesis of alternative. He has sold out from the start, shamelessly

tailoring his music to the (99% female) masses. Thus Corey must be made to see Rex the

way the rest of the Empire Records staff sees him - as a sleazy has-been whose music is

most decidedly not alternative. This is effectuated through Corey’s plan to give up her

virginity to Rex which backfires when Rex ignores her romantic intentions and

knowingly puts her off. Corey is now properly repulsed with Rex. But the incident causes

even more problems, creating rifts between Corey and both A.J. (who had planned on

telling Corey today that he loved her) and Gina (who does have sex with Rex). Rex’s

presence must then be eradicated before all these disparate disputes can be settled. Thus,

Joe eventually throws Rex out of the store.

With most of the conflicts resolved, the climactic fundraising concert that saves

Empire Records represents a synthesis number. Here, “all the beautiful little tattooed,

gum-chewing freaks” of Empire Records are able to retain their individual characteristics

since they have effectively prevented servitude as worker drones for Music Town. Gina

and another employee, Berko (Coyote Shivers), perform “Sugar High” (a punky pop

number that could pass for alternative) for a wildly disparate crowd of clearly demarcated

subcultures (bikers, hippies, skaters, punks, etc.) and age groups (ranging from a young

250

boy buying his first picture disc to a duo of old women in hair curlers enjoying a beer).

And everyone is brought together under the aegis of alternative.

To sum up, it is through paradigmatic and multiple-focus structure, direct address,

“implausible” conventions, and narrative vs. number tension that musical modality

invades Empire Records. Like a classical Hollywood musical, the film integrates its

narrative community integration through music. And the ideology of alternative promises

utopia by offering community in place of fragmentation.

Generation X and Empire Records

The appearance of musical modality within Empire Records accounts for the

film’s failure to address its target Generation X demographic. Notoriously cynical (and

hopelessly apathetic in some estimations), Generation X repels most direct address

attempts to solicit them. This resistance is most obvious in the attempts of advertisers to

capture the attention (and dollars) of the demographic. Nathaniel Wice reported on an

early 1990s Generation X marketing conference to discover many advertisers riffing on

the theme “they change channels as soon as they sense the sell” (282) and searching for

ways beyond direct solicitations. While many commentators allow that Generation X was

hardly the first generation to become skeptical of advertising, they suggest that

Generation X skepticism has reached epic proportions. As Debra Goldman noted in

Adweek:

Every American counterculture has had it out for advertising since advertising became a cultural power, but this generation of young malcontents is taking it personally…Twentynothings are the ultimate example of the old marketing

251

conundrum that says the more successful marketing is, the faster its object of desire retreats and the harder that object becomes to find, read, and reach. (288)

Andre Hultkrans takes the distinction further by contrasting Generation X with a

scandalously consumerist portrait of Baby Boomers: “The Boomers…invented

psychographics and elevated consumerism to a high art form…Their Narcissus-like

fascination with their own canons of taste and style provided fodder for marketing

analysts for over a decade. But now Generation X is proving immune, vaccinated with

precocious cynicism” (298). And Mark Saltveit extends this cynicism to notions of

community in his discussion of Generation X as slackers: “Whether they are

fundamentalists, Rush Limbaugh dittoheads, or PC liberals, Boomers always look to their

peer group for identity and direction. When faced with a trend, slackers are more likely to

shrug and dismiss it with one word: Whatever” (52).65

It is in this context of Generation X cynicism that I originally saw Empire

Records, an experience which impelled me to write this chapter. A friend and I saw the

film together sometime in 1996. We were the same age (twentysomething), race

(Caucasian), and class (middle) as not only each other but, roughly, the Empire Records

employees in the film as well, i.e. we were all Generation X. She hated the film and in the

middle of it, turned to me and asked, horrified, “That’s not supposed to be us, is it?” Here

was a perfect example, at least at one level, of how the ideological work of the text did

65 It should be noted immediately that “Generation X” and “Baby Boomers” are generalities and not all individuals born under these signs will fit each generalities’s characteristics.

252

not manage to interpellate a viewer to recognize herself within it.66 In fact, her question

tries to repel the desired reaction of Empire Records. Where the film actively solicits a

“Yes, it’s me” reaction, as per the musical’s more direct mode of address as well as

Althusser’s analysis of ideology, it received a “That’s not supposed to be us, is it?”

instead.67 But this dynamic (or lack thereof) holds some ambiguities. “That’s not

supposed to be us, is it?” is different from stating “No, it’s not me” even though the latter

statement is most certainly implied in the disgusted manner of asking the former. I insist

that within this difference lies quite specific cultural and historical sensibilities that

inform a Generation X mode of spectatorship resistant to Empire Records’ strategies,

particularly its direct address, community integration via alternative, and multiple-focus

structure.

The fact that not all mid-1990s youth shared this sensibility or that not all those

who did hated Empire Records does not detract from the usefulness of analyzing the

film’s failure with some members of Generation X. One way to account for such

discrepancies, however, is to return to Dyer’s outline of the utopian solutions to various

needs that the musical offers. By promising such solutions, the musical is playing with

ideological fire since there is no guarantee that these needs will be met. Contradictions

between number and narrative as well as between representational and non-

representational signs within the number itself may remain contradictions. “What

66 It has been suggested that my friend’s response might be read as a deferral to my film expertise. But the exchange took place long before my goals towards film expertise were known. 67 Jim Collins notes that the musical is histoire disguising itself as discours in its I/You mode of address and as such exemplifies Louis Althusser’s notion of ideology interpellating viewers to recognize themselves in the texts.

253

musicals have to do, then,…is to work through these contradictions at all levels in such a

way as to ‘manage’ them, to make them seem to disappear. They don’t always succeed”

(Dyer 185). Whether or not they succeed depends to a large extent on the cultural and

historical position of the viewer. As Dyer concludes, “different modes of representation

(in history and culture) correspond to different modes of perception, so it is important to

grasp that modes of experiential art and entertainment correspond to different culturally

and historically determined sensibilities” (Dyer 179).

Dyer ends his analysis there. But one can easily draw out its implications by

noting what happens to the musical from 1966 to 2001. Even though the needs met by the

classical Hollywood musical very much existed in this era (and still do today), youth

audiences in particular began to seek them out in other genres and films. One reason for

this shift lies in the fact that with the ascendancy of rock ideology in the late 1960s,

authenticity rose to prominence as an ideal, thus causing a change in the mode of

perception for musical entertainment. As the previous chapter has made clear, the SOS

would not sit well with all audiences subscribing to rock ideology.

A Generation X mode of spectatorship requires authenticity too, e.g., in the

panicky imperative of shielding oneself from commerciality that informs the ideology of

alternative. Hultkrans suggests authenticity becomes even more important for Generation

X:

The camcorder revolution has littered the networks with eyewitness “true crime” shows that set new standards for bogosity. For a generation unwilling -- or unable -- to suspend disbelief, there are now dramatizations, simulations, and faux documentaries to flirt with our jaded sensibilities…A generation anaesthetized to the gory shock value of B splatter films begs to be bludgeoned. Our generation welcomes the energence of the ultimate subgenre of twisted voyeurism -- the

254

Faces of Death series and underground “snuff” films. A new demand has been placed on “authenticity” by the desensitized organism. (298)

But while authenticity remains an ideal, its import changes throughout time. For instance,

authenticity became much more difficult to determine circa 1980 for at least three

reasons: 1. The increased use of digitalization in recording and performing music,

especially in the time/space-shifting techniques of sampling, could reproduce the

previously unreproducible aura thus making it often impossible to determine what really

was recorded/performed (Goodwin, 266-270). 2. Blatant efforts to commercialize music

could no longer be viewed as eternally commensurate with selling out, especially with the

rise in importance of the soundtrack album and music video. As Warren Zanes notes, “in

the eighties, rock video certainly made it impossible to avoid the fact that promotion and

art have a rather happy marriage; it wasn’t simply the Pat Boones of the world who could

be castigated for their interest in commercial packaging” (Zanes 49). 3. The failure of the

1960s counterculture to install permanent revolution led to an oppressive Boomer

hegemony in which most post-1960s culture (especially popular music after late 1970s

punk) was judged as inauthentic in myriad ways: grotesquely imitative; lacking in

revolutionary potential; too reliant on inauthentic methods of recording and performance;

too immersed in commerciality; etc. Those artists who did merit praise usually had some

sort of link to 1960s countercultural ideals.

Lawrence Grossberg sums up this environment well in his essay “Is Anybody

Listening? Does Anybody Care? On ‘The State of Rock.’” He describes how what he

calls a “postmodern structure of feeling” has become the dominant mark of affect for

Generation X:

255

Now everything has come under the antiaura of the inauthentic, everything is already co-opted, already an act. The result is that one’s responsibility is only located within a realm of affective sovereignty and individual choices where it does not matter what you invest in, as long as you invest in something. Consequently there is a tendency to keep everything at a distance, to treat everything ironically, with no investment in one’s investment. (Grossberg 53)

Empire Records’s direct address is bound to fail in this kind of affective climate. It elicits

investment for community from a viewer rooted firmly within this non-invested structure

of feeling which places one’s needs at a distance. Moreover, it elicits that investment

actively, even earnestly. Something is too hyper about this strategy, not distanced enough

in its explanations of and entreaties to join its putatively cool filmic community. “That’s

not supposed to be us, is it?” then seems like an entirely appropriate response to the

address of Empire Records which comes off as far too confident in its own authenticity.

Furthermore, the “is it?” tag reflects a reluctance to refuse, to render absolute judgments

along the lines of “No, it’s not me.” In short, it reflects the failure to invest in one’s

investments.

In this, the Empire Records employees seem hardly more capable of investment.

Indeed, they are all dancing and singing along to “Seems” in the first number. But A.J.

cuts short the number by exercising his veto power and turning off the song after its first

chorus. “Mark, listening to this crap is guaranteed to make you sterile,” he explains even

though he was singing and dancing along to it mere seconds before. Incidentally, Mark is

the one who plays Rex’s “Say No More (Mon Amour)” and inspires everyone in the store

dancing to it including Debra whose initial veto protests he ignores. Mark, Debra, and

most of the other employees have delivered their negative appraisal of Rex’s authenticity

in no uncertain terms. But again, the investment in that judgment carries only a

256

decentered affective investment. Here, another quote from Grossberg seems particularly

instructive: “Rather than being the affective center and agency of people’s mattering

maps, music’s power is articulated by its place on other mattering maps, by its relation to

other activities, other functions. Rather than dancing to the music you like, you like the

music you dance to” (Grossberg 56). And the same holds true for cinema. With the

advent of video (not to mention DVDs, the internet, cell phones, iPods, etc.), movies have

long since proven their capacity to flow through various settings. That my friend could

ask “That’s not supposed to be us, is it?” well above a whisper in my living room is

testament to that fact.

It thus seems perfectly natural that records motivate the numbers in Empire

Records (and countless other films from this era). The characters do not sing and dance

for or by themselves until Coyote and Gina’s “Sugar High” number at the end. They rely

on the singing and even dancing of others to motivate them (as when A.J. apes the

trademark stage moves of AC/DC guitarist Angus Young). One way to maintain a

distanced non-investment in an investment is to “quote” endlessly in this manner since

the sentiment can be relinquished at any time. After all, it is not your own.

Many critics extend this postmodern structure of feeling beyond Generation X

and deem it indicative of the overall fragmentation of western society of the last forty

years. Seen from this perspective, the failure of Empire Records mirrors a more notorious

Hollywood failure -- Heaven’s Gate (1980). In his book, A Cinema Without Walls --

Movies and Culture After Vietnam, Timothy Corrigan has written on the centrality of this

film for understanding what he might call post-Vietnam cinema spectatorship. He

describes this mode of viewing in much the same way as Grossberg does the postmodern

257

structure of feeling in this era: “The dynamics within (contemporary) views and viewings

indicate a decidedly contradictory blend of nostalgia for the older ritual of seeing epic

movies and a refusal to believe in those images and unifying rituals” (Corrigan 14). As

with the nostalgia for the western in Heaven’s Gate, Empire Records offers a nostalgia

for the musical and its rituals of bringing the audience into the filmic community.

But the film’s attempt to posit alternative as a unifying energy triggers that refusal

to believe in those images and unifying rituals. For the bizarre truth of the matter is that

the film cannot sustain a workable definition of alternative. Not only are the songs that

provide the soundtrack for most of the key numbers not alternative, these particular songs

do not even unify the diverse groups represented in the film. And, alternative ideology

must actively repel some social groups in order to retain its unique characteristics.

Take the AC/DC stress relief number. AC/DC’s “If You Want Blood (You’ve Got

It)” is a hard rock anthem from 1979. Joe plays it on his office jukebox, but Lucas places

the backroom phone on intercom so that everyone in the store can hear it. Once the song

kicks into gear, however, the scene cuts back and forth between the backroom jollies and

a pan across the store’s listening booths. The pan reveals several different social

types/activities: a bleach-blonde white grunge boy thrashing about; a hip black cat

grooving to his own selection (with a copy of Ten City’s soulful house music album State

of Mind in the background); a white heterosexual couple making out; a hippieish white

boy and girl lost in romantic bliss; and a white girl raining tears on a Carpenters’ record.

But they are separated not just from one another in their respective booths but also from

the AC/DC rocker blaring throughout the store – they are all wearing headphones.

258

Everyone here is either listening to a completely different song or decentering the song,

as per Grossberg’s analysis, by other activities, e.g. making out.68

An equally confused scene of attempted unification occurs a few minutes later to

Dire Straits’s “Romeo and Juliet,” an AOR song with even less claims to being

alternative. Its creaky, Dylanesque vocals initially provide the soundtrack for A.J.’s failed

attempt at courting Corey. But the scene cuts to a white girl practicing ballet moves with

headphones on at a listening kiosk and then to an Asian woman performing more arty

gestures at her own kiosk. Only the black UPS worker seems to be hearing “Romeo and

Juliet” as she bops out of the store. And, of course, in the still later number, everyone

dances along to Rex’s explicitly non-alternative “Say No More (Mon Amour).”

But in these efforts to include everyone in the Empire Records musical

community, the film telegraphs the diverse groups represented within – there simply is

not enough time to develop them. Even more disconcerting, the same fate awaits the

Empire Records employees. The multiple-focus structure renders them more signposts

for alternative than fully realized characters. With little time to form character arcs, their

stories become trivialized due to an almost surreal telegraphing.69 The key numbers, then,

exemplify how Empire Records, and presumably most Hollywood product of the post-

Vietnam era, “must aim to ‘undifferentiate’ the desires of different audiences, usually by

68 Of course, stating absolutely that an AC/DC song is not alternative goes against the better instincts of this essay. Indeed, AC/DC have an entry in the Spin Alternative Record

Guide. If one is going to talk about alternative modality, then one should take into account its ability to reignite genres like hard rock and heavy metal with new meaning. Nevertheless, the way the number is shot underlines the film’s hapless attempts to mobilize alternative. See Stovall. See also Michaels. 69 The multiple focus structure lies in explicit contrast to Moyle’s previous, more successful feature Pump Up The Volume (1990) which features a community brought to revolutionary potential by one individual, pirate radio rebel Hard Harry (Christian Slater).

259

emphasizing the importance of that investment in and of itself…rather than what they

may be able to represent (new spaces or depths, for instance)” (Corrigan 21). Corrigan’s

quote here echoes Grossberg’s “it does not matter what you invest in, as long as you

invest in something,” that “something” being alternative in Empire Records. The

different audiences represented in the film are so telegraphed (not to mention

ambiguously integrated via alternative), however, that they point to a failure to conceive

of this inconceivable audience that is everyone (or as many markets as possible). Like

Heaven’s Gate, Empire Records apparently failed because “it seemingly appealed to no

one because of its attempts to appeal to everyone (which is of course no one)” (Corrigan

13).

With Empire Records, though, its failure rises to the surface more egregiously like

a scar on the text. The scores of Rex Manning fans lined up for autographs are all women

save for a fluttering queen beside himself in fanaticism. Most of Rex’s fans have failed to

gain any distance from their object of idolatry, most hilariously the woman who belts out

“Say No More (Mon Amour)” as an opera aria at the altar of Rex. Indeed, Corey’s one

apparent flaw is that she is not properly insincere with her Rex Manning worship. These

fans, then, are a glaring excess within the textual system. The energy of alternative that

mobilizes so many disparate groups in the film, albeit again quite ambiguously, cannot

mobilize the Rex Manning fans since they are all guilty of supporting the one thing

alternative can never mobilize – selling out. Ultimately it fails to include everyone in the

260

Empire Records community, keeping them separated by listening booths or eradicating

them from the system altogether along with Rex Manning.70

So given Empire Records’ eager direct address, character-flattening multiple-

focus structure, and confused attempts to forge community via music, it is entirely

understandable how this film would fail with a Generation X audience. Still, one could

read the film as a testament to the impossibility of enticing the fragmented post-Vietnam

(or postmodern, depending on the critic) audience into a community. Borrowing from

Corrigan again, the film “accurately reflects the contemporary trouble with representing

any collective history for an audience that, at least since Vietnam, has only the most

temporary sense of itself as a singular historical image along an unprecedented plethora

of cultural and historical images” (Corrigan 15).

But this audience corresponds to only one culturally and historically determined

sensibility. The postmodern condition of the 1980s and 1990s feels like a totality largely

because the previous eras to which it is always contrasted (the late 1960s, the classical

Hollywood era, etc.) are conceived as totalities as well with no fragmentation in sight. To

nuance this analysis of the muscial’s interim years between 1966 and 2001, then, one

might look to the cheesy, overt attempts to sell the counterculture back to itself in the late

1960s which would no doubt further explain the pleasure many Gen Xers take in such

endearingly ridiculous relics as Kim Fowley’s 1969 Outrageous album and a film like

The Trip (1967). And one might want to approach the following quote from Corrigan

with caution:

70 In the extras on the Special Fan Remix DVD, however, Rex Manning himself appears at the integrated fundraiser. Significantly, he is dressed down in a jean jacket and good-naturedly joins Berko’s band in a punky desecration of “Say No More (Mon Amour).”

261

If classical movie rituals and formulas through the thirties and forties largely supplement, reflect, and support relatively stable social identities and ideologies, film audiences found this relationship basically intact but questioned in the fifties and then directly challenged by the new waves and counter-cinemas of the next generation. (Corrigan 17)

Corrigan hedges his bets here with the word “relatively.” But the classical era seems less

stable when one takes into consideration the contemporaneous parallel cinemas such as

the black, Chinese, Mexican, Yiddish, avant-garde, etc. films made in America at the

time.

Finally, one can certainly talk of other modes of perception. Even within the

Generation X perceptual mode, no predetermined method for receiving texts helps

explain Empire Records’s second life as a cult film. Perhaps the recent resurgence of the

musical that the success of Chicago (2002), Dreamgirls (2006), Hairspray (2007), and,

most spectacularly, the High School Musical franchise (2006 and 2007) speaks of a

steadily increasing desire to risk its impossible conventions, a perceptual mode more

open to the enticements of community. As Generation X faces an economic future far

more grim than most of their Boomer parents will ever experience, Empire Records

offers a vision of work as a font of abundance, energy, intensity, transparency, relief from

stress, and community. Going the classical Hollywood musical one better, Joe even

begins to suggest how this utopia could be organized when he speaks determinedly near

the end about acquiring the start-up capital to buy out Empire. Of course, this is as far as

the film goes towards that model. That start-up capital comes unexpectedly from Mitch

(Ben Bode), the owner of Empire, who, exasperated by the dancing teens around him in

the store, sells it to Joe for the night deposit raised at the concert finale. The very last

shot, then, rings false after this capitalist deus ex machina – the Empire Records

262

community is dancing blithely on the roof of the store, immune to the fragmentation that

makes it all the easier to exploit them economically and their Generation X cohort in the

audience. So like Heaven’s Gate, Empire Records may be a noble failure, a mostly

doomed attempt to buck the legacy of fragmentation. But the attempt alone accounts for

the pleasure so many see in this film. And if we take this pleasure seriously, then a

markedly more nuanced history of Hollywood cinema and culture beyond the late 1960s

can emerge.

263

Conclusion

I conceive The Musical Mode primarily as a history. Or, to put it more precisely, I

have positioned it as an intervention into histories of American film and popular histories

that uphold various pasts as more communal, if not more utopian, than various current

eras (although most such histories agree that any community or production born after

1980 can never hope to retrieve past glories). As I have been continually mulling upon

these issues over the past several years, one anecdote keeps returning to me as a

crystalline summation of my conclusions about the shortcomings of these histories. In a

graduate seminar I took in Spring of 2005, Janet Staiger, a Professor in the Radio

Television Film Department at the University of Texas – Austin, announced that Rick

Altman would be putting on one of his Living Nickelodeon shows in Austin. The Living

Nickelodeon attempts to recreate the rather chaotic atmosphere of early twentieth-century

nickelodeons. As a de facto master of ceremonies, Altman conjures up cinema going ca.

1906 by singing, playing piano, and interacting with the audience. But the chief attraction

was the illustrated songs courtesy of reproductions of magic lantern slides. Often

projected during reel changes, the slides showcased the lyrics to popular songs of the day

which allowed the audience to sing along. Knowing this feature of The Living

Nickelodeon, my immediate reaction was panic: “Do I have to sing?!?” Staiger reassured

me: “Well, I’m not planning to sing…”

I arrived at the Austin performance of The Living Nickelodeon ten minutes late

with Donna de Ville, a fellow graduate student only a year older than me. We

strategically sat in the back row in case any exhortations to sing along became too fervent

264

to bear. Altman was running through the audience, poking gentle fun at the projectionist

and his minor technological woes. With the problem fixed, Altman made his way to the

stage and provided piano accompaniment to a program of films in the cinema of

attractions mode. Then came the dreaded sing along. Altman sang through a verse and

chorus or two of a popular song of the day to acclimate us to the melody. Next it was our

turn. All we had to do was follow along with the lyrics on the slides. But my friend and I

stubbornly refused to sing which was easy to pull off given our position in the theatre.

Staiger, however, was seated near the front, and I immediately noticed that she was

singing along (whether under duress I could not determine).71 At one point in the

performance, Altman plowed through the aisles again, this time in order to introduce

boisterously his master of ceremonies character to select audience members. When he

sidled up to Staiger, he took on a decided lecherous air: “Hmmm, look at this – a woman

here all alone.” An easy exit became a must in this environment. And indeed, after about

thirty minutes and countless rolled eyes later, my friend and I took it.

I think a quote from a Cinema Journal description of The Living Nickelodeon

unwittingly goes a long way towards explaining what made us so uneasy: “Together with

interaction between the performers, ‘The Living Nickelodeon’ provides a compelling

participatory demonstration that forces audiences to spontaneously rethink the possible

variations in their role and behavior in relation to the program” (emphasis mine).72 The

71 She later informed me that she felt compelled to sing along since attendance at the event was so low and Altman was an old and dear friend. 72 Brian Taves, ed., “Cinema Journal Archival News,” Society for Cinema & Media

Studies. http://www.cmstudies.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=59&Itemid=109 September 8, 2006. Oddly enough, the words “forces” and “spontaneously” do not

265

Living Nickelodeon, then, tries to foster the myth of spontaneity that became central to

the workings of the classical Hollywood musical. But the master of ceremonies must

force that myth which compromises the participatory nature of the event, rendering it

much less compelling for certain audience members. This is not to imply any evil

machinations on the part of Altman. Quite to the contrary, The Living Nickelodeon offers

a significant contribution to film scholarship. But in a way Altman must force this myth,

along with others that would play a crucial role in the development of the classical

Hollywood musical, because they have become no longer tenable to particular factions of

a turn of the new-century audience.

In many ways, this project stems from the response to that performance. Our

inability to handle any direct exhortations to sing along exemplifies a distinctly late

twentieth-century response to a certain kind of musical cinema, a common reaction that

neatly caps a certain narrative of popular song in Hollywood film. One might structure

this narrative as a series of falls from grace beginning with an ideal of sorts in the more

participatory if not more utopian form of cinemagoing that Altman’s Living Nickelodeon

clearly means to invoke. From there, various Nickelodeon attractions survived the advent

of the picture palace and remained a part of American film spectatorship well into what

has since become known as the sound era.73 As Altman himself notes, “Nickelodeons

established many expectations and techniques that would ultimately either be overtly

appear in the print version of this description. The sentence in question there is much more carefully worded: “’The Living Nickelodeon provides a compelling participatory demonstration that encourages audiences to rethink the variations in viewers’ roles and behavior at early film programs” (116). 73 Although Altman (2004) has written an entire book critiquing the notion of post-1927 Hollywood cinema as the sound era.

266

adopted by Hollywood, or repressed and carried covertly within dominant filmmaking”

(Altman 2001 29). For instance, live singers appeared regularly on film programs for

many decades after the demise of Nickelodeons. But history has repressed most heavily

the sing alongs. The live performer’s direct exhortations to sing along mutated into the

frequently remarked upon direct address of the Hollywood musical.74 Any singing on the

part of the audience would increasingly occur (if at all) after the film was over with the

catchier numbers knocking about our heads for days afterward.

Eventually, a further move away from the ideal embodied in the Living

Nickelodeon occurred when the Hollywood musical itself suffered repression at the

hands of rock and recordings. Or so this particular narrative would leave one to believe. It

has been the goal of The Musical Mode to problematize precisely this sort of narrative. If

one can find the roots of the discomfort I shared with my colleague at the Living

Nickelodeon in the propensity of rock and recordings to sing for us all, supposedly in

contrast to the more participatory vibe of the classical Hollywood musical, then what

kind of damage, if any, does this destruction of the sing along cause? And where might

rock and recordings have opened other avenues of communality through music?

I want to address these questions here by looking at some of Altman’s work on

the Hollywood musical for two reasons. He is arguably the most important theorist of the

Hollywood musical, amassing a body of scholarship that, it should be noted right away, I

74 One might surmise that the live singer fused with the magic lantern slides in the person of the direct addressing star of Hollywood musicals. Altman suggests that some silent film stars were first seen on song slides. Even though none of the stars Altman lists became associated with the Hollywood musical, their appearance on song slides separate from the live singer (often a relative of the Nickelodeon owner, Altman notes) hints at a division of labor that became no longer necessary to uphold with the move of such musical performers as Jeanette MacDonald and Al Jolson into film.

267

greatly admire. But he indulges in the fall from grace narrative in his seminal The

American Film Musical, even explicitly so. Almost at the very end, he remarks that “this

book is marked by the American tendency to conceive history as a fall, and creative

activity as redemption” (363). Thus this tendency not only fueled his rather desperate

attempt to forge a musical community at the Living Nickelodeon but has had a great deal

of influence on film and popular music scholarship as well.

Echoing arguments made about the Hollywood musical by Jane Feuer and Linda

Williams, Altman recognizes that it must bear the burden of cinema’s original sin of the

lack of immediacy. This sin is particularly pronounced in the show musical which most

explicitly reminds the viewer of the immediacy of live performance: “The show musical

must constantly contend with the fall implied by the very term ‘media.’ In moving from

live entertainment to film, we are condemned to banishment from the immediacy of the

original event by an intermediary, by the mediation of the medium itself” (361). Setting

aside the varying degrees of mediation involved in live performance, it pays to note one

last time the variety of techniques the musical employed to mitigate against the decided

separation between performer and audience – direct address, bricolage, internal

audiences, long takes, etc. However, Altman goes one step further and maintains that the

classical Hollywood musical “provide(d) the nation’s most powerful device against mass-

mediated passivity” (352) through its collusion with the sheet music industry. Sheet

music impelled the nation to sit at their pianos and produce music rather than passively

consume it: “For thirty years – and perhaps even today, for some – the musical

collaborated with the sheet music industry to defer the moment when all of our playing,

singing, and dancing would be done for us” (357). In Altman’s estimation, the synergy

268

between the music and sheet music actually restored immediacy to the cinema and

removed its mass-mediated trappings: “While the sheet music industry is in one sense

nothing but another industry, it nevertheless serves to unveil the film’s attempt to hide

cinema’s mediating nature, thus reversing an ideological effect. The characters’ attempts

at song may be mediated, but ours are decidedly not” (359).

But rock and recordings changed this state of affairs: “During the sixties, music

starts to be conceived as canned, i.e., an increasing number of compositions call for

electronic sound sources as primary production ‘instruments’ and not just as post-

production enhancements, the media of reproduction thus becoming increasingly

inscribed within the process of production” (355). In this trajectory, music moves from

its recreation afforded by sheet music to its reproduction determined by recordings.

Altman maintains that we cannot recreate these recordings due to the technology

involved in their production: “We are simply not equipped with the necessary

instruments, as we once were in the good old days of the musical, when music was

written for the everpresent piano and the fundamental item of human standard-issue

equipment, the voice” (356).

Thus rock and the electric guitar replace the piano and usher in an era of

fragmentation. Where once the music served the entire family, it now caters to the youth

crowd: “As long as every musical spoke to us of our own capacity for and joy in the

production of music and dance, then the musical was serving a social function which,

alas, it no longer serves for the society as a whole” (359, emphasis added). Worst of all,

this move away from the piano and sheet music has transformed the United States into a

nation of passive music consumers, incapable of even the most elementary of musical

269

gestures. In a concluding passage so outrageous that it comes off more as a deliberate

provocation than a deeply held belief, Altman admits that his book is an attempt to

deliver us from this musical wasteland: “Its mission will not be served…until you return

to the piano and bang out one of your old favorites – missed notes and all – or until you

find yourself once again beating time to the music on the radio, and then singing the tune

the next day in the shower” (363-4).

One need not confess this morning’s shower aria or the radio tune that took over

your body a few minutes ago (or even the hours clocked at a piano perhaps banging out

new favorites) to know that Altman paints not only a hyperbolically grim portrait of the

musical present but a rather rosy one of the past. Writing in 1987, he notes that “today, a

quarter of a century after the decline of the Hollywood musical, it is difficult to imagine

the extent to which the musical once engendered active modes of entertainment, of re-

creation” (359). But in the absence of some hard figures or even anecdotal evidence

concerning the circulation of sheet music as well as the dissemination of pianos, it is

indeed difficult to imagine the precise extent to which the musical did actually engender

such activity. Reading through The American Film Musical, one would think that every

household in America featured a piano with an abundance of sheet music since the book

conceives of the classical Hollywood audience as a whole.

And once we enter the home of the past to find a piano with sheet music, other

questions arise. Does the sheet music not limit the creativity somewhat behind

recreating, as opposed to reproducing, the music in the home? Is the music experience not

mediated by the sheet music as opposed to an original composition or spontaneous

creation? Also, to what extent were the songs in classical Hollywood musicals written for

270

the piano? It would be just as difficult to recreate their string-laden grandeur at home

with just a piano as it would to recreate the electronic sounds of a recording. After all, the

songs in classical Hollywood musicals are recordings themselves. Finally, what about the

imbalances in the production of music in the home or at the nickelodeon? Who picks the

song performed? Who directs the musical activity? Is any of it ever forced? How are

dissenting voices dealt with? Could a woman attending a nickelodeon alone enjoy the

sing along as much as a man? What resources did she have in order to prevent unsolicited

attention? What happens to the sing along when different ethnic groups attend the same

screening, to whatever extent that was even possible? More scholarship needs to be done

in these areas of the social history of music in order to provide a more nuanced portrait of

the synergy between the film and sheet music industries. But the Living Nickelodeon has

already given a strong suggestion how communality may have been compromised in

these sites.

Moving into the rock era, Altman downplays how rock, recordings, and the

electric guitar have aided in musical production rather than perpetually hindering it. For

every guitar god of the order of Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, or Eddie Van Halen, there

were countless hopefuls trying to recreate their riffs, often spiraling in new directions.

The multivolume garage rock series Pebbles, for instance, charmingly documents myriad

attempts at approximating “Purple Haze” or “Louie Louie.” How is this practice more

deficient than recreating songs at the piano with the help of sheet music? Also, recordings

themselves form the basis of the production of the music in many genres from disco to

hip-hop to house and techno and all their variants. How are the club DJ’s beat-matching

and the hip-hop’s DJ’s scratching any less of a form of music production? As a former

271

club DJ, I can attest to the many hours of practicing required to maintain a continuous

dance beat for an entire evening. Should practicing beat-matching be thought of as a

somehow lesser musical activity than practicing the piano? And to tie in dancing to these

musics, Altman notes that Americans paid for dancing lessons all throughout the classical

Hollywood era. But the disco era was a huge rebirth of this musical activity if indeed it

ever really died. Couples spent money on learning The Hustle, The Freak, or even The

Bus Stop with the help of floor mats showing the appropriate foot placings and records

specifically designed the teach disco dancing.75 And many of these dances were far from

the spectatorial aspect Altman associates with break dancing. The Hustle, for instance, in

its most popular incarnations, was a relatively low energy couples dance. In fact, New

York Times columnist William Safire praised The Hustle as a return to more traditional

forms of dancing, escaping “frantic self-expression” and “personal isolation” (quoted in

Shapiro 185). Finally, the electric guitar was not somehow inherently resistant to

incorporation in the family home. Companies like Harmony sold hundreds of thousands

of low-end guitars and even amplifiers in the 1960s suggesting that the middle-class

family could gather around the electric guitar just as easily as it did the piano. And

however much youth cultures replaced the nuclear family, new conceptions of family

kept the spirit of communality alive from hippie communes to gay Houses, typified by

Sister Sledge’s 1979 disco classic “We Are Family.” Of course, these contentions need to

be updated to account for the spread in popularity of karaoke in the United States as well

as the Guitar Hero and Rock Band video games phenomenon. Again, these forms offer a

75 See Disco Bump (Telefunken 1975). The back cover features eight photos of a couple demonstrating various dances.

272

different experience from sitting around the piano with sheet music. But that fact does not

correspond to a diminishing of musical life in the twenty-first century.

A perfect distillation of this tension between a more participatory classical

Hollywood cinema and a more fragmented rock era Hollywood cinema lies in Altman’s

discussion of the passed-along song from his book Film/Genre. He notes how the passed-

along song created coherence amongst a community in some classical Hollywood

musicals. For instance, Love Me Tonight (1932) opens with all of Paris awakening in the

morning to create a city symphony merely through the sounds and rhythms of their daily

activities. Similarly, the Smith family in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) passes along the

title tune to one another in “a world…of shared songs and synchronized hearts all singing

in the same key, united by sheet music, pianos, and the families who gather around them”

(190). By contrast, a film like American Hot Wax (1978) features a scene in which

several characters listen to Little Richard on the radio in different locations. As Altman

concludes, “like other films of the 70s and 80s, including American Graffiti, FM, and Do

the Right Thing, American Hot Wax ironically uses synchronized simultaneous radio

listening as a device to strip listeners of any possible common interest or personal

contact, save their devotion to Alan Freed and the music he chooses” (191). And despite

Love Me Tonight’s propensity for bringing disparate people together, films like American

Hot Wax cannot hope to do the same for their meticulously marked characters: “In fact,

the careful choice of characters implies, they probably wouldn’t recognize each other and

certainly wouldn’t enjoy each other’s company if they should ever chance to meet” (191).

But the same could be said of the characters in Love Me Tonight. Nothing in the

city symphony suggests that they are doing anything more than going about their

273

morning routines. Indeed, they display no common interest or personal contact, save their

ability to create a rather disinterested city symphony. This aspect of the film is even more

pronounced in the famous “Isn’t It Romantic?” number in which carefully chosen

characters pass along the song until it reaches the heroine Princess Jeannette (Jeannette

MacDonald). And she picks up the song on her ornate castle balcony from a group of

poor gypsies who she only hears but never sees. Similarly, in Meet Me in St. Louis,

perhaps the most misdescribed film until Andy Warhol’s 1960s epics (Sleep, Eat,

Empire, Blow Job, etc.), not everyone in the Smith family shares songs and synchronizes

hearts. The father, Alonzo (Leon Ames), remains perpetually grumpy throughout the film

until the “You and I” number towards the end of the film. He is particularly annoyed by

all the singing and explicitly wishes that everyone would meet at the Fair (in reference to

the title song) and leave him alone. Altman also ignores the film’s disturbing

undercurrent particularly in the Halloween sequence which features children dressed in

grotesque parodies of the family.

Conversely, other writers have arrived at different conclusions about the

communality afforded by radio. Greil Marcus’s quote about the lingua franca of rock ‘n’

roll from Chapter Three suggests a strong bond between radio listeners. Since his

comment concerns Little Richard as well, his quote bears repeating: “In the fifties, young

people woke up to find that, somehow, they’d been born knowing the pop language that

was taking shape all around them. How was it that, for a white, teenage girl on a farm in

Iowa no less than for an eight-year-old African-American boy in Tulsa, Little Richard

needed no translation?” (2007 xi). And, in general, moments in which music creates a

communal bond have not disappeared or even declined. There have been countless

274

communal moments on club dancefloors or at concerts sometimes with cameras and

sound equipment present in order to document them. As the previous two chapters have

demonstrated, recordings can bring communities together.

Then there is the curious success of Sing-a-Long movie musicals in which prints

of famous Hollywood musicals with subtitles during the musical numbers are exhibited

around the country roadshow style. Tickets are purchased in advance with assigned

seating usually for a one-time-only engagement. Similar to the cult activity surrounding

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), audiences are encouraged to participate in the

experience not only by singing along but also by dressing up and utilizing props in

conjunction with certain song lyrics. I attended the Sing-a-Long screening of The Sound

of Music at Milwaukee’s Oriental Theater in 2001 and can attest to the boisterous

atmosphere throughout the entire evening. A middle-aged woman dressed up as Maria

skipped around the theater to all of Maria’s songs. The vast majority of the audience sang

along to each musical number including myself even though I had to rely on the subtitles

in every instance having seen the film only once previously. Audiences chatted and joked

freely with each other. Overall, it matched if not surpassed the Living Nickelodeon in

terms of participatory spectatorship. Grease (1978) and West Side Story (1961) have also

received the Sing-a-Long treatment. And finally in my hometown of Austin, the Alamo

Drafthouse Theater regularly holds sing-a-longs keyed to a variety of themes: boy bands,

Michael Jackson, hair metal, and the most popular of all, the “Once More With Feeling”

episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. De Ville has written an MA thesis on this

phenomenon as well as the participatory nature of other Alamo Drafthouse screenings,

analyzing at length the popularity of the sing-a-longs.

275

And, of course, this project’s rethinking of the musical has benefited from (and

was in part inspired by) the much-reported rebirth of the genre. After decades mourning

its death, critics and audiences have now proclaimed that the movie musical is back.

Earlier this year, USA Today features an article on Mamma Mia! (2008) entitled

“Musicals big news at box office again” (Wloszczyna). And an Entertainment Weekly

article nominates sci-fi as the genre “most in need of a savior,” reserving praise for a slew

of recent popular musicals (Harris).

As stated in Chapter Four, this resurgence has its roots in the Oscar-winning

success of Chicago (2002) and, to a lesser extent, Moulin Rouge (2001). Chicago’s huge

box office return, with domestic grosses surprisingly higher than foreign, has created an

atmosphere where producers have become more willing to back financially musicals or,

more precisely, films featuring SOS numbers. All of the following films (and possibly

more) in the wake of Chicago feature SOS numbers: From Justin to Kelly (2003), Beyond

the Sea (2004), De-Lovely (2004), Open House (2004), The Phantom of the Opera

(2004), The Producers (2005), Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical (2005), Rent (2005),

Romance and Cigarettes (2005), Colma: The Musical (2006), Dreamgirls (2006),

Idlewild (2006), Across the Universe (2007), Enchanted (2007), Hairspray (2007),

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), Mamma Mia! (2008), and High

School Musical 3: Senior Year (2008) slated to open a week after this writing. Anyone in

bliss over this resurgence should note that less than half of these films turned a profit

even though the last four all achieved box office success to varying degrees with High

School Musical 3.

276

Mamma Mia! and, of course, the High School Musical franchise deserve special

mention here. An enormous international stage success worldwide and in its seventh year

on Broadway as of this writing, Mamma Mia! proved a natural for a film version.

Stringing approximately two dozen ABBA songs through the story of a young girl

searching for her father, the film did well in the United States. But foreign audiences

cannot stop watching it. Currently, it has brought in $520 million against a $52 million

investment and, according to Box Office Mojo, is now the highest grossing movie

musical of all-time worldwide (“All Time”).76

Even more remarkable because it did not come with the pre-sold guarantee of a

songbook as popular as ABBA’s, High School Musical made its debut on January 20,

2006, on the Disney Channel and clearly channeled into some untapped desire for the

SOS, mostly on the part of tweens that make up the majority of its audience. Directed by

rock-era musical veteran Kenny Ortega (choreographer for Xanadu and Dirty Dancing;

director of Newsies), the modestly budgeted ($4.2 million) television movie turned into a

nationwide phenomenon with the soundtrack becoming the best-selling record of 2006.

The breathlessly awaited sequel, High School Musical 2, premiered on the August 17,

2007, on the Disney Channel and became the most-watched basic-cable telecast in

history with an average of 17.2 million viewers (Kissell and Schneider).

What is so fascinating about the High School Musical movies (as well as the

American Idol-backed flop From Justin to Kelly) is how unfascinating they are, or,

rather, how unrevisionist they are. The Astaire/Rogers musicals from seventy years

before were saucier and more envelope-pushing. Too many theories of genre

76 This figure is not adjusted for inflation, however.

277

development follow some variation of Henri Focillon’s model for the life of forms. A

genre is born in an experimental stage as it feels out its parameters and then moves

through a classical and refined age before reaching its final destination in the Baroque

stage in which the genre succumbs to parody and reflexivity usually associated with the

postmodern era. Altman pinpoints the shortcomings of this theory; it locks a genre into a

prescribed pattern of development: “Like a train, genre is free to move, but only along

already laid tracks…shuttl(ing) back and forth between experimentation and reflexivity”

(1999 22). The musical genre, then, is condemned to give forth only reflexive musicals

after a certain point in history, e.g., after the New Hollywood directors revised the genre

to their specifications. As squeaky clean teen morality plays extolling the dissolution of

high school cliques into one all singing, all dancing community, the High School

Musicals confound this genre road and perhaps even suggest a post after postmodernism.

They are firmly planted in the classical stage in an era when classicism is supposedly no

longer possible. The very title reinforces this notion, an impersonal generic stamp meant

to convey immediately the genre to an audience that already knows its mechanics.

But while the success of Mamma Mia! and the High School Musical franchise

will undoubtedly inspire the production of more films choked with SOS numbers,

deeming the current climate a rebirth of the musical seems premature at best. For one

thing, most of the music in the recent spate of successful musicals lives and dies with

their respective films, a fact made agonizingly clear when one listens to the soundtrack

albums as entities unto themselves. They move cocoon-like through the current popular

music landscape, applying no pressure on the development of various vibrant genres. No

doubt this inconsequentiality stems from the music’s constant looking back, coasting on

278

tepid approximations of vibrant popular music genres past. Hedwig and the Angry Inch

(2001) does a fairly remarkable job of recreating the amphetamine rush of Ziggy

Stardust-era David Bowie, ca. 1972. But the film leaves the viewer with a fantastic copy

and nothing more, never suggesting other avenues of development. In the absence of a

James Jamerson anchoring the beat with his inimitable bass, the Dreamgirls project of

emulating classic Motown was doomed to failure from the start, its most famous song,

“And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going,” a traditional Broadway showstopper. And

perhaps Hairspray (2007) should have remained stuck in the past. Comparisons between

the soundtracks for John Waters’s 1988 original film and the 2007 remake are brutal.

Where the former dug deep into the R&B grit of The Ikettes’s "I'm Blue (The Gong-

Gong Song)" and Gene and Wendell’s “The Roach” and soared high on the garish pop

mastery of Gene Pitney’s “Town Without Pity” and Little Peggy March’s “I Wish I Were

a Princess,” the SOS numbers of the remake succumb to what Robert Christgau calls “the

curse of Broadway rock and roll--the beat is conceived as decoration or signal rather than

the meaning of life, or even music” (1990 273).

And when it comes to musicals built upon long since established popular music

songbooks, the situation becomes even more hopeless. The cast of Mamma Mia! perform

the songs of ABBA with an almost incredible amount of energy, especially Meryl Streep

as the heroine’s overtaxed mother. But the bland arrangements of the songs themselves

amount to little more than Karaoke versions of ABBA’s greatest hits. Julie Taymor’s

Across The Universe works overtime to string a narrative through several dozen songs

from the Beatles catalogue. It tells the story of a working-class British youth with the

painfully obvious name of Jude (Jim Sturgess), ensuring that the song “Hey Jude” will

279

have a “natural” occurrence in the narrative. Other character names either reference songs

or inspire an SOS number – Prudence (“Dear Prudence”), Lucy (“Lucy in the Sky with

Diamonds”), Jojo (“Get Back”), Sadie (“Sexy Sadie”), Mr. Kite (“Being for the Benefit

of Mr. Kite”), etc. Jude moves to the United States in the late 1960s just in time to

experience the counterculture via protests and psychedelic drugs, events which occasion

more Beatles songs – “All You Need is Love,” “Revolution,” “Happiness is a Warm

Gun,” etc. Most of the songs appear in the film as SOS numbers. But the unimaginative

interpretations do little to loosen their ties to the Beatles’ original recordings, thus

draining the numbers of their spontaneity. And the desperate attempts to wedge the songs

into a narrative only heighten the awkwardness.

In addition to these musical travesties, the musical as mode continues unabated

and the SOS remains a rather vexed cultural artifact despite the putative rebirth of the

genre. Nowhere is this more apparent than on several popular videos on Youtube. Improv

Everywhere is a New York City-based performance art group that regularly stages light-

hearted improvisatory pranks in public spaces -- freezing in position for several minutes

in Grand Central Station or walking around shirtless at an Abercrombie & Fitch store.

They describe their “Food Court Musical” thusly: “16 agents create a spontaneous

musical in a food court in a Los Angeles mall. Using wireless microphones and the mall's

PA system, both their voices and the music was amplified throughout the food court. All

cameras were hidden behind two-way mirrors and other concealed structures.”77 The

number starts with a food court employee spontaneously bursting into song about her

77 “Food Court Musical,” Youtube, March 9, 2008. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkYZ6rbPU2M July 1, 2008.

280

need for a napkin after spilling some lemonade. An unseen source of orchestration kicks

in after a verse and several food court patrons look around to determine the source. Soon

a food court patron spontaneously bursts into song about his need for a napkin due to

spilled mustard on his pants (creating a link to the “they got the mustard out!” number

from “Once More, With Feeling”). They join each other in song, particularly the “can I

have a napkin please?” refrain, and perform some dance moves together. Another patron

joins in as well as a janitor with the cameras all the while recording the stunned reactions

of the actual food court patrons. A security guard enters the scene and demands “what the

hell is going on here?!?” They explain their need of napkins and for a tense moment it

seems as if the troupe are in trouble. But it turns out that the security guard is one of the

troupe as he sings into his walkie talkie demanding more napkins. The rest of the troupe

join in for the big finale as one man throws a napkin at them and another exasperatedly

responds “yes, you can have a napkin!” Some patrons burst into applause at the end of

the number.

In 2007, a video was uploaded to Youtube of over 1,500 prison inmates in the

Philippines performing the famous climactic dance from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”

video (1983). It quickly became one of the most popular viral videos on Youtube and

inspired countless similar performances at weddings. It also inspired an anonymous

dance troupe in England to perform the number in the lighthearted guerilla manner of

Improv Everywhere. On the tube,78 at the bus stop,79 in Chinatown,80 or in the Tesco

78 “Thriller dance on the tube – Michael Jackson thriller,” Youtube, January 28, 2008 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6EDAZ3crdY July 15, 2008. 79 “Thriller at the bus stop,” Youtube, February 17, 2008 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7G6EOM6rh0 July 15, 2008.

281

grocery store,81 the troupe always begins the dance in the same fashion. A well-dressed

man places on the ground a boom box playing the song. Seemingly from random, the

other members of the troupe gather around him and proceed to perform the number with

jaw-dropping dexterity until the song is completed.

Finally, the Australian comedy series The Chaser’s War on Everything features a

skit called “If Life Were a Musical.” The comedy troupe infiltrate the public sphere with

an SOS complete with an unseen source of instrumentation and synchronized dance

steps. Usually they invade a retail outlet, a clothing or hardware store82, and perform

directly to a salesperson or customer service representative. As with “Food Court

Musical,” they sing about banal, everyday occurrences – trying on jeans, picking up

someone from the airport, needing a hammer, etc. but almost always, they add some sort

of ribald detail to underline the song as a joke. So the jeans “are quite restrictive on my

balls.” The fictional singing housekeeper Mrs. Henderson needs to come home from the

airport to clean the “nappies full of poo.” And the singing patron at the Motor Registry

needs his driver’s license now “so he can get a blow job tonight” as his spontaneously

assembled backup trio put it.83

All three of these video series share an intriguing quality -- at the end of the song,

the performers abruptly return to everyday life. In fact, their sudden shift from number

80 “Thriller dance in Chinatown – Michael Jackson thriller,” Youtube, February 4, 2008 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqJBWY2WI9U July 15, 2008. 81 “Thriller dance in Tesco,” Youtube, February 17, 2008 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiZTF05x1RM July 15, 2008. 82 “If Life Were a Musical (1,2,3,4) – Best of the Chaser,” Youtube, June 10, 2007 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ym4cnamxkSM July 10, 2008. 83 “Chasers War - If Life Were A Musical: Driver's License,” Youtube, October 11, 2007 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixmBL1NK-NQ July 10, 2008.

282

time to the progressive time of quotidian existence heightens the comedy. In “Food Court

Musical,” one of the performance group members engages patrons in conversation after

the number and remarks mock incredulously “Look! The janitor’s still cleaning up!”

which indeed he is. At the end of the “Thriller” videos, the dancers either resume their

seats silently on the tube or briskly disperse in every direction. And in “If Life Were a

Musical,” the performers proceed with their purchases as if nothing out of the ordinary

has happened, resorting back to everyday speech, or they apologize to the random woman

at the airport for mistaking her for Mrs. Henderson. If there is a smile on any performer’s

face in any of these videos, it immediately drops at the end of the number as they return

to their daily business. As genuinely beautiful as many of these moments are, the quick

slide back into “reality” insures that this song was but a momentary out burst. Never does

a video give off a suggestion of how the song might transform the public space it has so

briefly infiltrated. It will revert back to its rationalized function of selling clothing or

providing an area in which to lunch, its temporary musicalization available only to the

memories of those fortunate enough to have witnessed it.

Pulling all these strands together now, the music of the SOS numbers in recent

musicals suffers from a relative poverty of context. The songs cannot break out of their

filmic casing in order to enrich other contexts and spaces as opposed to the perpetual

flow of so much popular music. By contrast, the songs in the guerilla videos have found a

context, a public sphere in which to hold the performances, but only for a jokey instant. I

detail these musical travesties, in both the negative and positive senses of the word, not

to paint yet another portrait of an impoverished musical culture but rather to underline the

centrality of the public sphere to the musical. The musical teaches us new ways to exist in

283

the public sphere. It can transform us into musical versions of ourselves. And it can also

transform the public sphere into a musical version of itself. But the value of those

transformations, those new ways to be public, will shift across time and vary from person

to person.

The ability to determine the value of a public gesture or activity carries a great

deal of power since the pronouncement can have legislative and historical consequences.

For the purposes of this project, it can determine what kinds of histories are written.

Tying this all back to Altman’s concerns, then, his tendency to conceive history as a fall

points to the kinds of publics he values. Gathering around the piano to bang out old

favorites off of sheet music or singing along to song slides at the nickelodeon clearly hold

more import for him than doing the same around an electric guitar and dancing to house

music all night long. The classical Hollywood musical taught us new ways to be public,

to exist within the public sphere. But so did rock, recordings, and the electric guitar.

Usually these two modes of publicity seem to be perpetually at odds with one another.

While writing these chapters, the one musical passage that played in my head repeatedly

was the droogy, proto-punk riff that opens “Down on the Street,” the first track off The

Stooges’ seminal 1970 album Fun House. I often wished that such a malevolent,

unforgiving force could power an SOS. But there is no compelling reason to mourn the

lack of such a synthesis because both modes continue to invigorate notions of how to be

public. Some are appalled at the travesty the various markings of the SOS visits upon the

public sphere while others are transformed forever by it. Some are appalled at the head

banging and slamdancing that greet a Stooges concert or recording or how Iggy Stooge

284

(Pop) greets us back by rolling around shirtless in broken peanut butter jars while others

view it as rock’s ultimate act of transubstantiation.

But again, the ability to determine the value of these musical gestures will

necessarily influence the histories that are written about them. So I would like to end with

another idée fixe that haunted me during the writing of this project, this time a 1919

Photoplay cartoon reproduced in Miriam Hansen’s Babel & Babylon: Spectatorship in

American Silent Film (247). Titled “Who’s Married to Whom, etc. etc.” it follows two

women into a movie theater where they proceed to ignore the film and gossip about the

love life of movie stars. At the end of nine panels, a man asks them what picture they saw

to which they reply “search us.” The cartoon clearly intends to ridicule the women for

their improper behavior in the public sphere. But along with Altman’s tendency to view

history as a fall, it begs a series of questions: what counts as valuable public discourse?

Who is allowed to determine it? How does one determine communality, when a

community is formed? And what happens when such communities are judged deficient?

Ultimately, my disdain for the ways in which these question have been answered in

relation to the history of the Hollywood musical and American popular music is what

propelled me through these pages.

285

Bibliography

Alberro, Alexander, ed. Two-Way Mirror Power: Selected Writings by Dan Graham on

His Art. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. Altman, Rick. “The American Film Musical: Paradigmatic Structure and Mediatory Function.” Genre: The Musical. Ed. Rick Altman. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. 197-207. ——-. The American Film Musical. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. ——-. “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre.” Film Genre Reader II. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. 26-40. ——-. Film/Genre. London: BFI, 1999. ——-. “Cinema and Popular Song: The Lost Tradition.” Soundtrack Available: Essays

on Film and Popular Music. Eds. Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Arthur Knight. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001. 19-30. ——-. Silent Film Sound. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. “All Time Worldwide Grosses.” Box Office Mojo. October 9, 2008. <http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/world/>. Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation).” Video Culture: A Critical Investigation. Ed. John Hanhardt. Layton, Utah: Gibbs M. Smith, Inc., Peregrine Smith Books; and Rochester, New York: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1986. 56-95. Anderson, Tim J. Making Easy Listening: Material Culture and Postwar American

Recording. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Arvey, Verna. “Present Day Musical Films and How They Are Made Possible.” Etude Vol. 49 January 1931: 16- 18, 61, 72. Auslander, Philip. Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Azerrad, Michael. Our Band Could Be Your Life. Boston and New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2001. Bangs, Lester. 1977. “Where Were You When Elvis Died?” Psychotic Reactions and

Carburetor Dung. Ed. Greil Marcus. New York: Vintage, 1988. 212-217.

286

——-. “Bubblegum.” The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll. Eds. Anthony DeCurtis and James Henke with Holly George-Warren. Original Ed. Jim Miller. New York: Random House/Rolling Stone, 1992. 452-454. Bazin, André. “Theater and Cinema.” What Is Cinema? Volume 1. Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967: 76-124. Bellour, Raymond. "To Analyze, to Segment." Genre: The Musical. Ed. Rick Altman. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. 107-116. Benedict, David. “Who killed the Hollywood Musical?” The Independent 22 June 2001. 26 September 2004. <http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/film-and- tv/features/who-killed-the-hollywood-musical-674969.html>. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968. 219-253. Bergreen, Laurence. As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin. New York: Viking, 1990. Block, Geoffrey. “The Broadway Canon from Show Boat to West Side Story and the European Operatic Ideal.” The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Autumn, 1993): 525-544. ——-. Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical from Showboat to Sondheim. NY: Oxford University Press, 1997. Bordwell, David. The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brockes, Emma. What Would Barbra Do?: How Musicals Changed My Life. New York: HarperCollins, 2007. Bronson, Fred. The Billboard Book of Number One Hits. New York: Billboard Books, 1997 Canby, Vincent. “'Song of Norway' Opens at the Cinerama.” New York Times 5 November 1970. 1 July 2008. <http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9E04E5DF153DEF31A25756C0 A9679D946190D6CF>. Carducci, Joe. Rock and The Pop Narcotic. Chicago: Redoubt Press, 1990.

287

Carey, Melissa and Michael Hannan. “Case Study Two: The Big Chill.” Popular Music

and Film. Ed. Ian Inglis. London and New York: Wallflower, 2003. 162-178 Carter, Tim. Oklahoma!: The Making of an American Musical. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2007. Chapman, James. Cinemas of the World: Film and Society from 1895 to the

Present. London: Reaktion Books, 2003 ——-. “A Short History of the Big Band Musical.” Film’s Musical Moments. Ed. Ian Conrich and Estella Ticknell. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2006. 28-43. Christgau, Robert. “Barbra Streisand, Featuring Mary Hopkin.” Any Old Way You

Choose It. Baltimore: Penguin, 1973. 166-170. ——-. “Consumer Guide Dec. 25, 1990.” Village Voice 25 December 1990. 4 August 2003. < http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/cg/cgv1290-90.php>. ——-. “Let's Call the Whole Thing Pop: George Gershwin.” Grown Up All

Wrong: 75 Great Rock and Pop Artists from Vaudeville to Techno. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998: 22-26. ——-. “Introduction.” Christgau’s Consumer Guide of the ‘90s. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2000. Vii – xvi. ——-. “Decade: Rockism Faces the World.” Village Voice 2 January 1990. 24 May 2004. < http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/rock/decade-89.php>. ——-. “Salon Bookbag: The History of Pop.” 27 October 2000. 4 July 2004. <http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/bkrev/bookbag-sal.php>. Cohan, Steven. Incongruous Entertainment: Camp, Cultural Value, and The MGM

Musical. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Cohen, Sara. “Men making a scene: Rock music and the production of gender.” Sexing

the Groove: Popular Music and Gender. Ed. Sheila Whiteley. New York: Routledge, 1997. 17-36. Coleman, Ray. The Carpenters: The Untold Story: An Authorized Biography. New York: HarperCollins 1994. Collins, Jim. “Toward Defining a Matrix of the Musical Comedy: The Place of the Spectator Within the Textual Mechanisms.” Genre: The Musical. Ed. Rick Altman. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. 134-145.

288

Cook, David. Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow of Watergate and

Vietnam, 1970-1979. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Corrigan, Timothy. A Cinema Without Walls – Movies and Culture After Vietnam. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991. Covert, Colin. “For Once, language is no barrier to love and soulful, riveting music.” Minneapolis Star Tribune. 31 May 2007. 6 June 2008. <http://www.projo.com/movies/films/once.html>. Crafton, Donald. The Talkies: American Cinema's Transition to Sound, 1926-1931. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1997. Dare, Michael. “Start Making Sense: An Interview with Jonathan Demme.” L.A. Weekly 9 November 1984. 12 August 2008. <http://www.dareland.com/emulsionalproblems/startmakingsense.htm>. Dawson, Jim, and Steve Propes. 45 RPM: The History, Heroes, and Villains of a Pop

Music Revolution. San Francisco: Backbeat, 2003. Denisoff, R. Serge and William D. Romanowski. Risky Business: Rock In Film. New Brunswick: Transaction, 1991. Denora, Tia. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. De Ville, Donna M. “The Alamo Drafthouse Cinema: Cultivating the Cult Experience,” MA thesis, University of Texas – Austin, 2007. Doherty, Thomas. Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the

1950s. Winchester: Unwin Hyman, 1988. “Dropping of Song Writers Saves $1000,000 Weekly.” Billboard 2 December 1930: 5. Dyer, Richard. “Entertainment and Utopia.” Genre: The Musical. Ed. Rick Altman. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. 175-189. Ebenkamp, Becky. “Will the Real Ohio Express Please Stand Up?” Bubblegum Is The

Naked Truth. Eds. Kim Cooper and David Smay. Los Angeles: Feral House, 2001: 81-85. Ebert, Roger. “Empire Records.” Chicago Sun-Times 22 September 22 1995. 8 August 2008. <http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19950922/REVIEWS /509220302/1023>.

289

Echols, Alice. Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin. New York: Henry Holt, 1989. Eisner, Ken. “Empire Records.” Variety 2 October 1995. 8 August 2008. <http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117910138.html?categoryid=31&cs=1&p= 0>. Elsaesser, Thomas. "Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama." Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film and Television Melodrama. Ed. Marcia Landy. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991: 68-91. Emerson, Ken. Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and Brilliance of the Brill Building

Era. New York: Viking, 2005. “Empire Records.” TV Guide. 8 August 2008. <http://movies.tvguide.com/empire- records/review/130858>. Ennis, Philip H. The Seventh Stream: The Emergence of Rocknroll in American Popular

Music. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1992. Feuer, Jane. The Hollywood Musical. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. ——-. “A Postscript for The Nineties.” Popular Music: Critical Concepts in Media

and Cultural Studies. Ed. Simon Frith. New York: Routledge, 2004. 228-240. Fordin, Hugh. Getting to Know Him: A Biography of Oscar Hammerstein II. New York : Da Capo Press, 1995. Fowler, Alistair. Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and

Modes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Frith, Simon. “The Magic That Can Set You Free: The Ideology of Folk and the Myth of the Rock Community.” Popular Music 1 (1981a): 159-168. ——-. Sound Effects. New York: Pantheon, 1981b. ——-. “Art vs Technology. The Strange Case of Popular Music.” Media, Culture and

Society 8:3 (1986): 263-279. ——-. "The Industrialization of Music.” Music for Pleasure. Cambridge: Polity, 1988. 11-23. ——-. "Why do songs have words?" Music for Pleasure. Cambridge: Polity, 1988. 105–28.

290

——-. Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge: Harvard Univerity Press, 1996. Frith, Simon and Angela McRobbie. “Rock and Sexuality.” On Record: Rock, Pop and

the Written Word. Eds. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin. New York: Pantheon, 1990. 371-389. Furia, Philip. The Poets of Tin Pan Alley: A History of America's Great Lyricists. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. George, Nelson. The Death of Rhythm and Blues. New York: Plume Books. 1989. Gilvey, John Anthony. Before the Parade Passes By: Gower Champion and the Glorious

American Musical. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005. Gledhill, Christine. “Rethinking Genre.” Reinventing Film Studies. Eds. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams. London: Arnold, 2000. 221-243. Gleiberman, Owen. “What I Love: The Closing Number.” Entertainment Weekly #840 (September 16, 2005): 60. Goodwin, Andrew. “Sample and Hold: Pop Music in the Digital Age of Reproduction.” On Record: Rock, Pop and the Written Word. Eds. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin. New York: Pantheon, 1990. 258-73. Gorbman, Claudia. Unheard Melodies – Narrative Film Music. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987. Grant, Barry Keith. “The Classic Hollywood Musical and the ‘Problem’ of Rock ‘n’ Roll.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 13. 4 (1986): 195-205. Grant, Mark N. The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004. Graves, Janet. “Musicals Without Rhythm.” New York Times 19 June 1938. Popular

Culture. Ed. David Manning White. Salem: Ayer, 1975. 149. Green, Stanley. The World of Musical Comedy. New York: Da Capo Press, Inc., 1980. Griffin, Sean. “The Gang’s All Here: Generic versus Racial Integration in the 1940s Musical.” Cinema Journal 42.1 (Fall 2002): 21-45.

291

Grossberg, Lawrence. “Is There Rock After Punk?” On Record: Rock, Pop and the

Written Word. Eds. Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin. New York: Pantheon, 1990. 111-123. ——-. “Is Anybody Listening? Does Anybody Care? On ‘The State of Rock.’” Microphone Fiends: Youth Music & Youth Culture. Eds. Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose. New York: Routledge, 1994: 41-58. Hamm, Charles. Yesterdays: Popular Song in America. New York: W.W. Norton, 1979. ——-. “The Fourth Audience.” Popular Music 1 (1981): 123-141. Hansen, Miriam. Babel & Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. Hansen, Miriam Bratu. “The Mass Production of the Sense: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism.” Reinventing Film Studies. Eds. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams. London: Arnold, 2000. 332-350. Harris, Mark. “The Final Cut: Is Sci-Fi Out of Ideas?” Entertainment Weekly January 11, 2008. March 1, 2008. <http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20169296,00.html>. Hirschhorn, Clive. The Hollywood Musical. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc. 1981. Inglis, Ian, ed. Popular Music and Film. London and New York: Wallflower, 2003. Jenkins, Henry. What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville

Aesthetic. Irvington, New York: Columbia Univ. Pr. 1993. Jewell, Richard B., and Vernon Harbin. The RKO Story. London: Octopus Books, 1982. Jones, John Bush. Our Musicals, Ourselves: A Social History of the American Musical

Theater. Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 2003 Kalinak Kathryn. Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992. Keightley, Keir. “Reconsidering Rock.” The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock. Eds. Simon Frith, Will Straw and John Street. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 109-42. Kehr, Dave. “Pennies From Heaven.” Chicago Reader. 1 July 2008. <http://onfilm.chicagoreader.com/movies/capsules/14920_PENNIES_FROM_HE AVEN>.

292

——-. “Stop Making Sense.” Chicago Reader. 1 July 2008. <http://onfilm.chicagoreader.com/movies/capsules/11551_STOP_MAKING_SE NSE>. ——-. “Xanadu.” Chicago Reader.” 1 July 2008. <http://onfilm.chicagoreader.com/movies/capsules/9573_XANADU>. (pub. Date not found) Kessler, Kelly. “Tough Guys, Rock Stars, and Messiahs: Genre and Gender in the Hollywood Musical, 1966-1983.” Diss. University of Texas-Austin, 2004. Kimbrell, James. Barbra: An Actress Who Sings: An Unauthorized Biography. Boston: Branden, 1989. Kissell, Rick. and Michael Schneider “’High School Musical 2’ aces test.” Variety 18 August 2007. 1 August 2008. <http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117970479.html?categoryid=14&cs=1>. Knapp, Raymond. The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006 Knight, Arthur. Disintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and American

Musical Film. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Kreuger, Miles. “At Long Last Love.” At Long Last Love – Original Motion Picture

Soundtrack. RCA, 1975. ——-. “Show Boat.” Show Boat. EMI, 1989. Kuhn, Annette. Dreaming of Fred and Ginger: Cinema and Cultural Memory. New York: New York University Press, 2002. Laing, Heather: “Emotion by Numbers: Music, Song and the Musical.” Musicals:

Hollywood & Beyond. Eds. Bill Marshall and Robynn Stilwell. Portand, Oregon & Exeter, England: Intellect TM., 2000. 5-13. Langford, Barry. Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005. Lannin, Steven and Matthew Caley, eds. Pop Fiction – The Song in Cinema. Bristol: Intellect, 2005. “Lena ‘Clipped’ By Memphis Censor: La Horne's Scenes Cut From Movie.” Pittsburgh

Courier (National Edition), 15 January 1949: 1.

293

Lewis, Lisa A. Gender Politics and MTV: Voicing the Difference. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990. Long, Robert Emmet. Broadway, the Golden Years: Jerome Robbins and the Great

Choreographer. NY: Continuum, 2001. Malone, Bill C. Country Music U.S.A. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985. Maltin, Leonard, ed. Leonard Maltin’s 2006 Movie Guide. New York: Plume, 2008. Marcus, Greil. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music. New York: Plume, 1997. ——-. “Treasure Island.” Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island. Ed. Greil Marcus. 1979. New York: Da Capo Press, 1996. 252-299. ——-. “Notes on the Life & Death and Incandescent Banality of Rock 'n' Roll.” 1992. The Faber Book of Pop. Eds. Jon Savage and Hanif Kureishi. London: Faber, 1995. 739-752. ——-. “Foreword.” Marooned: The Next Generation of Desert Island Discs. Ed. Phil Freeman. New York: Da Capo Press, 2007. ix-xv. Marshall, Lee. Bob Dylan: The Never Ending Star. Boston: Polity Press, 2007. Mast, Gerald. "Can't Help Singin"': The American Musical on Stage and Screen. Woodstock N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1987. McKay, Brian. “The Empire Strikes Out.” Efilmcritic.com 23 July 23 2001. 8 August 8 2008. <http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=1900&reviewer=258>. McLaughlin, Noel. “Rock, Fashion and Performativity.” Fashion Cultures: Theories,

explorations, and analysis. Eds. Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson. London: Routledge, 2000. 264-285. McMillin, Scott. The Musical as Drama: A Study of the Principles and Conventions

Behind Musical Shows from Kern to Sondheim. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 2006. Michaels, Rob. “Black Sabbath.” Spin Alternative Record Guide. Eds. Eric Weisbard and Craig Marks. New York: Vintage, 1995. 46-47. Miller, D. A. Place for Us [Essay On The Broadway Musical]. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1998.

294

Monaco, Paul. The Sixties: 1960-1969. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2001. Most, Andrea. Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical. Rhode Island: Harvard Univ Pr, 2004. Mueller, John. "Fred Astaire and the Integrated Musical." Cinema Journal 24:1 (Fall 1984): 28-40. Mungen, Anno. “The Music is the Message: The Day Jimi Hendrix Burned his Guitar - Film, Musial Instrument and performance as Music Media.” Popular Music and

Film. Ed. Ian Inglis. London and New York: Wallflower, 2003. “Musical Films Are Taboo.” Billboard 23 August 1930: 3, 91. “Musical Movies.” Box Office Mojo. 3 Feb 2008. <http://www.boxofficemojo.com/genres/chart/?id=musical.htm>. Pastorek, Whitney. “The 50 Best High School Movies.” Entertainment Weekly 15 September 2006: 47. “Picture Audiences Turning ‘Thumbs Down’ on Revues.” Billboard 14 June 1930: 18. Raymond, Marc. “The Multiplicity of Generic Discourses and the Meaning and Pleasure of Mean Streets.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 15:2 (Fall 2006): 62-80. “The Robot on the Run!,” Billboard May, 10, 1930: 15. Rodgers, Richard. Musical Stages: An Autobiography. New York: Random House. 1975. Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “Car Wash.” Chicago Reader. 1 July 2008. <http://onfilm.chicagoreader.com/movies/capsules/1636_CAR_WASH >. Rubin, Martin. “Busby Berkeley and the Backstage Musical.” Hollywood Musicals: The

Film Reader. Ed. Steven Cohan. London: Routledge, 2002. 53-61. Rushkoff, Douglas, ed. The Gen X Reader. New York: Ballantine Books, 1994. Sanjek, Russell. Pennies from Heaven: The American Popular Music Business in the 20th

Century. New York: Da Capo, 1996 (1988). Schippers, Mimi. Rockin' Out of the Box: Gender Maneuvering In Alternative Hard

Rock. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

295

Shapiro, Peter. Turn The Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco. New York: Faber and Faber, Inc., 2005. Shaw, Greg. “Brill Building Pop.” The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll. New York: Random House/Rolling Stone, 1992. Eds. Anthony DeCurtis and James Henke with Holly George-Warren. Original Ed. Jim Miller. 143-152. Sheffield, Robert. “David Bowie.” Spin Alternative Record Guide. Eds. Eric Weisbard and Craig Marks. New York: Vintage, 1995. 55-6. Smith, Jeff. The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. “Sobbin’ Women: The Making of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.” Seven Brides for

Seven Brothers (Warner Home Video, 2004). “Songofnorway.jpg.” 1 July 2008. <http://i8.photobucket.com/albums/a13/ChmnofBrd/Movie%20Ads/SongofNorw ay.jpg>. "Spontaneous." Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. 10th ed. 1996. Spring, Katherine. “Say It With Songs: Popular Music in Hollywood Cinema During The Transition To Sound, 1927-1931.” Diss. University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2007. Staiger, Janet. “Film Noir as Male Melodrama: The Politics of Film Genre Labeling.” The Shifting Definitions of Genre: Essays on Labeling Films, Television Shows

and Media. Eds. Lincoln Geraghty and Mark Jancovich. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2008: 71-91. Stilwell, Robynn J. “The Fantastical Gap between Diegetic and Nondiegetic.” Beyond

The Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema. Eds. Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer, and Richard Leppert. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007: 184-202. Stovall, Natasha. “AC/DC.” Spin Alternative Record Guide. Eds. Eric Weisbard and Craig Marks. New York: Vintage, 1995. 5-6. Taves, Brian, ed. “Archival News,” Cinema Journal 38 (1): 115-124. ——-, ed. “Archival News.” Society for Cinema & Media Studies. 22 Oct 2006. <http://www.cmstudies.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=59& Itemid=109>. "Theme Songs Within Reason or Producers Will Cut 'Em." Billboard 31 May 1930: 24

296

Truffaut, François. Hitchcock/Truffaut: A Definitive Study of Alfred Hitchcock. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967. Tudor, Andrew. Monsters and Mad Scientists: A Cultural History of the Horror Movie. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd, 1989. Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone, 2002. Weisbard, Eric. “Nirvana.” Spin Alternative Record Guide. Eds. Eric Weisbard and Craig Marks. New York: Vintage, 1995. 271-272. Weisbard, Eric. “Generation Ex.” Village Voice 13 July 1999. 8 August 2006. <http://www.villagevoice.com/2005-10-18/specials/generation-ex/>. Williams, Alan. "The Musical Film and Recorded Popular Music." Genre: The Musical. Ed. Rick Altman. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. 147-158. Williams, Linda. Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle

Tom to O. J. Simpson. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001 Willis, Ellen. “Janis Joplin.” Beginning to See the Light. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1992. 61-67. Wloszczyna, Susan. “Mamma Mia!: Musicals big news at box office again.” USA Today. 19 March 2008. 21 March 2008. <http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/2008-03-19-musicals-main_N.htm>. Wojcik, Pamela Robertson, and Arthur Knight, eds. Soundtrack Available: Essays on

Film and Popular Music. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. Wolf, Stacy. A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Wood, Graham. "Distant Cousin or Fraternal Twin? Analytical Approaches to the Film Musical." The Cambridge Companion to the Musical. Eds. William A. Everett and Paul R. Laird. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002: 212–230. Wood, Robin. “Ideology, Genre, Auteur.” Film Genre Reader II. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. 26-40. Zanes, R.J. Warren. “Too Much Mead? Under The Influence (of Participant- Observation)." Reading Rock and Roll: Authenticity, Appropriation, Aesthetics. Eds. Kevin J. H. Dettmar and William Richey. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. 37-71.

297

Vita

Kevin John Bozelka attended James B. Conant High School in Hoffman Estates, IL. In

1988, he attended the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and received a B.A. in Film.

He was employed as a film and popular music critic for a variety of publications. He also

was employed as a club DJ for several establishments in the Milwaukee area. In 2002, he

attended McGill University in Montréal, Québec and received an M.A. in

Communications. In 2004, he entered the Graduate Program at the University of Texas at

Austin.

Permanent address: 5310 Joe Sayers Ave. #102 Austin, Texas 78756 This dissertation was typed by the author.