Papers by Thomas Barker
This dissertation explores the role of music within the politics of liberation in the United Stat... more This dissertation explores the role of music within the politics of liberation in the United States in the period of the late 1950s and the 1960s. Its focus is on the two dominant, but very different (and, it is argued, interconnected) mass political and cultural movements that converged in the course of the 1960s: civil rights and counterculture. Divergent tendencies in the popular musics of the period, which were drawn into the orbits of these two movements, are considered in the context of tensions between political commitment and aesthetic autonomy, between the call for collective political action and the pull of individualism, and between existing political reality and the utopian perspectives offered by art. The theoretical approach derives largely from critical theory (in particular Adorno, Bloch, and Marcuse), and the thesis argues that by tending toward autonomy and individualism popular musics in this period articulated a vision of society that was radically different from...
The purpose of this article is to consider the ways that Coltrane’s music might be said to have t... more The purpose of this article is to consider the ways that Coltrane’s music might be said to have taken on the character of what Adorno called the ‘autonomous work of art’ in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Building upon the 1999 essay by Nick Nesbit entitled ‘Sounding Autonomy: Adorno, Coltrane, and Jazz,’ this article aims to provide a critical theory of Coltrane’s aesthetics, examining the ways that dominant socio-political tendencies became objectified within Coltrane’s music through his interaction with the historically formed musical material. Unlike Nesbit, however, this study provides an account of musical autonomy that places greater emphasis on the precarious nature of this category in African American music. Indeed, because of the economically disadvantaged status of black musicians, the idea of an autonomous—anti-commercial—aesthetic, subject only to its own dialectic of form and material, is a difficult concept to reconcile with jazz. Consequently, I examine the persistent conflicts that arose in the development of an autonomous musical language in jazz—in particular, the ways that Coltrane was forced to adopt a conciliatory attitude toward the ‘official’ jazz establishment in order to maintain his position as commercial artist, even as his music was developing beyond commercial acceptability.
Moreover, whilst Nesbit has derived the social content of Coltrane’s works through the idea of double-consciousness—in which African American composers are seen as mediating two traditions, ‘one blues bases [black]… the other technocratic [white]’ —it is argued in this study that the idea of ‘blackness’ as it existed in the 1960s was no longer simply bound up with African and American (African-American) traditions, but had become expanded to include colonial and former colonial identities. Although this found limited form in the expression of Afrocentrism and Black Nationalism, it is perhaps best expressed by Robert L. Allen’s 1969 conception of internal colonialism, where the situation of African Americans in the US is understood in the similar terms as colonial countries. It is argued that Coltrane’s attempt to combine without reconciling the contrasting traditions of jazz and Indian music was the expressive form of this expansive conception of African American identity. This indirect commentary on the trajectory of the civil rights movement is in tune with Adornian conception of musical autonomy, where political realities appear only insofar as they are refused explicit. By mediating subjectivity within the collective musical material, Coltrane went beyond individual commentary on the political movements and expressed a condition that pertained more closely to universality.
This dissertation explores the role of music within the politics of liberation in the United Stat... more This dissertation explores the role of music within the politics of liberation in the United States in the period of the late 1950s and the 1960s. Its focus is on the two dominant, but very different (and, it is argued, interconnected) mass political and cultural movements that converged in the course of the 1960s: civil rights and counterculture. Divergent tendencies in the popular musics of the period that were drawn into the orbits of these two movements are considered in the context of tensions between political commitment and aesthetic autonomy, between the call for collective political action and the pull of individualism, and between existing political reality and the utopian perspectives offered by art. The theoretical approach derives largely from critical theory (in particular Adorno, Bloch, and Marcuse), and the thesis argues that by tending toward autonomy and individualism radical popular musics in this period articulated a vision of society that was both utopian and critical.
The study situates itself in the existing literature on protest music, but seeks to take this further by examining the complexity of responses in music of this period to protest and liberation movements beyond protest songs and politically committed music to discuss issues of social critique and critical reflection. After an initial consideration of what might be understood by the categories ‘protest music’ and socially or politically ‘engaged music’, considering among others the work of Eyerman and Jamison (1998), Mattern (1998), Roy (2010), Street (2011), and in particular Denisoff (1968), notions of political engagement and autonomy are discussed in relation to Adorno (1970) and Marcuse (1977). Subsequent chapters then function as case studies of particular tendencies as well as considering significant figures in the music of the period in the context of liberation, civil rights, Black Power, the counterculture, and the New Left. The Highlander Folk School is considered for the ways in which it used music to foreground a collective political identity that was in due course subverted by the needs of individual activists; Bob Dylan is examined in light of his retreat from collective political projects and his move toward aesthetic individualism that was nevertheless met with an increase in his perceived relevance to the liberation movements; John Coltrane for the radicalism of his experiments with the material of bebop which, it is proposed, led jazz in the direction of a self-contained autonomous aesthetic which itself can be read as political; and Frank Zappa, whose music, it is argued, constituted a form of critical reflection both on the material of consumer culture and on American culture itself. By way of conclusion the dissertation offers a critical reappraisal of the relationship between music and politics in America in the 1960s.
The purpose of this article is to situate Dylan’s abandonment of protest songs and, more broadly,... more The purpose of this article is to situate Dylan’s abandonment of protest songs and, more broadly, his rejection of collective liberation projects in the early to mid-1960s, within the contradictory currents of the counterculture. In doing this, this study does not aim to provide yet another Dylan biography, rather, its aim is to clarify the recurrent tension between the individual and the collective in Dylan’s music. In certain respects this article has an important precedent in Tony Fluxman’s 1991 essay “Bob Dylan and the Dialectic of Enlightenment.” However, unlike Fluxman, this study deals with the ways that Dylan made use of “myths” to establish himself as a prominent figure in the 1960s counterculture. It is argued that part of what made Dylan so pertinent to these struggles was his ability to draw upon a stock of cultural images which were both individual, inasmuch as they pertained to ideas of independence and autonomy, and part of the collective U.S. imagination. The self-defeating nature of this myth is seen as intimately tied to the loss of real individualism.
The critical dimensions of Zappa’s music have generated considerable debate both inside and outsi... more The critical dimensions of Zappa’s music have generated considerable debate both inside and outside of academic circles. Whilst the more philosophically oriented have argued for his (variously) modernist (Knakkergaard), postmodernist (Lowe), or avant-gardist credentials (Cotter), others have concentrated on the sometimes tedious but always necessary job of musicological stock-taking, documenting the biographical and historical details of his music and its context. Unfortunately, however, the gulf between these two approaches has rarely been breached, with critiques of his aesthetics remaining abstract from the specific concerns of the 1960s political movements and studies of the movements failing to draw upon the conclusions of the aesthetic projects. The task of this present article is to go some way toward correcting this oversight. Specifically, this study sets out to situate Zappa’s critique of “commodity fetishism” concretely within the “Freak Scene,” the 1967 Human Be-In, and Summer of Love in the same year. Drawing upon the critique of “constitutive subjectivity” found in Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and his 1969 essay on “Subject and Object,” it is argued that the subversive power of Zappa’s aesthetics was derived from his opposition to the hierarchical organization of his audience and the art-object. In taking this approach, I confirm the conventional wisdom that Zappa’s music was implicitly (and often explicitly) critical of conformity, whilst also considering his engagement with its extreme opposite—what Paul Heelas (20) has referred to as the counterculture’s obsession with “unmediated individualism.” As suggested by the Adorno epigraph, the more the “I” believes itself to be self-constituting, the more it opens itself up to objectification. Conformity and constitutive subjectivity are therefore seen as both enabling and presupposing one another.
Journal of Black Studies, May 2015
The purpose of this article is to explore how music provided the U.S. plantation-slaves with a sp... more The purpose of this article is to explore how music provided the U.S. plantation-slaves with a space in which the hegemony of the White ruling class could be subverted, adapted, and resisted. Consistent with the beliefs of slave religion, which saw the material and the spiritual as part of an intrinsic unity, I identify two tendencies in slave song: freedom as material practice and freedom as the “aesthetic imagination.” I argue that the tensions between these two spheres provided a crucial intimation of a life without slavery.
CounterPunch, Feb 13, 2015
As police brutality and racist violence are once again shunted to the centre stage of US politics... more As police brutality and racist violence are once again shunted to the centre stage of US politics, figures such as Michael Brown take their place in a seemingly endless string of victims. From Eric Garner in 2014, Trayvon Martin in 2012, Rodney King in 1991, back to the 1963 execution of the NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers; from the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing by members of the KKK in the same year, which resulted in the deaths of four girls aged between 11 and 14, to the brutal murder of the fourteen year old Emmett Till in 1955—the thread weaves continuously back through lynching, Jim Crow laws, forced servitude, and slavery. Perpetrators of this violence draw upon a similarly unbroken US tradition, one in which murderers are not justly held to account for their actions. Although the police force is now relied upon to do much of this work, the same narrative of murder with impunity can be located throughout.
Invariably the liberal media makes much of these deaths, connecting individual murders with the broader ‘racial problem’ in American society. The murdered are cast as victims, as the unwilling prey of systemic injustice. Yet for all their compassion, there is a subtle ideology which sours the media’s representation of this violence. Although allowing for minor transgressions, the liberal media is concerned first and foremost with the moral credentials of the victim. To be a true victim, the individual must appear nonviolent: Trayvon Martin, an ‘innocent youth’; Garner, a ‘gentle giant’ – both guilty of only minor infractions. Indeed, even in these cases the media is curiously reluctant to take sides until the innocence of the victim is beyond doubt.
The same, however, does not hold true for those who resist. In cases such as the Watts Riots in 1965, the Black Panther Party, or the Attica Prison Riots in 1971, in which 43 inmates, guards, and hostages, were slaughtered by police with state-approval, the liberal media was quick to jump to the offensive. Although the individuals involved were undoubtedly victims of racist violence, by no stretch of the imagination could their behaviour be described as passive or nonviolent (though the nature of their violence was obviously defensive). The tacit ideology which lies behind this pattern of reporting is that when faced with politically motivated black aggression the liberal media is inclined to invert their analysis, from seeing racism as prior to black resistance to considering black resistance as justifying racism. Certainly, part of the reason that organisations such as the Black Panther Party provided so few victims is because of their use of defensive violence in the fight for liberation.
One of the main consequences of this misrepresentation has been that black people appear dehumanized in the media, as either helpless victims or mindless killers. Although this distortion goes back at least as far as slavery – with African-Americans frequently portrayed either as ‘Sambos’ or revolutionaries (with little room in between) – the modern form of this ideology can be situated in the political conflict of the 1960s and 1970s. Black radicalism in the twentieth-century has become a significant source of fear for the liberal establishment, representing a challenge to their class supremacy. Through a critique of The New York Times’ representation of nonviolence and defensive violence in the civil rights and black power movements, this study aims to expand the definition of victimhood to encompass those that sought to defend themselves. Only by celebrating the lives of black radicals, will a strategy for overcoming racial oppression emerge.
International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Jun 2012
Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphonie bears aesthetic characteristics compatible with both mod... more Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphonie bears aesthetic characteristics compatible with both modern and postmodern concepts; however, this article argues that assimilation to the latter category becomes inevitable when Turangalîla is viewed unproblematically through the eyes of the present. Situating Turangalîla within its own productive context, and deriving its significance therefrom, this article corrects such anti-historicist tendencies by demonstrating the historical dependence of aesthetic meaning. It is argued that these meanings can in large part be understood through Messiaen’s rejection of the composer’s own capacity for aesthetic discrimination.
The Spleen Journal, Dec 10, 2013
It is generally agreed that the origins the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation lie not, as is commo... more It is generally agreed that the origins the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation lie not, as is commonly thought, in the North’s moral opposition to southern black slavery, but rather in a strategic decision made by the incumbent Republican Party to preserve federal authority in the southern states. In order to restore national unity after the outbreak of civil war, the tensions between the rapidly expanding industrial capitalism of the North and the agricultural semi-feudal southern economy were exploited to great effect. The foremost of these contradictions was that between free labour and slave labour. DuBois has argued that for economic systems legitimated only through violence and coercion, such as slavery, ignorance and isolation are necessary for the reproduction of society. With its emphasis upon centralization and rationalization of production methods, isolation and ignorance were not practical in the industrial North. This tension between industrial and rural living was to prove decisive both in determining the outcome of the American Civil War and the future of the black movement. It is this tension which forms the subject of this paper.
By tracing the function of totality in French post-structuralist thought, particularly that of Ja... more By tracing the function of totality in French post-structuralist thought, particularly that of Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard, this study will demonstrate how in the postmodern era a new stability has been found within the absolute repudiation of consensus. It will be argued that the undialectical dualistic tendencies in this thought constitutes a new totality, counterposing progress and stasis, heterogeneity and homogeniety, homology and paralogy, as if they were not mutually constitutive. Frustrating though it may be that the search for a non-totalizing consensus has proven to be so elusive and at times so dangerous, the absolute opposition to all forms of totality does not provide a solution to this problem, offering, as it does, a new form of stability. It is, however, precisely this negation of totality which can be seen as the primary project of postmodernism. Implcit throughout this study is a defence of Marxist dialectics over the absolute heterogeneity of postmodernism.
Conference Presentations by Thomas Barker
Music can provide a vital means of articulating, affirming, and structuring the identity of socia... more Music can provide a vital means of articulating, affirming, and structuring the identity of social movements. Speaking of the role of music in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, King states that “songs bind us together, give us courage together, help us to march together.”1 It is just this characteristic which makes music such an attractive tool for the expression of discontent—giving, as it does, a collective voice to those whom society has hitherto rendered mute.2 However, though commonplace, such a position overstates the mimetic qualities of music. Any truly critical theory of music and social movements must implicate the appropriated cultural forms in the processes of social adaptation and identity construction, examining the extent to which identity is not only articulated and affirmed by music, but thrown into question and re-constructed.
Thesis Chapters by Thomas Barker
The aim of this dissertation is to explore the relationship between music and liberation movement... more The aim of this dissertation is to explore the relationship between music and liberation movements in the context of the late 1950s and 1960s United States (US), in particular the civil rights movement, the Black Power movement, the counterculture, and the New Left. A variety of popular musics were drawn into the orbits of these movements. Radical popular musics in this period are examined in the light of tensions between political commitment and aesthetic autonomy, between the call for collective political action and the pull of individualism, and between existing political reality and the utopian perspectives offered by art. It is argued that even though tending toward autonomy and individualism popular musics articulated a vision of utopia that was socially critical and oppositional in relation to dominant political realities of the period. This argument is pursued through a series of case studies: the Highlander Folk School, Bob Dylan, John Coltrane, and Frank Zappa.
The idea of ‘political music’ is problematic and calls for clarification from the outset. In the ... more The idea of ‘political music’ is problematic and calls for clarification from the outset. In the context of popular music and folk music, the term is most usually associated with what became known in the 1950s and 1960s as ‘protest music’, particularly as protest songs in relation to the protest movements of the time. In the case of art music, however, the idea of a specifically ‘political music’ is usually understood as politically committed or politically engaged music, in the way often associated with composers like Hanns Eisler in the period from the 1920s to the 1950s, and in the 1950s and 1960s with composers like Luigi Nono. In addition to these, there is the association of music—both art music and popular music—with political propaganda, especially in the Second World War and in the Cold War that followed. However, whilst all of these notions of ‘political music’ need to be addressed early on in this chapter, a further important issue is raised as a result: what about musics that do not easily fit into any of these categories, but which nevertheless came to be regarded as ‘political’ or politically provocative and critical in their implications, even though not obviously or directly political in their content or their function?
The purpose of this chapter is therefore not only to explore the problematic notions of ‘protest music,’ ‘politically engaged’ music, and the political use of music as propaganda, but also to discuss the ‘politically mediated’ character of so-called autonomous music in order to clarify concepts that are fundamental to the rest of this dissertation. Beginning with a cursory examination of definitions of protest music and politically engaged music that foregrounds the role of song text in determining the political meaning of music, I then move on to consider ways in which supposedly ‘apolitical’ music can be considered political when it is used in a political context. Finally, I turn attention to the political implications of so-called ‘autonomous music’, arguing that it is through its critical relation to its material, which is itself of a collective and socially mediated character, that such music can be understood as radical and politically critical.
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Papers by Thomas Barker
Moreover, whilst Nesbit has derived the social content of Coltrane’s works through the idea of double-consciousness—in which African American composers are seen as mediating two traditions, ‘one blues bases [black]… the other technocratic [white]’ —it is argued in this study that the idea of ‘blackness’ as it existed in the 1960s was no longer simply bound up with African and American (African-American) traditions, but had become expanded to include colonial and former colonial identities. Although this found limited form in the expression of Afrocentrism and Black Nationalism, it is perhaps best expressed by Robert L. Allen’s 1969 conception of internal colonialism, where the situation of African Americans in the US is understood in the similar terms as colonial countries. It is argued that Coltrane’s attempt to combine without reconciling the contrasting traditions of jazz and Indian music was the expressive form of this expansive conception of African American identity. This indirect commentary on the trajectory of the civil rights movement is in tune with Adornian conception of musical autonomy, where political realities appear only insofar as they are refused explicit. By mediating subjectivity within the collective musical material, Coltrane went beyond individual commentary on the political movements and expressed a condition that pertained more closely to universality.
The study situates itself in the existing literature on protest music, but seeks to take this further by examining the complexity of responses in music of this period to protest and liberation movements beyond protest songs and politically committed music to discuss issues of social critique and critical reflection. After an initial consideration of what might be understood by the categories ‘protest music’ and socially or politically ‘engaged music’, considering among others the work of Eyerman and Jamison (1998), Mattern (1998), Roy (2010), Street (2011), and in particular Denisoff (1968), notions of political engagement and autonomy are discussed in relation to Adorno (1970) and Marcuse (1977). Subsequent chapters then function as case studies of particular tendencies as well as considering significant figures in the music of the period in the context of liberation, civil rights, Black Power, the counterculture, and the New Left. The Highlander Folk School is considered for the ways in which it used music to foreground a collective political identity that was in due course subverted by the needs of individual activists; Bob Dylan is examined in light of his retreat from collective political projects and his move toward aesthetic individualism that was nevertheless met with an increase in his perceived relevance to the liberation movements; John Coltrane for the radicalism of his experiments with the material of bebop which, it is proposed, led jazz in the direction of a self-contained autonomous aesthetic which itself can be read as political; and Frank Zappa, whose music, it is argued, constituted a form of critical reflection both on the material of consumer culture and on American culture itself. By way of conclusion the dissertation offers a critical reappraisal of the relationship between music and politics in America in the 1960s.
Invariably the liberal media makes much of these deaths, connecting individual murders with the broader ‘racial problem’ in American society. The murdered are cast as victims, as the unwilling prey of systemic injustice. Yet for all their compassion, there is a subtle ideology which sours the media’s representation of this violence. Although allowing for minor transgressions, the liberal media is concerned first and foremost with the moral credentials of the victim. To be a true victim, the individual must appear nonviolent: Trayvon Martin, an ‘innocent youth’; Garner, a ‘gentle giant’ – both guilty of only minor infractions. Indeed, even in these cases the media is curiously reluctant to take sides until the innocence of the victim is beyond doubt.
The same, however, does not hold true for those who resist. In cases such as the Watts Riots in 1965, the Black Panther Party, or the Attica Prison Riots in 1971, in which 43 inmates, guards, and hostages, were slaughtered by police with state-approval, the liberal media was quick to jump to the offensive. Although the individuals involved were undoubtedly victims of racist violence, by no stretch of the imagination could their behaviour be described as passive or nonviolent (though the nature of their violence was obviously defensive). The tacit ideology which lies behind this pattern of reporting is that when faced with politically motivated black aggression the liberal media is inclined to invert their analysis, from seeing racism as prior to black resistance to considering black resistance as justifying racism. Certainly, part of the reason that organisations such as the Black Panther Party provided so few victims is because of their use of defensive violence in the fight for liberation.
One of the main consequences of this misrepresentation has been that black people appear dehumanized in the media, as either helpless victims or mindless killers. Although this distortion goes back at least as far as slavery – with African-Americans frequently portrayed either as ‘Sambos’ or revolutionaries (with little room in between) – the modern form of this ideology can be situated in the political conflict of the 1960s and 1970s. Black radicalism in the twentieth-century has become a significant source of fear for the liberal establishment, representing a challenge to their class supremacy. Through a critique of The New York Times’ representation of nonviolence and defensive violence in the civil rights and black power movements, this study aims to expand the definition of victimhood to encompass those that sought to defend themselves. Only by celebrating the lives of black radicals, will a strategy for overcoming racial oppression emerge.
Conference Presentations by Thomas Barker
Thesis Chapters by Thomas Barker
The purpose of this chapter is therefore not only to explore the problematic notions of ‘protest music,’ ‘politically engaged’ music, and the political use of music as propaganda, but also to discuss the ‘politically mediated’ character of so-called autonomous music in order to clarify concepts that are fundamental to the rest of this dissertation. Beginning with a cursory examination of definitions of protest music and politically engaged music that foregrounds the role of song text in determining the political meaning of music, I then move on to consider ways in which supposedly ‘apolitical’ music can be considered political when it is used in a political context. Finally, I turn attention to the political implications of so-called ‘autonomous music’, arguing that it is through its critical relation to its material, which is itself of a collective and socially mediated character, that such music can be understood as radical and politically critical.
Moreover, whilst Nesbit has derived the social content of Coltrane’s works through the idea of double-consciousness—in which African American composers are seen as mediating two traditions, ‘one blues bases [black]… the other technocratic [white]’ —it is argued in this study that the idea of ‘blackness’ as it existed in the 1960s was no longer simply bound up with African and American (African-American) traditions, but had become expanded to include colonial and former colonial identities. Although this found limited form in the expression of Afrocentrism and Black Nationalism, it is perhaps best expressed by Robert L. Allen’s 1969 conception of internal colonialism, where the situation of African Americans in the US is understood in the similar terms as colonial countries. It is argued that Coltrane’s attempt to combine without reconciling the contrasting traditions of jazz and Indian music was the expressive form of this expansive conception of African American identity. This indirect commentary on the trajectory of the civil rights movement is in tune with Adornian conception of musical autonomy, where political realities appear only insofar as they are refused explicit. By mediating subjectivity within the collective musical material, Coltrane went beyond individual commentary on the political movements and expressed a condition that pertained more closely to universality.
The study situates itself in the existing literature on protest music, but seeks to take this further by examining the complexity of responses in music of this period to protest and liberation movements beyond protest songs and politically committed music to discuss issues of social critique and critical reflection. After an initial consideration of what might be understood by the categories ‘protest music’ and socially or politically ‘engaged music’, considering among others the work of Eyerman and Jamison (1998), Mattern (1998), Roy (2010), Street (2011), and in particular Denisoff (1968), notions of political engagement and autonomy are discussed in relation to Adorno (1970) and Marcuse (1977). Subsequent chapters then function as case studies of particular tendencies as well as considering significant figures in the music of the period in the context of liberation, civil rights, Black Power, the counterculture, and the New Left. The Highlander Folk School is considered for the ways in which it used music to foreground a collective political identity that was in due course subverted by the needs of individual activists; Bob Dylan is examined in light of his retreat from collective political projects and his move toward aesthetic individualism that was nevertheless met with an increase in his perceived relevance to the liberation movements; John Coltrane for the radicalism of his experiments with the material of bebop which, it is proposed, led jazz in the direction of a self-contained autonomous aesthetic which itself can be read as political; and Frank Zappa, whose music, it is argued, constituted a form of critical reflection both on the material of consumer culture and on American culture itself. By way of conclusion the dissertation offers a critical reappraisal of the relationship between music and politics in America in the 1960s.
Invariably the liberal media makes much of these deaths, connecting individual murders with the broader ‘racial problem’ in American society. The murdered are cast as victims, as the unwilling prey of systemic injustice. Yet for all their compassion, there is a subtle ideology which sours the media’s representation of this violence. Although allowing for minor transgressions, the liberal media is concerned first and foremost with the moral credentials of the victim. To be a true victim, the individual must appear nonviolent: Trayvon Martin, an ‘innocent youth’; Garner, a ‘gentle giant’ – both guilty of only minor infractions. Indeed, even in these cases the media is curiously reluctant to take sides until the innocence of the victim is beyond doubt.
The same, however, does not hold true for those who resist. In cases such as the Watts Riots in 1965, the Black Panther Party, or the Attica Prison Riots in 1971, in which 43 inmates, guards, and hostages, were slaughtered by police with state-approval, the liberal media was quick to jump to the offensive. Although the individuals involved were undoubtedly victims of racist violence, by no stretch of the imagination could their behaviour be described as passive or nonviolent (though the nature of their violence was obviously defensive). The tacit ideology which lies behind this pattern of reporting is that when faced with politically motivated black aggression the liberal media is inclined to invert their analysis, from seeing racism as prior to black resistance to considering black resistance as justifying racism. Certainly, part of the reason that organisations such as the Black Panther Party provided so few victims is because of their use of defensive violence in the fight for liberation.
One of the main consequences of this misrepresentation has been that black people appear dehumanized in the media, as either helpless victims or mindless killers. Although this distortion goes back at least as far as slavery – with African-Americans frequently portrayed either as ‘Sambos’ or revolutionaries (with little room in between) – the modern form of this ideology can be situated in the political conflict of the 1960s and 1970s. Black radicalism in the twentieth-century has become a significant source of fear for the liberal establishment, representing a challenge to their class supremacy. Through a critique of The New York Times’ representation of nonviolence and defensive violence in the civil rights and black power movements, this study aims to expand the definition of victimhood to encompass those that sought to defend themselves. Only by celebrating the lives of black radicals, will a strategy for overcoming racial oppression emerge.
The purpose of this chapter is therefore not only to explore the problematic notions of ‘protest music,’ ‘politically engaged’ music, and the political use of music as propaganda, but also to discuss the ‘politically mediated’ character of so-called autonomous music in order to clarify concepts that are fundamental to the rest of this dissertation. Beginning with a cursory examination of definitions of protest music and politically engaged music that foregrounds the role of song text in determining the political meaning of music, I then move on to consider ways in which supposedly ‘apolitical’ music can be considered political when it is used in a political context. Finally, I turn attention to the political implications of so-called ‘autonomous music’, arguing that it is through its critical relation to its material, which is itself of a collective and socially mediated character, that such music can be understood as radical and politically critical.