Right to rock: the Black Rock Coalition and the cultural politics of race

Abstract

Right to Rock: The Black Rock Coalition and Cultural Politics of Race. By Maureen McMahon. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Bibliography, index. Black has long seemed an impossibility. Anthropologist Maureen McMahon's new study explores as political and cultural and, importantly, as an intervention into industrial conventions and constraints that sunder two words that comprise it. During 1992 and 1992 McMahon undertook fieldwork within Black Rock Coalition (BRC), an organization with major branches in New York City and Los Angeles (not inconsequently industry capitals of country). McMahon was an observer as well as participant in the BRC's production of (21), having been recruited as secretary of organization's New York City branch after her propensity for note taking was observed by other members. With this disclosure McMahon outs herself as fan as well as scholar of scene, refreshing admission in popular scholarship. Her involvement with and belief in organization does not detract from astute analysis of her project; if anything, it enhances it. The book is in chapter form but divides roughly into two parts. Chapters 1 through 5 explore BRC's tactics, aesthetics, and its own scene and intersections with New York club scene in general. The second part, chapters 6 through 10, explores BRC and rock's interactions with institutions of cultural, political, and social power, especially industry. McMahon's observations and explorations of BRC's tactics, theoretical and class underpinnings, and mission in first half of book are fascinating and provocative. The rigor of her analysis of musical scene and its tactics provides model for similar work on other organizations or individuals working against commonsense grain of popular and its institutions. The second half of book is equally well observed and analyzed but suffers in places from lack of complication of certain beliefs reiterated in her study, especially but not solely about vexed intersection of gender and rock. The first two chapters provide theoretical and material background of McMahon's study, clearly introducing themes both of her book and of BRC. McMahon explains how BRC members consciously chose term black rock upon formation of organization in mid-1980s because they saw it as a flexible musical category that could embrace totality of musical production. Moreover, it was political and statement, crafted in part to write blackness back into rock, genre from which performers and audiences had been, for all intents and purposes, expelled by early 1980s, especially from point of view of industry and, consequently, audiences. McMahon perceives as defined by BRC as critical intervention into what was for musicians an impossible situation (8). As McMahon and BRC members see it, had been turned into an oxymoron by industry, audiences, and notions of what constituted authenticity in context. That is, codes of authenticity required that blacks neither listen to nor play music. Part of BRC's goal was to reclaim right of its members to play and, by extension, to participate in any type of cultural and material production they desired rather than confining themselves to artistic categories and prohibitions not of their own making. BRC members, as well as author, were members of what McMahon refers to as post-liberated generation of middle-class Americans who had attended integrated schools, were not part of underclass featured so prominently in (white) media representations, and, importantly for this project, were deep into music (59), especially music. The BRC was therefore much more than an affinity group of like-minded musicians (although it served that purpose); it was crucial site of identity and cultural politics. …