Tag Archives: music

Peola, Pecola, IMITATION OF LIFE, and TBE

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I wanted to share some media that help contextualize some of the rich cultural history that Morrison conjures up in The Bluest Eye, both the fictional time of the novel (1941) and the time in which the novel was published (1970). Note: linking all of these “real” materials from cultural history to a fictional text is the bread and butter of “cultural studies” modes of critique…

In terms of the 1940s, it’s important to note that the character Pecola seems to reference Peola in the 1936 film, The Imitation of Life. This useful and brief segment from Turner Classic Movies gives a quick plot summary and explains the irony of Pecola’s name, insofar as it refers to a character who wishes to be white and ends up “passing”:

TCM Race & Hollywood “Imitation of Life”

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Also regarding the 1940s, there’s a wonderful collection of objects relevant to TBE (and many other texts) at The Museum of Fictional Artifacts, built on the exhibition platform Omeka, by English for New Media Students at Dakota State University. There you’ll see images and explanations of Mary Jane wrappers, the Dick and Jane books, and many other objects in the text.

As I mentioned in my lecture, it’s also important to think about Morrison’s intervention into an important moment in African American cultural history. The late 60s/early 70s saw the rise of “Black Power” in politics and the “Black Arts Movement” across a wide range of cultural fields. These tendencies brought with them a new emphasis on affirmations of blackness. I think it’s safe to say Morrison supports this idea, but her novel regards these affirmations a bit skeptically, emphasizing the many ways in which white supremacy burrows within subjects throughout their formation as subjects, rendering problematic any proclamation of a pure, beautiful blackness as a bulwark against racism. For examples of the mode of affirmation Morrison wanted to problematize or, better, critique from within, check out James Brown’s ebullient “Say it Loud” (1968):

“Say It Loud It Loud ~ I’m Black & I’m Proud”

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Even more relevant to the themes of the novel is Curtis Mayfield’s “Miss Black America” (1970):

Curtis Mayfield – Miss Black America

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And finally, Stevie Wonder’s “Ebony Eyes,” from his pathbreaking double album Songs in the Key of Life (1976). One can imagine “Ebony Eyes,” a little whimsically, as the daughter of the defiant Frieda, a “devastating beauty/a pretty girl with ebony eyes”:

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Women and the Blues

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I mentioned in my that Morrison was likely thinking about the amazing outpouring of musical creativity among African American women in the interwar period when thinking about China, Poland, and Marie in the novel. The women are often represented as sites of unbridled appetite, good humor, and irreverent attitudes towards social norms. This cut from Ma Rainey, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” helps us see the connection:

Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey – Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom

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We might also listen to Bessie Smith’s “Empty Bed Blues”:

Empty Bed Blues Bessie Smith

At last I have found the FULL version of this classic by Bessie and am posting it for all of her many fans who have so kindly commented on my earlier postings of her. It was recorded at the Columbia studios in New York on the 20th.

For those who really want to go deep and/or think about a research topic, Hazel Carby has written about this topic extensively.

 

 

 

Killer Mike and the “groove of history”

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For those of you who don’t know him, Killer Mike is an Atlanta-based hip-hop artist and one-half (with El P) of the hip-hop dynamic duo Run the Jewels. He’s one of my heroes: hilarious, angry, smart, talkative, and open to the entire world. This episode, from the NY Times‘ “Sway” with Kara Swisher, got me to thinking about the end of Invisible Man. I’ve always found it unsatisfying the way the novel sort of dispatches the Brotherhood and Ras and street-level anarchic struggle and leaves the narrator snoozing underground.

Mike is someone who has lived an above-ground life trying to think about how to pull people marginalized and oppressed by the hyperinequalities and white supremacy of our era into what Ellison calls the “groove of history.” And he sounds like the love child of Ras and Jack doing it, mixing elements of black nationalism and a highly conscious socialist reading of politics and economics. If you haven’t checked out this year’s RTJ 4 album, do so: I’ve linked to it below as well.

 

Opinion | Killer Mike Says He Has a Choice to Make (Published 2020)

The rapper and activist on transforming fear into power.

RTJ4 Full Album Stream

Listen to the full RTJ4 album here!

 

call and response/antiphonal development

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We explored today Ellison’s interest in antiphonal forms to link an individual musician/orator/writer with an audience. I wanted to share links to two blog posts that help us grasp this connection more concretely. First, the post I shared on Zoom:

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And second, a jazz-centric post from Lincoln Center’s blog. This one is more relevant in some ways, since the IMs performances in chapters 12 and 16 are jazz-like in their improvisiatory riffing, their lack of a “blueprint” as Peetie Wheatstraw has it:

https://www.jazz.org/blog/playlist-call-and-response/

 

Ellison and music

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As I’ve mentioned a few times, music is incredibly important to Ellison. He attended Tuskegee on a music scholarship, he was an obsessive collector of records, and he grew up in Oklahoma in the “swing era” amid musicians like guitarist Charlie Christian and band leader Count Basie. He was a bit old, in a sense, for the “bebop” that emerged in the 40s and rose to dominance in the 50s via players like Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis, but he was a cogent critic of this emergent style and its fingerprints, so to speak, are on Invisible Man in various ways. Here’s a quick tour through some helpful musical contexts for the novel:

[for those interested in a deeper dive, there’s lots of scholarship on this topic. You might start with some of the interviews with prominent scholars on this site]

Peetie Wheatstraw was a real blues musician who called himself “the devil’s son-in-law.” Peter Wheatstraw in the novel is a bit more urbane and ironic, arguably, than the Peetie of this track, but you can at least catch the flavor of the Southern “Delta blues” tradition that Ellison references via the name here:

Peetie Wheatstraw – Devil’s Son-In-Law

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Charlie Christian was Ellison’s contemporary and also from Oklahoma City. He is a bridge figure between the swing era and bebop whose playing helped bring the electric guitar from its place as a “rhythm instrument,” playing chords as a harmonic foundation for the solo instruments, to a place as a solo instrument in its own right. Here’s his “Solo Flight”:

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Charlie Parker and Dizzie Gillespie are often pointed to as Godfathers of bebop, whose velocity and melodic invention radically reshaped jazz music, especially (to quote Invisible Man) by exploring the “uncertain extremes of the scale” (259). Here both do just that, in a wild ride that shows off the sheer velocity of the music of this moment:

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