Booty Pop

Good Booty: Love and Sex, Black and White, Body and Soul in American Music
By Ann Powers

Given that her title comes from Little Richard's "Tutti Frutti," I expected Ann Powers' book to start with the 1950s. After all, the first explosion of rock 'n' roll set off a national panic about race and sex that has inspired thousands of rock critics. But Powers goes deeper. Her book begins with the early 19th century, with a look at the music of the creole community of New Orleans, just after the Louisiana Purchase brought this European-American-African-Caribbean city into the United States.

This is fascinating stuff. Powers looks through reports about the era's "quadrille balls" and finds the same themes that would appear in the musical hysteria more than a century later: Sex! Violence! Youth! Black! White! Boys! Girls!

Here Powers also notes a theme that helps makes sense of music that would come later on. Namely: The way music -- and writing about music -- allows Americans freedoms they often otherwise feel they lack. The public perception of 19th century New Orleans music was largely based on exaggerations by outsiders writing travel essays about visiting the new territory. These white Northern writers came to see the South as representing a contrast to Yankee propriety. When Yankees wrote about the quadrille balls, the music in Congo Square, some of them wrote journalism full of moral panic, others wrote fiction filled with romantic notions. But whatever the style or the moral, the music allowed dancers to act out hidden desires, and writing about the music allowed writers to talk about things that society wanted to keep silent.

Wop-Bop-a-Lu-Bop

Once her study gets into the 20th century and the age of recording, we are on (for me) more familiar ground, but Powers brings a much needed look at some of the popular performers who don't get the recognition they deserve today, even though they clearly had an influence that lingers. In a chapter about gospel music, Powers doesn't just discuss Sam Cooke, but how gospel singing groups like the Soul Stirrers (where Cooke first rose to fame) inspired Elvis and basically served as the templates for the Beatles and all the rock bands that followed.

At one point, Powers discusses an early 20th century singer named Florence Mills, who, too skinny to convincingly carry off the Vaudeville bawdiness of more voluptuous singers, instead won over audiences with an intense, personal connection. She walked toward the crowd, reaching out to them, and they responded to the sense that she was a real person, expressing real emotion that she found in the songs in her repertoire.

Well, if that isn't the epitome of the soul-rock'n'roll performance of "authenticity," I don't know what is. In the past few years, it has been commonplace for music critics (including Powers) to pooh-pooh this emphasis on authenticity as a "rockist" social construct, but Powers seems to be showing that emphasis has deeper roots than we might have thought.

As the roughly chronological structure of  "Good Booty" comes to more recent times, Powers discusses what are, for me, much more familiar subjects, but she finds new ways to talk about them.
In one chapter, she discusses Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison and wrings new meaning out of this overexposed trio. Symbols of the sexual freedom denied to earlier generations, all three were trapped by the expectations they felt forced to live up to.

That theme becomes even more pronounced in her chapter examining the music world of the 1970s and its sex-drugs-rock'n'roll lifestyle. Discussing the groupie scene of the time, Powers takes an interesting tone. In her telling, the underage groupies weren't always victims in the way we tend to think about sexual abuse victims today, but neither were they in charge of their own sexuality. Meanwhile, the men taking advantage of them were, in some ways, trapped in a game where the rules seemed "predetermined by established positions and rituals ... Is a game consensual if the rules prove exploitative?"

The Anti-Sex League

The sexual revolution changed tragically with the outbreak AIDS in the early 1980s, and Powers  writes movingly about how the music of the period addressed the epidemic more frankly and forcefully than the Reagan administration did. Meanwhile, the rising new genres of the time, punk rock, hip-hop and thrash metal, avoided the love song and tended to treat sex as little more than a bodily function.

However, none of this meant that music stopped being concerned with sex. Rather, it meant that music largely stopped hiding behind metaphors, double-entendres or romantic illusions. This leads Powers to a discussion of Madonna. I did not think there was anything new for a rock critic to say about Madonna, but Powers shows how Madonna's form of sexual liberation becomes a cage for her as she gets older.

"Good Booty" ends with the turn of the new millennium, when digital technology and the Internet were changing all of our lives for better and worse. Pop stars like Britney Spears digitally manipulated their vocals with Auto-Tune, presenting themselves as sex robots. (Spears, of course, shows even better than Madonna how the hypersexuality of music can trap an individual artist in an untenable position.)

Meanwhile, digital technology made more concrete changes when the Internet decimated the record industry. Music fans now treated music and musicians as disposable, clicking "play," or "like," or dropping files in the trash. At the same time, the online world made sex seem more like an Internet activity, with porn suddenly widely available and dating apps that made picking a partner a matter of swiping right or left.

We Ache In The Places We Used To Play

After two centuries of being the art form that Americans used to explore the erotic, music was now just one of many options available. At the same time, the racial equality that was promised by American music was increasingly proving to be elusive. No wonder so much pop music turned instead toward the political in the past few years. Maybe it's just a coincidence that Beyonce's "Lemonade" videos and album had her returning to New Orleans and discussing her creole roots, but that brings us back to where Powers started, doesn't it?

If you're the kind of music lover who complains that music critics write about sociology more than music, you may not be happy with this book. Powers sets out to study the interconnection of sex, race and music, and the last of these three subjects gets the least amount of attention.

With all the genres and artists she examines, she doesn't give us a lot of analysis or criticism about the music itself.  At times, it seems Powers is giving us an intellectual history of musical criticism as much as anything else.

No doubt that will frustrate many readers. But I feel that our love of music has always been about a lot more than melody, harmony, rhythm and a nice voice. I found it fascinating to see how American music appears to keep stirring up the same strong feelings today about the same subjects it did 200 years ago.