| Abstract |
Beth Fowler's detailed study of race relations in the United States between 1946 and 1964 vis-à-vis the emergence and stratification of rock and roll music offers an important, if somewhat undertheorized, account that challenges simplistic desegregation narratives. Drawing on forty-five interviews of Black and white Americans born between 1934 and 1956 who listened to rock and roll (a sample that is, the author admits, disproportionately middle class), as well as archival sources, Fowler problematizes the common assumption that “rock and roll music helped white people to appreciate Black culture, leading to support for the desegregation movements that civil rights activists were staging at the same time” (p. 3). Rather, as Fowler points out, there were divergent interpretations of rock and roll and racial politics among Black and white teenagers. Fowler contrasts the “color-blind” approach of white people with the embrace by Black people of the mainstream success of African American artists as a means to achieve full citizenship, an vision that decidedly went beyond voting rights and the desegregation of public spaces.
The book, with its rather clumsy title, is broken up into five chronological chapters. The first chapter, which covers the 1946–1953 period, discusses the social and economic environment that led to the emergence of rock and roll. Chapter 2 (1954–1956) explores racial crossover and its intersections with respectability politics, while chapter 3 (1957–1960) looks at the emergence of the concept of the “teenager.” The fourth chapter (1961–1964) addresses the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (Sncc) and how it affected the reception of rock and roll. The last chapter, which is chronologically less specific, looks at the broad impact of rock and roll and desegregation on the “post–civil rights” era, particularly on the Black Lives Matter movement.
The strongest parts of the book are the in-depth oral histories and nuanced discussions of desegregation politics, as well as the pointed critique of what the author calls “post–civil rights racial liberalism,” by which white people tend to ignore how economic injustice and structural racism persist despite integration efforts (p. 8). In this regard, it remains unclear why the author still holds on to the problematic term post–civil rights. While Fowler meticulously documents the years from 1946 to 1964, the abrupt shift from the 1960s to the 2010s and the Black Lives Matter movement in the final chapter is a bit baffling. Fowler leaves out how the audience for blues music transformed from Black to white in the late 1960s, a topic that authors such as Marybeth Hamilton and myself have written about (the author also inexplicably makes no mention of rockabilly, an important blending of rhythm and blues and country music). The 1960s resegregation of rock and roll into rock (white) and soul (Black) could have been explored a good deal more, and discussing Black Lives Matter without its connections to hip-hop seems a clear oversight. Despite these omissions of larger developments in the history of American music, Fowler's study provides an important counterargument to popular beliefs that rock and roll successfully integrated U.S. society. |
