Abstract
John Fahey and the dialectic
Cultural geography has seen decades of critiques of the notions of purity and authenticity, but these notions have been constitutive of entire music genres. Operating under societal antagonisms and rapid systemic change, folk musics from Europe and in settler-colonial societies seem to have as their objective to sustain identity instead of producing sounds, pleasures, positionalities, and ideas that are new. Folk or popular music on primetime television is not in the business of purposefully alienating previous generations and reverberating across sociospatial boundaries and legacies in unexpected ways. In the US context, the folk revival, country, bluegrass, jam bands, ‘classic rock’, and singer-songwriters tend to nurture an ethos of retrieval and continuation, even if they clearly also have nurtured countercultural tendencies and poetic originality (hence Bob Dylan). These genres often become entwined with white, petit-bourgeois, masculine, or liberal-nationalist sensibilities. A mostly desexualized comfort zone is built up against the promiscuous hybridizations and ostensible dehumanization of technological society. It is precisely because disco was so strongly ridiculed in the 1970s and 1980s that we could understand it as the most important counterweight to the investment in musical authenticity. Perhaps disco is the truest music the USA has ever produced, insofar as it inaugurated vastly new aesthetic, technological, and erotic propensities, consolidated a new kind of embodied spatiality for billions (the discotheque), and sonically led the way to rap, synthpop, and electronic dance music.
However, constructions of authenticity can be more self-aware, more self-defeating. Making danceability or worldwideness the decisive criterion for what ‘true music’ is would be facile, since these features are so easily commodified and territorialized on geographical, gender, and class identities. A ‘defense of disco’ cannot be merely oppositional or it leaves the binaries and mutual stereotyping in place and doesn’t consider the disjointedness of audiences and sounds, the cross-fertilizations, ironies, and reversals that constitute popular music as such. One must beware of a cultural populism for which creativity and critique would be relegated to the always-already – to what capitalism itself does better than its critics. 1 Music is never just a pleasurable groove, but a vehicle for thinking which can only emerge amidst the sounds and the discourses of critics, fans, and musicians themselves.
George Henderson’s new book does one of the finest jobs in dissecting how such intellectuality of music comes about. The book demonstrates how wrong it is to assume any easy conflation of folk music with a straightforward quest for authenticity. His third monograph is splendidly written, intricately researched, methodologically innovative, and honest in its emotions, and I think that is because the subject matter had so long been dear to his heart. While I started my career in music geography and then diversified, George ended up there just before retiring. Having been forced to confront some of my musical and theoretical prejudices, this book review can be considered a collegial gift to a friend and mentor.
John Fahey is strange. What strikes the listener, first of all, is how astutely he reimagines what the steel-string acoustic guitar had thus far been capable of in the late 1950s, inaugurating his very own fingerpicking techniques. On instrumental tracks, Fahey created unheard-of tonalities and atmospheres infused by Iberian playing, Béla Bartók, minimalism, Indian classical, psychedelia, and musique concrète, yet still grounded in Bill Monroe and Charlie Patton. Even if he overwhelmingly appealed to white male intellectuals, Fahey’s compositions and writings were deliberately self-obscuring and jarring and did not intend to sustain any identity.
So the most fascinating problem in Fahey for contemporary cultural geography is no doubt how his music acts as a prism of race. As one of the endorsers on the back cover writes, the central dynamic in Henderson’s book is one of ‘love and theft’, which was improbably enshrined as framework for American popular culture’s self-scrutiny in Bob Dylan’s album Love and Theft. There is between the hegemonic white majority of US men and the historically oppressed men of minorities an irrepressible urge to appropriate cultural fragments and ideas from each other even though the massive power asymmetry embedded in centuries of structural violence shapes these processes at every turn. There is nothing necessarily redemptive about these appropriations, but they do demonstrate the existence of a pliability that sometimes anticipate antiracist feelings to the extent that US racism requires keeping black and white separate in space and in signification.
For Leslie Fiedler, there is in white American literature a structurally unacknowledged homoerotic love between white and colored men and an obsession with violence. 2 For Eric Lott, white cultural performances, especially amongst the working-classes, emulate and thereby contain the Black identity they have to officially keep at bay and despise. Lott focuses on blackface because it is the weirdest and arguably most concentrated cultural expression of the desire for breaching segregation. 3 From this perspective, America as conjured through popular culture is emphatically not a melting-pot or land of equal opportunity – the American dream – but a nightmarish, fundamentally lop-sided mimicry restlessly displacing the identities involved in it. It needs to be noted Fiedler and Lott write much less about the ‘black side’ of the love and thieving. Clearly in an inverse way Black populations in the Americas could not but draw from the majoritarian Europe-derived cultures to forge identities since they were brutally denied most continuity with their plural ancestral cultures.
This dizzying and terrifying feature of the relationality between black and white is characteristic of ‘the dialectic’. The profundity of all of Henderson’s work owes a lot to the dialectical thinking he developed mostly, but not only, through Marxist theory. This new book excels in working out the wonderful inconsistencies that make Fahey such a singular figure as musician and critic. Apart from the love-and-theft dynamic within the music itself, what makes Fahey compelling for Henderson’s theorization of the politics of US identity is that the folk musician was himself a student of philosophy and folklore, navigating the existentialist, psychoanalytical, and progressive movements of the 1950’s and 1960’s, all heavily tinged with the dialectic. Indeed, Fahey referred directly to Hegelian thought in his writings and spoken word (pp. 145–146).
To explicate Fahey’s significance for Hegel studies, it isn’t only the obvious thematics of the master-slave dialectic and the tension between individual and society that Henderson draws on. More fundamentally, there is a dialectical manner of approaching concepts found on every page of this book. It is precisely because Fahey was emphatically not joining the new left and the civil rights struggle that he can be said to offer an important commentary on structural injustices and on the ‘discontent’ in the book’s title, a discourse neither antiracist nor reactionary yet still complexly ‘white’. Another recurring paradoxical point is that in mocking white fondness for Black music, folklore studies’ earnest search for authenticity, and US individualism, Fahey happens to demonstrate his own way of individuating and authenticating which remains unmistakably American (pp. 112–113). ‘How can [Fahey] remain part of the cultural scene that has claimed him and not be dragged down into the mediocrity he accuses it of?’ (p. 130). For anyone grappling with what America is, Henderson is saying, it is worth taking Fahey’s self-contradicting megalomania seriously.
‘Blind Joe Death’ is a hazy ‘legend’ Fahey created with his first album out of himself qua performer, channeling a poor, Black, forgotten, disabled bluesman from the plantation South. On another layer, however, it is a nom de plume for Fahey as obsessive amateur scholar of the Delta blues overidentifying with one particular guitarist. Blind Joe Death then uneasily combines blackface and the critique of romantic depictions of Black people. Henderson’s book beautifully unpacks the resulting political contradictions: the pioneer (and antihero) of cultic avant-garde folk music imagines himself as preserving an African-American legacy together with white progressive students, yet is also bemused and possibly concerned about his own imposture. ‘What Fahey wants to know of his audience is, Could you tell the difference between the real and the fake? Do you get that your expectation regarding the typical blues or folk narrative occults real historical content rather than revealing it?’ (p. 119). As the blues became renarrated in the 1950’s and 1960’s as primordially Black, and folk and country as exclusively white, Fahey in his writings confronted his milieu with the questions of who was borrowing from whom, what his own authority was in this vicious back and forth, and on Henderson’s reading, how the racial real cannot but stymie any liberal project of overcoming it.
What then is Blind Joe Death’s America? It is an imaginary space full of trickstering, pseudonymy, simulation, and dissimulation. The intense irony in all this responds to anxieties about the violent foundations of the nation and its supposedly neutral whiteness. It is philosophically as well as politically important to work through the complexities of this tragicomedy so as not to succumb to a dour current of ultra-structuralist fatalism increasingly fashionable in the humanities for which foundational violence is ontologically inescapable. Hence Fahey’s surrealist destabilizations of Americanness could be productively compounded with the uncanny racial comedy in the music videos of Childish Cambino’s ‘This is America’ or Thundercat’s ‘Dragonball Durag’.
US raciality is no binary. While Lott is interested in how blackface comes to buttress whiteness, Fiedler’s cultural matrix also included the genocide of Indigenous Americans, the exploitation of migrant labor, and sexual dynamics. Clearly woman-man, native-settler, poor-rich, immigrant-citizen, city-country, and nature-human are other asymmetries that criss-cross and complicate the black-white one. There are also the USA’s imperial ambitions, its umbilical relationship with Europe, its echoes in Australia and Israel. All these racializing tensions are also expressed in music. The big philosophical question that pops up eventually is whether thinking through dichotomies, however many, and dialectical thought itself, may obscure the multiplicities and emergent nature of identification processes.
While the concern of much US popular cultural studies has been to understand America as split between Black and white, how is this horizon, this continental imaginary, replaced by a revolutionary movement or broader utopian impetus in which national identities no longer cohere? The black-white dialectic seems to structure Fahey’s music first and foremost, but there is something more cosmopolitan going on as well, with traces from the soundscapes of the Balkan, Morocco, Mali, Persia, India, and Bali. Far from solidifying white identity and designating folk/blues as archetypical sound of America’s melting pot, Fahey’s music can be said to expose the illusory nature of all claims to identity. These ‘exotic’ inflections (exotic only from an illusory central point) should then not be interpreted as add-ons to the folk idiom, but as preceding it, musical potentialities and inheritances denied in and by the mainstream.
And what to do with the fact that for all his verboseness in liner notes Fahey decided not to sing? (He does have some samples and prose passages in English.) Song is fundamental to plugging music into a particular national space. The universalizability of bebop, techno, or the sonata lies to some extent in their lack of lyrics. Of course, discourse on universality has been dominated by white men, and we must always be cautious when valorizing a European-derived art form in global context. But in the anticolonial, socialist, and feminist traditions, subversive universalities have been continuously invented. While Fahey himself might not have been interested in provincializing America, could his kaleidoscopic, self-parodying take on legacy and relationality, underscored by his readings of Sartre and Hegel, be potentially relevant to understanding cultural rebels and sonic experimentalism the world over? Given its racial dynamic, the figure of Blind Joe Death could only have been America’s. But what if the creative impulse to imagine and dialectically explore such a figure could be generalized? This is one hope for future musicianship scholarship I derive from George’s excellent book.
