Music Archives - Not Even Past

Sky Pilot, How High Can You Fly

I started going to camp in 1968. We were still just children, but we already had Vietnam to think about. The evening news was a body count. At camp, we didn’t see the news, but we listened to Eric Burdon and the Animals’ Sky Pilot while doing our beadwork with Father Pekarski.

Pekarski looked like Grandpa from The Munsters. He was bald with a scowl and a growl, wearing shorts and an official camp tee shirt over his pot belly. The local legend was that at night, before going out to do his vampire thing, he would come in and mix up your beads so that the red ones were in the blue box, and the black ones were in the white box. Then, he would twist the thread on your bead loom a hundred and twenty times so that it would be impossible to work with the next day. And laugh. In fact, he was as nice a guy as you could ever want to know.

Back then, bead-craft might have seemed like a sort of “feminine” thing to be doing at a boys’ camp. We considered it an Indian thing to do. Of course, we didn’t know squat about real Native Americans, but for little boys in the sixties, “the Indians” were the quintessential embodiment of manly courage, righteous rebellion, and strength, so we wanted to be like them in every way. Our camp counselors thought bead-craft was a good way to get rowdy boys to sit still in the shade for thirty-five minutes on a July afternoon in the Hill Country. We accepted. Besides, George did bead-craft with us, and George was cool.

George was one of our counselors. He was almost eligible for the draft and he had a girlfriend. That made him a serious hero for little boys. While he worked, he would comment on the war. Or get quiet and turn the radio up when KTSA played the Sky Pilot.

Soon there’ll be blood, and many will die
Mothers and fathers back home they will cry.

The Sky Pilot was seven and a half minutes, two sides of a 45-rpm single, complete with war noises and patriotic bagpipes, surreptitiously recorded at a solemn military funeral.

Eric Burdon had done his homework. But his song was from another time and another war. His sky pilot was Icarus in a biplane, you’ll never, ever, ever reach the sky. But for us, it was all about Vietnam. It was becoming impossible to rescue gallantry and honor from that quagmire. The Sky Pilot, and George’s reverence for it, had taught us the unthinkable: to question patriotism, religion, and long, hot afternoons hanging with the boys at the rifle range. Trying to keep a steady hand. Trying desperately to earn all the coveted NRA marksmanship medals so that we, too, could become soldiers, one day. But, was that even a good thing, anymore?

You’re soldiers of God, you must understand
The fate of your country is in your young hands

Eric Burdon was on the edge. He had a bad boy image. Not the shirtless mayhem of the ‘80’s; not the wanton outpouring of staged violence that turned the crowd comfortably numb. Eric still wore the coat and tie that you would expect to see on any of his polite contemporaries, but, on him, they looked rough, as if it were the first time he had ever gotten dressed up. Eric was on the edge, but not over the edge. Not numbed or comfortable, we were possessed, spellbound, and impassioned.

Eric Burdon & the Animals in 1967. Foreground: Eric Burdon Background (L–R): Danny McCulloch, John Weider (in striped shirt), Vic Briggs and Barry Jenkins (via Wikimedia)

We learned everything we needed to know on KTSA. When we were ten, it made us wonder. When we turned thirteen, it made our hands tremble and our hearts pound. That was AM radio, back when broadcast meant broad. You could hear KTSA loud and clear anywhere in South Texas, especially, after dark. The songs on the radio called on us to step up.

Our consciousness of what a real man was, and what he ought to think, came from our counselors, Kurt and George, that first summer when we were only ten. Kurt was seventeen and already a cancer survivor. He had lost one to the silent beast, but he had more balls than all of us put together. George was only sixteen, but already dark and wise. He would sweat through the chest and pits of his tee-shirt pretty early in the day. We thought that was cool. He had lots of black wavy hair, a wisp of a beard and a deep gaze. To us, Kurt and George were titans.

They were just kids, really, not even old enough to vote but almost old enough to line up at boot camp and die in Vietnam. The draft was on everyone’s mind. Vietnam was the first-ever televised war. We could see bodies like our own, bodies like we wanted ours to be, mangled for reasons we couldn’t understand. We even saw the massacre at My Lai, and we learned to doubt that Americans were always the good guys.

US Army helicopters pour machine-gun fire into the tree line to cover the advance of ground troops (via BBC)

My first summer at camp, Kurt and George were absolutely in charge of us for two whole weeks. There was no adult interference and so, no reason to distrust or suspect. When you were ten, adults were the enemy. They always had a hidden agenda, something they wanted and ways to get it. Adults could blackmail you. They would stop at nothing to gain absolute control of little boys’ thoughts and impulses. And, they swore that what they wanted was good for you.

For fourteen days that summer, we were free. Ours was an ideal world, even if it was only temporary. The influence that Kurt and George had on who we were and who we wanted to be was virtually unlimited. We worshipped them. We would have gone anywhere with them. We would have done anything to please them. We would have given everything to wear what they wore, to smell how they smelled, to know all the mysterious things they knew, and to move through the world as they did, fearless, tall and strong.

One afternoon at rest period, Kurt and George came into the bunkhouse and asked for silence. That was unusual. We were all in our underwear and we listened carefully. Rest period was on your bunk in your underwear. You didn’t have to sleep but you had to be quiet and horizontal. That was when we devoured our DC Comics and our Mad Magazines. Fruit of the Loom was the appropriate attire because it kept you inside, it cooled you down and, most importantly, it gave your favorite clothes an hour to air out.

Sky Pilot cover shows two planes in the air — Sky Pilot cover (via Wikimedia)

Kurt had found a nearly perfect flint spearhead at an Indian mound back in the hills, probably a Comanche artifact. We were in their hunting grounds, their sacred space, where they talked to eagles and buried their ancestors. Kurt’s spearhead was in his sock drawer, by his bunk, which was next to mine. We all knew about it, we all knew where he kept it and we were all proud of it. It was our spearhead. Kurt and George came to tell us that the spearhead had been stolen, and they knew who had done it. They were going to leave us alone during rest period that day, to give the boy who had stolen it a chance to put it back. If he did, there would be no questions asked. If he didn’t, he would be sent home in disgrace.

He did. It was (…). I saw him do it. My bunk was right there. He got up, supposedly to go to the bathroom, but he made a quick, unmistakable stop at Kurt’s sock drawer. It’s hard to hide a spearhead on your person when all you have on is your tidy whities, but it was really the stop that gave him away.

The repentant thief was careful, though, and no one saw him but me. Why he had taken it, we never knew. Insecure, I guess. Afraid that, unless he stole it, he would never acquire the power, the unspoken secret energy that could only be yours if you waited for it, the dynamism would most certainly elude you if you tried to take it by force instead of earning it.

No questions were asked. Kurt and George had practiced compassion to teach instead of punish. We did wonder whether they really knew who it was, or if their bet had been a gamble. We think they did know. When they explained the conditions of our impending ordeal, they were too calm to have been bluffing. When it was over, we would have followed them into battle. We would have followed them onto the streets to protest the war.

Vietnam was the inescapable quandary constantly ringing in our ears. We heard about it on KTSA. Dylan told us the answer was blowing in the wind. Peter, Paul and Mary railed against the cruel war raging; and Johnny having to fight. They taught us how to sing and why. They taught us to demand, with childlike innocence, where had all the flowers gone.

In the 60’s, not all of it was committed protest music. There was a lot of romantic pop, too, but it all came to smell of the war. There were songs about young couples that missed each other, songs that made every GI remember the girl he had left behind. Or, the girl he thought had left him behind. Ruby, are you contemplating going out somewhere? That was the anxiety. If a guy wasn’t around, she would find someone else. If he came home crippled, she might still love him as a friend, but she wouldn’t want him. Yes, it’s true that I’m not the man I used to be. Oh, Ruby, I still need some company. There was more than one way to get your manhood blown off.

Veterans protest and carry a sign that reads "We won't fight another rich man's war" — Veterans Protest (via Zinn Education Project)

The GI anthem, though, was the one written by 16-year-old Michael Brown of The Left Banke. It reached number 5 on the charts in ‘66. Just walk away, Renée; You won’t see me follow you back home. They called it Baroque rock, because of the orchestral arrangement and the long, lonely flute solo. The empty sidewalks on my block are not the same; You’re not to blame. Michael and the boys had a sultry mumbling way about them that gave flesh to the burning a priori adolescent male resentment for adult manipulation, the secret decisions made in smoky rooms that made old men rich and young men die. That was a common feeling back in ‘68. It was generational. We were angry about Indochina. It was killing us.

More by Nathan Stone:
Romero
José and His Brothers
Three-year-olds on the world stage

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Turbo-folk: Pop Music in the Crucible of Balkan History

Kicking off our new series on digital history projects, Dr. Vladislav Beronja, a professor in the UT Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, tells us about a class project to build a website on Balkan pop music.

By Vladislav Beronja

Turbo-folk—a mixture of pounding electronic beats and trilled vocals—can be heard blasting from cafés, taxis, and dance clubs across the former Yugoslavia. Despite its ubiquity in the region, this Balkan pop phenomenon has been a hotspot of political and cultural controversy due to historical associations with Slobodan Milosevic’s nationalist regime in Serbia of the 1990s. The genre has been accused of valorizing patriarchal values, crass materialism, gangster lifestyle, and—more seriously—war crimes. A closer look at turbo-folk, however, reveals that it has undergone significant transformations in the last few decades.

This spring my students examined turbo-folk as well as the accompanying controversies in the context of an undergraduate seminar, “Punks and Divas in Southeastern Europe: Popular Music and Cultural Identity in the Balkans.” The result is a website titled Old Beats, New Verses: 21 Newly Composed Essays on Turbo-folk, which the class collectively created with help from the European Studies Librarian, Ian Goodale.

Old Beats, New Verses: 21 Newly Composed Essays on Turbo-Folk (via Old Beats, New Verses)

In many ways, “Old Beats, New Verses” is a companion piece to a similar website on punk music, “Yugoslav Punk,” the soundtrack of the last Yugoslav generation characterized by playful rebellion, liberal orientation, and irony typical of late socialism. Turbo-folk, on the other hand, represents for many the soundtrack to Serbian militant nationalism, which stoked the flames of war that ultimately engulfed and destroyed multiethnic Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Drawing on recent scholarship and the wealth of materials available on the Internet, the student essays address different aspects of turbo-folk, from its most prominent divas to representations of gender and national identity to global influences. Many if not all of the contributions challenge the assumptions and stereotypes connected to turbo-folk while still maintaining a critical outlook.

Turbo-folk stands at the complex intersection of the various highly politicized identities in the former Yugoslavia, such as nationality, gender, sexuality, and class. This complex cultural location has been the case from the genre’s inception in newly composed folk or neofolk music. Emerging in 1960s Yugoslavia, neofolk coincided with rapid industrialization and expansion of the urban working class in the fledgling socialist state. The new-fangled genre combined elements of Balkan folk music, strongly inflected by Ottoman colonial legacy in the region, with western pop structures and modern electric instruments. Like its primary audience of recently urbanized peasants, neofolk was almost immediately received with ridicule and scorn by the Yugoslav cultural establishment, even as the communist authorities continued to strategically utilize the genre’s wide appeal. Frequently derided as overly crass, kitschy, and even foreign, neofolk nevertheless occupied a dominant position in Yugoslav socialist culture as its unacknowledged pleasure-filled underbelly.

Tanja Savić-Prostakuša (Bad Woman), 2017 (via Old Beats, New Verses)

Reflecting on this history, many student contributions examine the afterlife of neofolk—and of Yugoslavia—in contemporary turbo-folk. The career of Lepa Brena, the neofolk singer who rose to spectacular fame in the early 1980s, is especially interesting in this respect. Several students examine Brena’s music as a vehicle of contemporary Yugonostalgia—a collective longing for the former socialist homeland that is often mediated through music, cinema, and other products of pop culture. Born into a Bosnian Muslim family, but a longtime resident of Belgrade and married to a Serb, Brena in many ways breaks the stereotype of both the neofolk/turbo-folk performers and audiences as overly nationalistic. Moreover, positive references to socialist Yugoslavia in contemporary turbo-folk, as well as the genre’s popularity across national lines have arguably made it an expression of “identity beyond borders,” as one student essay puts it.

If neofolk is representative of socialist Yugoslavia (and its contradictions), then turbo-folk has become symbolic of its violent dissolution. In the 1990s, turbo-folk became an extension of Slobodan Milosevic’s authoritarian regime in Serbia, when the genre flooded the airwaves, pushing out any oppositional musical voices and subcultures. In this vein, the category of “kitsch” has been widely applied to turbo-folk to describe its aesthetically and politically regressive qualities. Offering a creative reading of Viki Miljković’s 1994 hit “Coca Cola, Marlboro, Suzuki,” an essay by Luis Martinez shows how the kitschy, commodity-filled surfaces of turbo-folk music videos should not be seen as mere escapism, but as unwitting mediators of traumatic and perplexing historical changes in the region.

Since the 1990s, the genre has become largely autonomous from regime politics, although the controversies around turbo-folk divas and their fans continue to linger. Many essays demonstrate that turbo-folk has significantly evolved in the 21^st century by reflecting more socially progressive themes. For instance, the genre has started incorporating proto-feminist values and queer aesthetics. An essay by McKenna Gessner argues that contemporary turbo-folk divas challenge normative ideas of femininity and female sexuality. The essay draws examples from Jelena Karleuša and Nikolija’s music videos, featuring dramatic reversals of gendered power dynamics and outrageous “femme” looks. Other contributions are less celebratory, such as Gabriella Velasco’s essay on queer embodiment (or the lack thereof) in turbo-folk. All the essays, however, acknowledge that the nods and winks of turbo-folk divas to their female and queer audiences have become more open and explicit, despite the continued presence of patriarchal and homophobic attitudes in Balkan societies.

Lepa Brena. “Jugoslovenka.”1989 (via YouTube)

The section on turbo-folk and cultural and national identity is the most extensive, and for good reason. Like identity in the Balkans, turbo-folk has always been full of ambiguities and contradictions, which makes it a fascinating object of study. For instance, the influence of Ottoman colonial legacy on contemporary Balkan popular music still remains largely unacknowledged even when it is playfully evoked. Turbo-folk not only adopts Orientalist melodies and themes, but it blatantly copies pop songs from Turkey and the Middle East, simply translating the original texts to bring them closer to former Yugoslav audiences. As Milena Đorđević-Kisačanin’s essay shows, Serbian turbo-folk singers will frequently borrow from Greek pop music to escape charges of “Turkishness.” The same is true of the wider appropriations of Romani music. Roma culture is used to symbolize the unfettered spirit of the Balkans as a whole, even as the Roma themselves remain one of the most marginalized and oppressed group in the region.

The student enthusiasm and the consistently high quality of research during this project have convinced me of the advantages of doing a collective assignment with a strong digital and public-facing component. Together these student essays show the value of intercultural contact, original research, and guided on-line engagement in an undergraduate seminar setting. They also successfully break the surface of the stereotypes of Balkan popular culture to reveal a more complex, layered, and historical image of the region. In this sense, the project can perform the critical work of scholarship beyond the university classroom.

Three-year-olds on the world stage

When I was very small, I lived six blocks from the Santa Fe Opera. Our home was in the Tesuque Village, which is really just a country road that runs alongside the Tesuque Creek just north of Santa Fe, with twenty tiny cul-de-sacs stretching up into the alluvial crannies of the southern Rockies. There were fruit stands and general stores. The Indians from the Tesuque Reservation would come to trade hides for cigarettes. This was before there were casinos. I remember the taste of the fresh local pears. There will be some in heaven, I assume. Once, I got lost. I was three. An Indian from the reservation took me to every house in the village and asked me, “Is that your house, little boy?”

On the horizon to the east, we had the Sangre de Cristos. They were huge, daunting, legendary and high. Mountain snow accumulated there in the winter to keep the semi-arid New Mexico wasteland inexplicably green all summer. Deep in the heart of the wilderness, at Horsethief Meadow, the early Comanche hid away in the lush green grass of summer with the wild and not-so-wild herds of mustangs that made them the wealthiest traders at the Taos market in the nineteenth century. Savages? Trade in your textbook. They knew more about selective breeding than Her Majesty’s Master of Horses.

To the west, there was the Opera. You might ask why Tesuque had an Opera. All I can say is that it just needed one. It simply couldn’t do without one. It was brand new, when I was three. It went up in 1957. I wasn’t sure where I lived, but I knew it was in the shadow of the Opera, a battleship on our western horizon. Man-made grandeur. And woman-made, of course. A work of art. An open-air theatre, like the Athenians had, long, long ago. A democratic, public forum.

I never went. I was three years old. My brother, one year my senior, and my sister, one year my junior, never went, either. But Momma and Daddy went. (Assuming I got the right house, and they were my real momma and daddy.) Newlyweds, twenty-five years old with three little kids, and walking distance from the Santa Fe Opera. They had season tickets. They were there when an aging Igor Stravinsky conducted his masterpiece, the Rite of Spring. With the New Mexican sunset descending behind the main stage. They were there, in the third row, behind Georgia O’Keeffe, our friend from the Piggly Wiggly in Santa Fe.

We got the LP’s. We just called them records. We played our records one after the other on the old Magnavox Hi-Fi, set into a handcrafted hardwood cabinet, as if that precise technology, the culmination of 1961 electronic genius, was expected to last, unaltered, for two hundred years.

I had to push a stool up to the speaker, so I could reach over to find the switch at the lower right-hand corner of the record changer. Click to the right and click back. Stacked high with Igor’s Rite of Spring, I piled on Sherry Lewis and Lamb Chop, Toscanini’s Beethoven, Belafonte’s Calypso, Walt Disney’s Bambi and the legendary Kingston Trio. I sang with the Kingston Trio one night at a night club in Reynosa. By then, I was four. Walked right across the darkened dance floor all by myself and sat on one of the amplifiers. I knew all the words, and I sang with them, just as I always did. Every day, at home. Of course, they knew who I was. We had sung those songs together hundreds of times. But that is a tale for another day.

Rite of Spring, well, we called it the jungle record, and we hid behind the couch during the rowdy parts. That same year, we got our first Peter, Paul and Mary. The LP. Help me find the way, to the promised land. But, the opera was out of reach. Daddy bought the LP’s for La Traviata, La Bohème, and Madame Butterfly, but he kept them up high and we were down low. It was so we wouldn’t scratch them. And, it was because they were in Italian. And, because they were sad. Too sad for three-year-olds.

Original 1904 poster for Madame Butterfly by Adolfo Hohenstein — Original 1904 poster by Adolfo Hohenstein (via Wikipedia)

I am sixty now. I have been away for a long time. I decided it was time to go back. To go inside the Santa Fe Opera. I bought my ticket online. It was expensive. And I drove two days to get there. I guess, on horseback, it would have been two weeks. Three, by stage coach. Not one to complain.

I wanted Doctor Atomic. It was a contemporary opera sardonically set right there in the New Mexico piñon rattlesnake drylands. The role of Oppenheimer was to be sung by a thermonuclear power tenor. And a healing ceremonial dance by the Navajo and Pueblo nations, on stage, to ward off the bad karma. But it was sold out. Of course, it was. So, I bought Madame Butterfly.

Before you continue, comrade, you should really punch up the famous aria on Spotify or wherever it is you satisfy your musical impulses these days. I don’t know if the María Callas version is on there. She was the diva. It was that good, that night. Sung by Ana María Martínez. Brought the house down. It has been more than a month, and I still cry when I think of it.

It had just rained. A grand New Mexico cloudburst, typical of mid-August. They call it their monsoon. The rain stopped before the curtain opened. Except there is no curtain. Athens, remember? It was cool and damp, though. A Santa Fe night, clouds lifting and the proverbial western sunset, iconic and scented of damp sagebrush, just behind the stage.

You know the melody of the aria. Even if you have never been to the opera. Now, imagine it, there. Cio-Cio San, a.k.a., Madame Butterfly, gazes across the harbor at Nagasaki in 1904. Waiting for her lawfully wedded American imperial husband, Lieutenant Pinkerton, who never took her seriously, to return. Delta Dawn, what’s that flower you got on? Could it be a faded rose from days gone by? Yeah, like that, but, Puccini, comrade. Way cooler. And sadder. The big sad. Still has me choked up.

One day, three years after his departure, a ship does sail into Nagasaki with an American flag on it. Pinkerton has not come to assume his commitment to the delicate Butterfly. He has learned, through the diplomatic gossip network, that he has a Japanese child with blue eyes, that his flesh and blood is descending into poverty and dishonor. Beside the woman he fancied and then, abandoned. Pinkerton has come to take the child away from his mother.

He can’t face her, of course. Too ashamed. Of how he let her down. Of how unremittingly faithful she was, in the face of his own callous indifference.

View of the stage at the Sante Fe Opera House (via Wikipedia)

At the curtain calls, without a curtain, the crowd booed the tenor. Joshua Guerrero. But he was a good sport. He understood. He had portrayed the playboy badass so well that the massive woke Santa Fe audience wouldn’t let him leave the role, not even for the curtain call. Pinkerton had been a world class prick, so his interpreter wasn’t getting a free pass. The listeners’ friendly jeers counted as a standing ovation, for the performer. There was something very wild west, about that. That was rodeo etiquette, comrade, not the Met.

The clincher, that night, was played by a three-year-old. I know this wasn’t in Puccini’s original score. These works are not dead artifacts. They are still alive. After Butterfly commits hara-kiri, Pinkerton arrives to take the boy away to America. The boy, without singing a note (he was really just three years old) wraps himself in the American flag that his mother had used as a curtain in her Japanese-American home in Nagasaki. He picks up the bloodied dagger with which his beautiful mother has just killed herself and, with it, faces down Pinkerton. He is having none of it.

No baby jails. No icy separation from families at borders. No teaching them foreigners a moralistic lesson with heartless biblical puritan cruelty. Cio-Cio San’s boy was only three, but ready to take on the egotistical American imperial madness. If only that gesture could come off the Santa Fe stage, into the real world. Maybe it already has.

Because I am now sixty, and not twenty and not three, I felt that perhaps the central character in the opera was, actually, Suzuki, Butterfly’s servant and companion, the only one who knows her commitment and her suffering, the only one who understands that there cannot possibly be a happy end to this tale. The long night, as Butterfly waits for Pinkerton to arrive, and Suzuki knows that he will most certainly not, was moving. One would hope that she took the boy with her. Somewhere, far away, where his life will be more than the currency of cruel old men and their hateful games.

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Demystifying “Cool:” A Brief History

by Kate Grover

Elvis Presley promoting the film Jailhouse Rock, 1957 (via Wikimedia Commons)

When I was nineteen, I was bestowed with some of the highest praise a person can receive.

It happened at a rehearsal for The Vagina Monologues (go figure…) when some cast members I hadn’t met approached me for the first time:

“You’re Kate, right? Cool Kid Kate?”
“What?”
“Cool Kid Kate. There’s another Kate in the cast, so we’ve been calling you that to know which one we’re talking about.”

I was stunned. “Wow. Thank you,” was all I could say. We talked for a few more minutes, but at that point, I had completely checked out of the conversation. The compliment pinballed around my brain, igniting pleasure centers that I didn’t even know existed.

Cool kid Kate. Cool kid Kate. Ohmigosh…that is so cool!

This anecdote highlights a more-or-less universal truth: cool—as a concept, a descriptor, and a category—is potent force. For me, hearing someone say I was cool was much-needed validation, reassurance that the way I was living, acting, and being in that moment was acceptable. Better than acceptable—cool!

But while I had no doubt what cool meant to me, it remains an elusive concept. What is the mysterious power of cool? And where does it come from?

Believe it or not, scholars have been asking these questions for the last thirty years. Since the late-1980s, several writers have attempted to define cool and position it as a distinctly American concept. In the 1940s, African-American jazz musicians first popularized cool as a way of describing both the new, more restrained style of jazz and a form of emotional and aesthetic self-possession. For example, jazz saxophonist Lester Young, the figure scholars most widely cite as the first to bring cool into American vernacular, used the phrase “I’m cool” to communicate being in control and relaxed. Cool was different from hip, another staple in the lingo of African-American jazz culture, which meant being streetwise and aware of new trends and ideas.

Lester Young in New York, 1946 (via Flickr)

Though cool and hip have similar roots, it is important to distinguish these two concepts and validate their specific meanings in postwar African American culture. At the same time, it is also important to recognize that, for many people in decades past, cool and hip have come to mean the same thing: what is new, what is now, and what’s in vogue. Consequently, some of the early scholars studying cool have used the term in different ways. Two of the first major studies to explore ideas about coolness, by Richard Majors and Janet Mancini Billson, and by Peter N. Stearns use cool to connote a specific way of being—a usage akin to the meaning of cool promoted by 1940’s jazz artists. Conversely, Thomas Frank and Susan Fraiman rely on a formulation of cool that reflects its conflation with hip. While these early texts provided the groundwork for later studies, their diverging approaches and lack of consensus on cool’s origins and function in American life meant that cool remained an obscure area of scholarly research for quite some time.

Joel Dinerstein and Frank H. Goodyear’s 2014 book American Cool, has played a major role in popularizing, legitimizing, and catalyzing the scholarly study of cool. Published as a companion to the exhibition Dinerstein and Goodyear curated for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, American Cool examines what it means for someone to be cool. The study introduces cool as an American concept, theorizes how cool acts as a marker of distinction, and showcases portrait photography of “cool figures” throughout American history—the same portraits that appeared in exhibition. But most importantly, the study outlines the ways these cool figures (mainly iconic politicians, musicians, or actors) provide us with new, innovative ways of being. According to Dinerstein, cool people are important to Americans because they teach us methods for living life that we would have not otherwise known. Cool figures are special among ordinary people because they take what other cool people before them have done and transform that into something new for subsequent generations. People emulate cool figures and new forms of coolness develop that provide even more people with models for being that enliven and inspire. Cool, in this construction, is a way of describing someone you admire for being and doing something you could not do and be on your own. This explains, perhaps, why the quippy compliment “Cool Kid Kate” meant so much to me.

The American Cool exhibition and its glossy-yet-scholarly coffee-table book companion attracted media attention and public interest to the study of cool. In particular, news outlets focused on Joel Dinerstein, the educator who had been teaching college courses on cool decades before the American Cool exhibition. Dinerstein has subsequently become the most prominent—and in-demand—scholar working on cool today. In 2014, writers at TIME consulted Dinerstein for their “coolest person of the year” series. A couple years later, the fashion brand Coach asked Dinerstein to write a book celebrating the company’s 75^th anniversary. This year, Dinerstein published the first cultural history of cool in the Cold War era, The Origins of Cool in Postwar America. As the title suggests, this nearly 400-page text is American cool’s origin story and gives the most comprehensive research on cool’s roots to date.

But the study of cool is far from complete. There are many more questions to ask, especially about what cool means to different groups of people in the U.S. today. Is cool still important to people? How does cool change in different environments? Who gets to be cool, and why? The answers to these questions promise to reveal major insights about American life and culture.

Getz/Gilberto Fifty Years Later: A Retrospective

by Edward Shore

“I’m not a sociologist but it was a time when people in the States wanted to turn to something other than their troubles,” Brazilian singer Astrud Gilberto mused in 1996. “There was a feeling of dissatisfaction, possibly the hint of war to come, and people needed some romance, something dreamy for distraction.” This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of 1964’s Getz/Gilberto, the triumphant collaboration between North American jazz saxophonist Stanley Getz (1927-1991), Brazilian singer and guitarist João Gilberto (b. 1931), his then-wife, Astrud Gilberto (b. 1940), and their friend and compatriot, the composer Antonio Carlos “Tom” Jobim (1927-1994).

Getz/Gilberto was not North America’s first encounter with bossa nova, the lyrical fusion of samba and cool jazz emanating from the smoky nightclubs, recording studios, and performance halls of Rio de Janeiro in the mid-1950s. Yet the eight-track LP was by far the most successful. Propelled by the genre-defining single, “The Girl From Ipanema,” Getz/Gilberto spent ninety-six weeks on the charts and won four Grammy awards, including Best Album of the Year in 1965. Other tracks, including “Para Machucar Meu Coração,” “Desafinado,” and “Corcovado/Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars,” also became jazz standards. “Americans are generally not very curious about the styles of other countries,” Astrud Gilberto insisted. “But our music was Brazilian music in a modern form. It was very pretty and it was exceptional for managing to infiltrate America’s musical culture.”

What explains Americans’ love affair with bossa nova in the winter of 1964? Part of the answer lies in the power of popular music to relieve a broken heart. Critics associated Getz/Gilberto’s cool, sophisticated sound with the Kennedy White House, where music, high fashion, and glamorous parties had been hallmarks of “Camelot” on Pennsylvania Avenue during the early 1960s. Perhaps audiences sought to recapture a bit of the mystique that had vanished when President Kennedy was slain in Dallas, Texas, only five months before the record’s release.

For jazz critic Howard Mandel, Getz/Gilberto was like “another tonic for the assassination’s disruption, akin for adults to the salve upbeat the Beatles had provided for teenagers’ after their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964.” Gilberto’s hushed vocals and understated guitar, Jobim’s gentle piano, and Getz’s lush saxophone transported weary listeners to a sun soaked, tropical paradise light years removed from the turmoil confronting the United States in the winter of 1964.

Yet the Brazil of North American fantasy–languid, exotic, and serene–contrasted sharply with reality. By late 1963, the United States had declared Brazil a “trouble spot” in its hemispheric crusade against communism. Traditional elites and U.S. Cold Warriors opposed Brazilian President João “Jango” Goulart and his center-left agenda, which extended voting rights to illiterates, taxed foreign corporations, and introduced land reform. Meanwhile, peasant agitation in the Brazilian Northeast, the fulcrum of the global sugar trade, deepened the anxieties of U.S. policymakers who feared that Latin America’s largest economy might soon follow in Cuba’s footsteps. In March 1964, the Lyndon Johnson administration and the Brazilian military secretly began plotting Goulart’s overthrow.

While “The Girl from Ipanema” climbed to the top of the Billboard charts, U.S. warships penetrated Brazilian waters to support a military coup d’état on April 1, 1964, terminating the country’s brief flirtation with social reform. The United States had once again intervened in Latin America to preserve an illusion of tropical tranquility that existed only in the imaginations of ruling elites, intelligence agencies, and North American consumers. The military dictators who succeeded Jango and controlled Brazil for the next two decades understood the uses of music just as well and embraced bossa nova for its commercial appeal, apolitical subject matter, and potential to smooth over the nation’s deep-seated socio-political divisions.

Yet the marriage between bossa nova and the dictatorship was not to last. A younger generation of Brazilian artists, including Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa, Gilberto Gil, Rita Lee, and Tom Zé, fused elements of bossa nova with rock n’roll, psychedelia, experimental theatre, and Brazilian folk music into the colorful, exuberant countercultural movement known as Tropicália. Gone was the “tall, tan, young, and lovely” morena of Ipanema Beach. By 1968, the regime’s censors raced to cleanse Brazilian popular music of anti-establishment themes, even forcing Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, two of the country’s most visible stars, into exile in the United Kingdom. The coup government ultimately turned its back on bossa nova, too. In 1969, the regime sacked Vinícius de Moraes from his post in the Foreign Ministry after the legendary composer, playwright, and original author of “The Girl from Ipanema” criticized the dictatorship’s restraints on artistic freedom.

Popular interest in bossa nova continued to wane over the course of the 1970s. Outraged by U.S. sponsorship of the military regime, Brazilian musicians distanced themselves from a style that enjoyed intimate ties to the “giant from the North.” A blend of rock, samba, and jazz known as MPB, or “música popular brasileira,”eclipsed bossa nova as Brazil’s national sound. MPB artists like Chico Buarque, Jorge Ben, and Novos Baianos camouflaged criticisms of government repression, social injustice, and imperialism with irresistible melodies, appealing to a growing audience of middle-class youth. Meanwhile, in the slums and favelas of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Salvador, a young generation of Afro-Brazilians challenged the nation’s vaunted reputation as a “racial democracy,” while embracing cultural symbols of Black Power and the African Diaspora, including soul, funk, and reggae. Amid this rising tide of popular protest against the regime, bossa nova, with its dreamy, cool detachment, appeared painfully at odds with the struggles of ordinary Brazilians.

Still, the genre remains a major force in Brazilian pop culture and “world” music. The millions of tourists who visit Rio de Janeiro every year arrive at an airport named after Tom Jobim. Inevitably, more than a few vacationers board their flights home in “Girl from Ipanema” t-shirts purchased at the airport gift shop. Bossa nova also experienced a brief resurgence in the mid-1990s. Red Hot+Rio, a compilation album produced by the AIDS-awareness organization Red Hot in 1996, paid tribute to the musical career of Tom Jobim and featured covers by artists including Sting, Astrud Gilberto, and David Byrne. Today, pop stars like Marisa Monte, Celso Fonseca, and Uruguay’s Jorge Drexler refashion bossa nova sounds for contemporary audiences. And what about the song that made bossa nova an international sensation? “The Girl From Ipanema” currently ranks as the second-most-recorded pop song of all time, after the Beatles’ “Yesterday.” Amid the pageantry surrounding the upcoming FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Rio Olympic Games, look for “The Girl From Ipanema” to sway gently back into the spotlight.

Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto perform “The Girl From Ipanema” in 1964:

Hear more Bossa Nova:

João Gilberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim in a 1992 live concert

Elis Regina and Tom Jobim performing “Aguas de Março” in 1974

Astrud Gilberto’s comments can be found in “Interview with Astrud Gilberto,” by Howard Mandel, Verve Records, Re-issue of Getz/Gilberto, 1996, liner notes.

Howard Mandel’s comments come from correspondence with the author, January 2014. A special thanks to him from the author.

Photo Credits:

1964 LP cover of Getz/Gilberto (Image courtesy of Verve Records)

Creed Taylor, Antonio Carlos “Tom” Jobim, João Gilberto and Stan Getz recording together (Image courtesy of last.fm)

Brazilians marching against the country’s military dictatorship, 1964 (Image courtesy of Mount Holyoke College)

Musical team on Getz/Gilberto: (from left) Stan Getz, Milton Banana, Tom Creed Taylor, João Gilberto and Astrud Gilberto (Image courtesy of last.fm)

Images used under Fair Use Guidelines

Great Books on Early Twentieth-Century Popular Music

by Karl Hagstrom Miller

Recent years have seen a real flowering of scholarship about the popular music of the early twentieth century. Here are a few of my favorites—and a little something extra.

David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (2009).

An essential book for anyone interested in the history of popular music in the United States, Selling Sounds charts the emergence of a cohesive—and ubiquitous—music industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The fascinating characters that populate Suisman’s story are no lovers of music. They are savvy business men who learned how to transform disembodied sound (whether on sheet music or phonograph records) into hard cash. They also set the template for how music would be marketed for the next 100 years. No book tells the story better.

Elena Razlogova, The Listener’s Voice: Early Radio and the American Public (2011).

Radios became common in American homes during the 1920s. They brought the world into the family room in unprecedented ways. While much of scholarship on radio focuses on the establishment of major national broadcasting networks, The Listener’s Voice reveals the rollicking world of US radio before the majors seized control. Early radio often depended on its listeners to provide content. Through phone calls and letters, listeners created thriving participatory communities over the air. It was more akin to the vibrant world of early internet forums than to the homogenizing, on-way transmissions of later radio and television networks.

John W. Troutman, Indian Blues: American Indians and the Politics of Music, 1879-1934 (2009).

This wonderful book addresses some of the themes I explore in Segregating Sound—music, race, folklore, and money—from a different angle. Indian Blues tells the fascinating story of the struggle over music and musical meaning between government officials, teachers, and Native Americans in the early twentieth century. While government sponsored programs on reservations and in Indian boarding schools used music as a means to suppress Native resistance and collective memory, many Native Americans used music—be it traditional, new commercial pop styles, or combinations of both—to assert Native autonomy, escape the confines of government proscriptions, and get paid. Fresh, innovative, and well told, Indian Blues offers a story you won’t find anywhere else.

Carl Wilson, Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste (2007).

This is a slim book about pop diva Celine Dion’s top-selling album featuring “My Heart Will Go On,” better known as the theme from the movie Titanic. It is also one of the best pieces of music writing I have read in years. Wilson, the pop music critic for the Toronto Globe and Mail, admits he is not a Dion fan. He then systematically explores her global appeal to discover what he might be missing. The result is brilliant meditation on aesthetics, taste, cultural politics, and pop music history. At times touching and often hilarious, this beautifully written book changed the way I hear music.

Sounds of the Past #2

by Karl Hagstrom Miller

Anyone interested in early sound recordings can find a treasure trove at the Library of Congress website.

“In the Baggage Coach Ahead” is a great example of the sentimental ballads that became popular in the United States during the 1890s. The classic ballads were maudlin tearjerkers, narrative tales of lost love or dead mothers designed to pull at the heartstrings. They featured snappy melodies that lodged themselves in the heads of anyone within earshot. New York sheet music publishers churned them out by the score, hoping that a few would prove popular with theater audiences and the legions of young women who played the latest hits at the family piano. The assembly-line composition process marked the industrialization of American popular music.

Listen to “In the Baggage Coach Ahead”

“In the Baggage Coach Ahead” from 1896 hits all the requisite stops. The song takes place on the sleeping car on a train, where an inconsolable baby cries in its father’s arms. Other passengers demand silence, complaining that they cannot sleep. One woman then suggests that the father take the baby to its mother, a request that set up the song’s kicker. “I wish I could,” the father replies, “but she’s dead in the coach ahead.”

The song was the most popular composition of Gussie L. Davis, a pioneer in breaking down segregation in the music business. He was one of a very few African American songwriters who successfully published sentimental ballads during the decade. Most black writers were either barred from the industry or constrained to writing comic minstrel songs about black inferiority.

The performer, Vernon Dalhart, was a struggling opera singer who moved from Texas to New York around 1911. He eventually became a popular recording artist for the Edison phonograph company, waxing everything from light opera and minstrel songs to popular hits of the day. In 1925, he re-imagined himself as a hillbilly singer and achieved his greatest popularity with “The Prisoner’s Song,” often touted as the first country record to sell a million copies.

Sentimental ballads such as “In the Baggage Coach Ahead” were popular, in part, because they could help Americans grapple with the dramatic social changes they were experiencing. Urbanization, industrialization, immigration, the expansion of railroad travel, and the availability of thousands of new consumer goods (including phonographs and commercial theater) brought increasing contact with people, products, and ideas from elsewhere. Sentimental ballads helped negotiate the intersection of public and private spheres. Davis’ last verse finds all the mothers and wives on the train helping the lone father sooth his crying child. It concludes, “Every one had a story to tell in their home of the baggage coach ahead.” Mothers saved the day and helped transform a public tragedy into a private morality lesson when witnesses shared the story with their loved ones back home.

Embracing “In the Baggage Coach Ahead” and its kin meant not having to choose between public and private allegiances. Sentimental ballads were commercial leisure that celebrated private domesticity. Listeners could identify with both by singing along with the odes to private virtue echoing from the public stage.

Karl H. Miller’s “Sounds of the Past #1” on Not Even Past

Sheet music cover: Historic American Sheet Music collection, Duke University Libraries Digital Collections
Portraits of Davis and Dalhart via Wikimedia Commons

Sounds of the Past

By Karl Hagstrom Miller

Interested in popular music and the music industry in the early twentieth century? The Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at the University of California at Santa Barbara has built perhaps the most useful archive on the planet for you.

Their website features a growing mountain of streaming and downloadable songs that were originally released on fragile cylinder recordings. To publicize the site and demonstrate its richness for both scholarship and teaching, this is the first in a series of posts that will feature cylinders I find particularly interesting or noteworthy.

First up is an early recording of one of the important ancestors of hillbilly music and humor.

LISTEN: Len Spencer, “The Arkansas Traveler,” Edison Ambersol 181 [1909]

“The Arkansas Traveler” was a fiddle tune and comedy skit that has been traced back to the 1840s. The tune itself long ago entered the traditional fiddle repertoire. It is one of the standards that beginners learn, virtuosi use to impress the judges at fiddle contests, and many kids know through its modern lyrics about smashing up a baby bumblebee. What is less well known is that the tune was part of an elaborate and ubiquitous comedy routine that addressed tensions between city and country.

The skit portrayed a traveler (usually from the city or the East) coming across a squatter in rural Arkansas. As the squatter repeatedly saws the first strain of the tune on his fiddle, the two engage in pun-riddled banter. “Where does this road go?” the traveler asks. “It don’t go nowhere. Stays right where it is,” comes the reply. Tension grows as the traveler’s questions become more antagonistic and the squatter continues to dissemble. It is finally eased when the traveler grabs the fiddle and finishes the tune that the squatter had started. Laughter ensues, and the squatter welcomes the traveler to stay the night.

The humor of “The Arkansas Traveler” cut two ways. The rural fiddler’s apparent inability to comprehend the traveler’s questions pegged him as comically unsophisticated, reinforcing urban fantasies about the rural South. Yet it is easy to see the squatter’s naiveté as an act. He feigns ignorance in order to deflect the city’s slicker’s condescension, deflate his pretensions, and get him to leave. The traveler looks down on the backwoods primitive without realizing that the joke is on him.

Yet ultimately, “The Arkansas Traveler” tells a story of commonality rather than difference. In the skit, the tensions between the urban and rural characters dissolved as the two discover that they know the same music. The white hayseed and city slicker were not so different after all. White rural listeners thus could imagine holding their own in cities populated by the likes of the gullible yet ultimately endearing traveler, and their urban counterparts could identify with the fiddler, who may have expressed shared contempt for urban pretensions and represented the simplicity and straight-talk of their own real or imagined rural heritage.

“The Arkansas Traveler” provided the template for hillbilly humor from Fiddlin’ John Carson in the 1920s through the popular 1960s television show “Hee Haw” and Jeff Foxworthy’s “You might be a redneck if…” bit in the 21st century. It also demonstrated the market value of simultaneously promoting poor, white, rural southerners as both unprepared for participation in civilized society and the smartest ones in the room.

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