Critical Review Set 1, Post #1 (McClary; due 9/12)

McClary, Susan.  1994.  "Same As It Ever Was: Youth Culture and Music."  In Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture, eds. Tricia Rose and Andrew Ross.  New York: Routledge, 1994.

McClary's article asserts that it is not the lyrical or overtly “political” value of a piece or genre that is at the heart of music's sociopolitical power, but rather the mind-body "correspondence" (34) -- the physicality associated with music at large, implicit in any genre or piece -- that informs music's capacity to deconstruct standing social conditions, gender roles, and systems of marginalization.  McClary writes that “the musical power of the disenfranchised...resides in their ability to articulate different ways of construing the body” (34), highlighting what I perceive as the most powerful reality captured in her text: that music activates movements of the body sculpted by racial, sexual, and gendered identities, and that the dispersion of music through commerce has produced a terrain in which these physical expressions are constantly contested.  Plato’s fear that music promulgates a “thirst for liberty” and “sensuousness of body” (29) comes on behalf of this terrain, and furthermore reflects similar anxieties as those who criticized Pickett’s “Midnight Hour” or the Ciaccona -- anxieties produced on the basis of uncomfortable freedoms, of physical and expressive liberties that push cultural envelopes.

In the article McClary observes that “white audiences have often come to black music to experience vicariously the body they otherwise deny themselves, then have castigated black musicians for indulging in physicality” (34).  I’m curious to know how the appropriation of physical expression rooted in the musical traditions of marginalized communities simultaneously serves to destabilize standing systems of marginalization.  How would these white listeners’ “indulgence” in jazz, or maybe even Plato’s indulgence in a Classical dance-craze that he publicly abhorred, complicate and deconstruct the very prejudices from which some of the most infamous and popular traditions have emerged?