2008 Pop Conference Bios/Abstracts

Eric Weisbard

Eric Weisbard organizes the Pop Conference and has edited two volumes of conference papers: This is Pop (Harvard, 2004) and Listen Again (Duke, 2007). He has been senior program manager and curator at EMP, music editor at the Village Voice, and senior editor at Spin. He wrote Use Your Illusion I & II for Continuum''s 33 and 1/3 series and is currently completing a dissertation for the University of California, Berkeley history department.Panel(s):
Liminal Soul
Saturday, April 12, 2008, 9:00 - 10:45Abstract:

"''Me in the R&B Charts?'' Elton John''s ''Bennie and the Jets'' and the British Invasion-Soul-Top 40 Nexus"
When Donnie Simpson, a DJ at Detroit R&B station WJLB, approached program director Jay Butler about airing Elton John''s "Bennie and the Jets," Butler was hesitant. "I really didn''t want to play it," he told Record World in 1975, "because there are often repercussions from the black community about one less space for a black artist on the playlist." But when Butler gave in the response was remarkable. "Within three days, it was our No. 1 request item." Next, as John later recalled, "this guy called Pat Pipolo from MCA Records rang me up and said, You''re Number One Black in Detroit, and I said, I beg your pardon? Black record—me in the R&B charts? Spit it out!" For John, who had backed such performers as Patti LaBelle and Billy Stewart in his 1960s group Bluesology, the opportunity to reach a black public was irresistible. He even deferred promoting a huge single: "Candle in the Wind" is on his first UK greatest hits compilation but not the US version, where "Bennie" replaces it.

This presentation, drawing on archival source material, will recover a different kind of lost "soul" moment with implications for the still explosive subject of racial exchange in pop. What does it say that John became the first white artist to appear on Soul Train? ("A musician with a sort of psychedelic outlook on life," host Don Cornelius called him.). Is it significant, given white appropriations of blackness, that on "Bennie" producer Gus Dudgeon placed a clap track on the on-beat, to satirize white audiences? Ultimately, I argue, the Top 40 ("Bennie," like many an R&B or UK success, crossed over to become number one pop) offered a different sort of cultural nexus than either rock, as it evolved out of the counterculture, or soul, as it evolved out of Black Power. Here, chart climbing still equated with social mobility and ideological affirmations of identity often gave way to theatrical parody. Top 40 preceded the Vietnam era politicization of pop, but it also accompanied it, and needs to be understood as an enduring, ambiguous force for a different kind of popular music upheaval.

PANEL ABSTRACT:

This panel begins with a premise previously raised by Gayle Wald in her research on Sister Rosetta Tharpe: "forgetting takes place through a series of discrete, intentional acts." With that idea in hand, our panel proposes to explore both acts of "forgetting" and "recovery" as it applies to several examples from the world of soul music. This is a genre in which both the forgotten and remembered are weighted with the complexities of race, politics, gender and industry, as well as themes such as authenticity, pride, and desire. The three papers will look at two acts of forgetting: Wald's research on the public television program, "Soul!" from the late '60s and early '70s, and Kajikawa's dissection of the rise and disappearance of contemporary R&B star D'Angelo. Wang will be contributing an example of recovery by discussing the rise of the retro-soul movement over the last 15 years. Through this panel, we hope to collectively add onto larger discussions around the racial politics of music, fame and business.