Music never stands still. It moves around, from one socio-cultural context to another, and in moving, it changes. It changes in how it is heard, how it is mediated, and how it is adapted and developed. Musical migrations necessarily entail musical transformations as particular genres are modified in relation to expectations of different audiences, however that difference is defined, and as variant meanings and associations arise when songs and song styles move over and between distinct cultural boundaries. A music genre may well be readily identifiable as the same genre across both sides of a cultural dividing line, whether that be one of social class, ethnicity, or generation, but how it signifies is diversified nevertheless according to who produces it and consumes it, who gives it initial meaning, and how that meaning is interpreted, in time and over time, in place and between one place and another.
There are many ways in which these processes can be investigated, some, perhaps inevitably, of greater cultural significance than others. Here, Jon Stratton’s focus is certainly on a set of movements that have been of considerable significance. They have occurred between the Caribbean and Britain, and parts of France and North Africa, and they involve some fascinating shifts and crossovers, falling for the most part during the second half of the twentieth century. The music genres in the frame are largely ska and reggae, with punk and raï also figuring to some extent later on, partly through discussion of roots reggae in Britain and partly through discussion of the scholarly neglected music of Rachid Taha. Early chapters consider the career of Kenny Lynch; the song “My Boy Lollipop,” sung by Millie and recorded in Britain by Chris Blackwell; the trope of the character called Johnny Reggae in his transmutation from England to Jamaica; and the Paul McCartney song, “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” with its colonial and postcolonial connections. Though the rationale for these choices could have been made clearer, these chapters illuminate what was involved in the two-way trafficking of music between the Caribbean and Britain in the postwar period. The music moved across the racial faultlines which were operative in those decades, with these explaining the kinds of change and modification already mentioned as well as the kinds of response characterizing its reception in both the center and periphery of these former imperial locations. Both racism and anti-racism were involved in these movements and conjunctions, and Stratton provides the requisite contextual detail even as his analytical focus falls mainly on the revisioning of specific songs or the chameleon qualities of others as they appear in different performance settings and at different points in time. The book’s concern with racial faultlines is fully confronted in a chapter which examines the varying versions and varying receptions, in the contrasting racial environments of Britain and the United States, of the song “Brother Louie,” written by Errol Brown and Tony Wilson (co-founders of the group Hot Chocolate). The song addresses the issues associated with interethnic dating, and is perhaps the most celebrated of the few songs which have focused on this topic.
The remaining three chapters highlight both the strengths and weaknesses of the book. The first of these deals with the changes that were made to ska and its socio-cultural uses across the racial faultline in Britain between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. This of course brings out both the racism (with ska’s attraction for white working-class skinheads) and the anti-racism (with ska used as the musical basis for the Two Tone movement) involved in this music’s crossings of the faultline. The second is the already-mentioned examination of the work of Rachid Taha, while the final chapter looks into the song career of “Police On My Back,” first released by the ethnically-mixed British band The Equals in 1967. Stratton deals with this version and four of the cover versions, with their meanings changing from a representation of Jamaican rude boy culture to an expression of black migrant experience in Britain and elsewhere in Europe. The strengths in these chapters, as in those previous, lie in the quality of description and analysis, while the weaknesses lie in a lack of overall coherence. The chapters are tied together through their thematic concern with musical migration and the politics of diaspora and identity, but the songs and topics focused on in each chapter seem somewhat random, even though they are of course all relevant to the key preoccupation of the book. The same is to some extent the case with their order of presentation and progression. Most of these chapters derive from previously published journal articles, and they have been bunched together here with insufficient attention to their interrelationship and to how each contributes to the general composition and coherence of the book. Consequently, there is too often an abrupt jump from one chapter to another.
That shortcoming aside, the book is to be strongly recommended as an assortment of studies dealing with the migration of music. This is a perennially absorbing topic, and in its intersections with “race” and ethnicity, a politically important one as well. Stratton continues to make insightful and informed contributions to the cultural analysis of ethnicity and music, and this book is a welcome addition to previous work by him, as for example on the Jewish presence in popular music (see my review of his book, Jews, Race and Popular Music, in JFRR, February 2012). This new book will be of interest to those working not only in music studies and cultural studies but also in the sociology and social history of ethnic relations in the West.
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[Review length: 937 words • Review posted on September 22, 2015]