Issue 96

Issue 96 tag:www.socialtextjournal.org,2009-11-10:/journal/issue96/40 2010-01-04T18:11:30Z Fall 2008 Movable Type Pro 4.31-en Witchcraft tag:www.socialtextjournal.org,2010:/journal/issue96//40.483 2010-01-04T17:30:58Z 2010-01-04T18:11:30Z

What explains the social power of music in the United States today? What allows Americans to invoke it as the cause of antisocial violence, as well as of personal expressivity? This essay contemplates the peculiar American invention of a musical culture defined by generation, which has political force without being properly political. It suggests that this music has come to play the part assigned to witchcraft in many other societies, bearing within itself the capacity to transform individualism into antisociality, alienation into destruction, desire into violence. It can do so because it opens anew the gap in language between meaning and force. Tracing the history of music in the aftermath of World War I, from the Beatles to Marilyn Manson, Frank Sinatra to Santana, and following the popular cultural discourses that both invoked and strove to contain magic, the essay suggests that America remains possessed by the idea of witchcraft.

Rosalind Morris http://www.socialtextjournal.org/cgi-bin/mt/mt-cp.cgi?__mode=view&blog_id=40&id=120 Excerpt:

Frank Sinatra, it seems safe to say, did not understand witchcraft. Sure, he made the song "Witchcraft" famous, transforming a terrifying idea into the kind of desire that can be spoken in public without shame. And yes, he understood that romance is -- or has been, since the 1950s at least -- the only space that Americans permit to be suffused by powers that can undo someone, that can undermine reason. But even that insight seems to have possessed Sinatra only inadvertently, in the way that any other cultural truism possesses someone.

It may be the case that Sinatra was a magician, if by magician we mean one who produces an illusion so perfect that it appears to be real, one who can, thereby, seem to defy the laws of nature. Frank Sinatra may well be a magician according to this rather lethargic criterion. Like every great artist, he appeared to possess and be possessed by a quite inexplicable talent -- one that he cultivated, trained, and nurtured, to be sure, but one that exceeded what he, as an ordinary man, could rightly have expected. This talent made it possible for him to do things with his body that most people could not -- to move people with the force of song. But even so, few would ever refer to him as someone capable of sorcery.

To move people with the force of song requires that music lift off from language, and from meaning, to be more than the content of the lyrics -- and, at the same time, to animate them with this now foreign seeming element. Sinatra could surpass meaning as well as any singer, transforming lyrics into the mere shapes of words. He filled those evacuated contours with an aural richness so mellow and so mellifluous that you almost feel sated with food after listening. It's the soaring glissando, the swinging, finger-snapping melodiousness of the songs that are his legacy. It's not that the words have receded from the horizon of his music, but the words are not what we recall as having been his.