The transatlantic feedback loop

The transatlantic feedback loop is the pattern in which American music and musicians, many of them Black, cross to Britain and are remade there, and British music, Black Britain’s included, crosses back to the United States. The debate asks whether that is a trade between two nations or the motion of one Atlantic culture, and who is heard as the music’s author when it comes back. Paul Gilroy (1993) proposes the Atlantic as a single unit for the history of the modern world, Black culture’s included. Jack Hamilton (2016) borrows Gilroy’s title for a chapter called “The White Atlantic,” which faults the story of the British Invasion for denying that the music had been crossing all along and traces how the Rolling Stones came to be heard as authentic in their own right. Roberta Freund Schwartz (2007) follows the blues to Britain through records, clubs and visiting musicians, and Ulrich Adelt (2010) finds in Eric Clapton’s blues a problematic idea of Black masculinity. Gilroy describes how English audiences remade Jimi Hendrix into their image of a Black American performer, and Dick Hebdige (1979) reads Britain’s youth styles as responses to the Black presence in Britain. Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton (1999) write that America created the DJ and Britain gave him a home, and DeForrest Brown, Jr. (2022) sets out to free techno from the British account of it. Laura Chrisman (1997, 2003) objects that Gilroy’s Atlantic shuts out what nationalism and socialism might offer and obscures its ties to imperialism and capitalism.

One Atlantic

Paul Gilroy suggests in The Black Atlantic that cultural historians could treat the Atlantic as “one single, complex unit of analysis” and so write the history of the modern world across national and cultural borders.¹ His example from the music of his own day is “Keep On Movin’” (1989), the hit by the London collective Soul II Soul. The record was made in England “by the children of Caribbean settlers,” remixed in the United States in the style of Jamaican dub by the African American producer Teddy Riley, and it carried samples of records by the JBs, from America, and by Mikey Dread, from Jamaica. That mixture, Gilroy writes, “encapsulated the playful diasporic intimacy that has been a marked feature of transnational black Atlantic creativity.”²

The British Invasion myth

Jack Hamilton’s Just around Midnight calls its chapter on Britain “The White Atlantic,” a title Hamilton describes as “an ironic homage” to Gilroy’s book. Gilroy’s inquiry, Hamilton argues, should reach Liverpool’s skiffle cellars and London’s jazz and blues clubs, where young white English people worked out their own relation to Black music and “ultimately redirected global popular music in the process.”³ In the common story of the British Invasion, as he tells it, rock and roll was close to dying until the Beatles “invaded” and “heroically rescued the music from the very Americans who had created it and then neglected it.” Hamilton faults the story most “for the denial of porosity implicit in its central metaphor”: the word implies a border the music had not already been crossing. British papers, Hamilton writes, had been describing invasions of Britain by Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis and Sam Cooke years before Americans took up the word, and the British bands named their Black heroes “with obsessive frequency in interviews.” Mick Jagger told Melody Maker in 1964 that anyone who took groups like his for originators should stop listening to them: “Listen to the men who inspire us. Buy their records.”⁴

How Britain got the blues

Roberta Freund Schwartz’s How Britain Got the Blues follows the blues to Britain through records, the jazz clubs’ record recitals, the music papers and visiting musicians. In her account, a small circle of critics, collectors and discographers, champions of African American music, started the British blues revival by teaching listeners about that music.⁵ Big Bill Broonzy, who first came to Britain in 1951, “altered the landscape of British popular music,” she writes, “as surely as the Beatles did a decade later.”⁶ The bandleader Chris Barber invited Muddy Waters to Britain in October 1958.⁷ Her preface turns to the British bands’ own advocacy. The Beatles “berated reporters for not knowing who Muddy Waters was,” and the Rolling Stones would not appear on the American program Shindig! unless Howlin’ Wolf was invited too. The image of the Stones, “Britain’s second most popular import,” seated at Wolf’s feet, Schwartz writes, moved viewers both Black and white.⁸ The writer Peter Guralnick, remembering the broadcast for NPR, called it “reality imposing itself on this totally artificial setting.”⁹ In time, Hamilton writes, the band that had wanted to be Muddy Waters found other rock musicians wanting to be them. He counts that shift, “from the Rolling Stones being heard as the authenticated, to the Rolling Stones being heard as the authentic,” among “the most significant turns in the racial imagination of rock.”¹⁰

When white British bands took up the blues, Peter Checkland, in Schwartz’s account, argued that critics should hold them to the standards of the idiom’s best performers, and he called British blues “a sad parody of the real thing.”¹¹ Ulrich Adelt writes in Blues Music in the Sixties that the British blues magazines of the 1960s “featured exclusively African American blues artists,” except in Blues Unlimited’s album reviews, and took a dim view of white blues artists.¹² He treats Clapton as the representative figure of Britain’s blues movement and reads him through Norman Mailer’s 1957 essay “The White Negro,” whose idea he carries over to Britain. In Adelt’s reading, Clapton, like many other British musicians, turned to “a problematic construction” of Black masculinity.¹³

Hendrix in England

Jimi Hendrix, an experienced rhythm-and-blues sideman, was remade in England, Gilroy writes in another chapter of The Black Atlantic, into the Black American that English audiences wanted to see: “wild, sexual, hedonistic and dangerous.” His biographers agree, in Gilroy’s account, that the “updated minstrel antics” of his shows held back his creativity. Gilroy leaves open whether the early performances parodied the minstrel role or confirmed its lasting power; either way, he writes, Hendrix’s handling of its codes “points to the antagonism between different local definitions of what blackness entailed.”¹⁴

The Black presence in Britain

Dick Hebdige’s Subculture reads Britain’s postwar youth styles as responses to the Black people living in Britain as well as to the records that reached it. British working-class youth cultures, he writes, play out “a phantom history of race relations since the War,” and the white subcultures, one after another, can be read as adaptations that “symbolically accommodate or expunge the black presence from the host community.”¹⁵ The mods took up a “‘soul-brother’ look; tight-fitting, loose-limbed, black and yet urbane.” When rock settled into bland teen pop in the early 1960s, as Hebdige tells it, the mods turned to soul and ska.¹⁶ Northern Soul, in his account, was “a genuinely secret sub-culture” of working-class young people who danced athletically to up-tempo American soul records of the 1960s.¹⁷ Its records have been “much mythologised as ‘rejects’ of soul record companies,” Sarah Raine writes for the Museum of Youth Culture, but most of its anthems were made for a mass audience and aimed at the R&B chart, the segregated chart for African American pop.¹⁸

House and techno

Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton’s Last Night a DJ Saved My Life puts dance music’s crossing in two sentences: “America created the DJ and gave him his music. Britain, in its fertile club culture, gave him a home.”¹⁹ When the records of Detroit’s techno labels, Transmat, Metroplex and KMS, began to cross borders, they write, the trio of Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson “found their greatest market overseas.”²⁰ DeForrest Brown, Jr., in an interview, named two compilations, of Chicago house and Detroit techno, that brought both genres to Britain, where neither yet existed.²¹ His Assembling a Black Counter Culture, he has said, sets out to free the word “techno” from the dance-music industry and from the British vocabulary for dance music, and to place its origins in Detroit’s community and in African American history.²²

Chrisman’s objection

Laura Chrisman, writing in Race & Class in 1997, called Gilroy’s project “mystical” and “idealist.” In her reading he builds “a transcendental category of blackness,” an idea of blackness that stands outside history, and so keeps the “ethnicism” he faults in Afrocentric nationalism. Because Gilroy rejects what nationalism and socialism might offer, she wrote, his book becomes “an exclusive club liner,” its passengers “hand-picked by Gilroy, bound for death.”²³ In Postcolonial Contraventions (2003) she made a second objection. By making modernity “the exclusive object of black Atlantic critique,” she wrote, Gilroy had made it hard to see how the black Atlantic connects with imperialism and capitalism.²⁴

Further reading

• Simon Jones, Black Culture, White Youth: Reggae Tradition from JA to UK (1988) — on the influence of Jamaican popular music on young white people in Britain, from the mods and skinheads to punk and 2 Tone, with a study of 1980s Birmingham

See also

• The color line in pop — the debate over race and the categories of popular music
• Authenticity and its discontents — the debate over authenticity in popular music
• The songwriter-performer divide — the debate over who is the author of a record