Hamilton — Just Around Midnight

Author: Jack Hamilton
Title: Just around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination
Year: 2016
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Type: Academic book

Just around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination is a book by Jack Hamilton, a scholar of media studies and American studies at the University of Virginia, published by Harvard University Press in 2016. It asks how rock and roll, a music with Black roots and many Black early stars, came to be heard as white, and why that happened in the 1960s, a decade generally understood as one of interracial exchange and crossover. His answer is that “rock and roll became white in large part because of stories people told themselves about it,” a change in how the music was received, made by audiences and writers and, after them, the music industry.¹ Rock’s ideology of authenticity, he argues, set a double standard, hearing Black musicians’ versatility as betrayal while white musicians took up Black forms and kept Black performers at a distance. His chapters run from Sam Cooke and Bob Dylan through the British Invasion, Motown and the Beatles, soul singers from Aretha Franklin to Dusty Springfield, and Jimi Hendrix to the Rolling Stones.

Hamilton, who took his doctorate in American studies at Harvard, joined the University of Virginia’s media studies faculty in 2014 and was an assistant professor there when the book appeared. He had been the pop critic for Slate since 2013.²

The introduction opens on Margo Jefferson’s article “Ripping Off Black Music,” published in Harper’s in January 1973, in which she recalled dreaming, the night Hendrix died, that his death was “the latest step in a plot being designed to eliminate blacks from rock music so that it may be recorded in history as a creation of whites.” Her nightmare, Hamilton writes, “had in fact come true before she wrote her article.”³ The panic that met rock and roll in the 1950s, he argues, was that its racial intermixture “would threaten the social order”; by the end of the 1960s the music “had lost this character of racial disruption, to the point that black involvement was seen as flatly incongruous.”⁴

He sets aside three common accounts of the change: white theft; Black self-segregation, which he finds has “some amount of truth” but “tends to conflate music and activism”; and, most common, silence.⁵ His own account turns on authenticity, the “enormously powerful and enormously vague conceptual engine” of rock ideology, and “by the end of the 1960s ‘real’ rock music had been colored white.”⁶ Dylan, the Rolling Stones and Janis Joplin “were lauded for casting off the shackles of racial conformity,” while artists like those at Motown “were derided for being insufficiently black.” For white musicians, engaging with Black musical forms “while keeping black bodies at arm’s length became, simply, a new way of being white.”⁷

The first chapter pairs Cooke and Dylan: Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” was, in Hamilton’s account, a civil rights anthem partly inspired by Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind”.⁸ The second chapter, “The White Atlantic,” faults the British Invasion myth “for the denial of porosity implicit in its central metaphor,” the invasion.⁹ The third follows the influence of Motown’s bassist James Jamerson on Paul McCartney’s playing on Rubber Soul and Revolver,¹⁰ and the fifth hears Hendrix’s and the Rolling Stones’ “preoccupations with violence” as “responses to hardening racial ideologies in popular music.”¹¹

Emma Rees, in Times Higher Education, called the book “brilliant but uneven” and “disappointingly canonical,” with whole chapters on the Beatles and the Stones while women artists are almost wholly neglected.¹² David McCarthy, reviewing it in 2018, read it as “two equally provocative volumes in one,” an anthology of the decade’s racial imagination and a study of musicians’ working lives.¹³

Key contributions

• The question of how rock and roll, a Black-rooted music, came to be understood as white during a decade generally understood as one of crossover.
• The argument that the change was one of reception, made by “stories people told themselves” about the music.
• A critique of three common accounts: white theft, Black self-segregation and silence.
• An account of rock’s ideology of authenticity as a double standard, which took Black versatility for betrayal and made white engagement with Black forms, kept apart from Black performers, a new way of being white.
• Case studies of Sam Cooke and Bob Dylan, the British Invasion, Motown and the Beatles, soul singers, Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones.

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