Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture

Black rock has long seemed an impossibility. Anthropologist Maureen McMahon's new study explores black rock as a political and cultural category and, importantly, as an intervention into industrial conventions and constraints that sunder the two words that comprise it. During 1992 and 1992 McMahon undertook deep fieldwork within the Black Rock Coalition (BRC), an organization with major branches in New York City and Los Angeles (not inconsequently the music industry capitals of the country). McMahon was an observer as well as a participant in "the BRC's production of a black rock scene" (21), having been recruited as secretary of the organization's New York City branch after her propensity for note taking was observed by other members. With this disclosure McMahon outs herself as a fan as well as a scholar of the scene, a refreshing admission in popular music scholarship. Her involvement with and belief in the organization does not detract from the astute analysis of her project; if anything, it enhances it.

The book is in chapter form but divides roughly into two parts. Chapters 1 through 5 explore the BRC's tactics, aesthetics, and its own scene and intersections with the New York club scene in general. The second part, chapters 6 through 10, explores the BRC and black rock's interactions with institutions of cultural, political, and social power, especially the music industry. McMahon's observations and explorations of the BRC's tactics, theoretical and class underpinnings, and mission in the first half of the book are fascinating and provocative. The rigor of her analysis of a musical scene and its tactics provides a model for similar work on other organizations or individuals working against the commonsense grain of popular music and its institutions. The second half of the book is equally well observed and analyzed but suffers in places from a lack of complication of certain beliefs reiterated in her study, especially but not solely about the vexed intersection of gender and rock.

The first two chapters provide the theoretical and material background of McMahon's study, clearly introducing the themes both of her book and of the BRC. McMahon explains how BRC members consciously chose the term "black rock" upon formation of the organization in the mid-1980s because they saw it as "a flexible musical category" that could embrace the totality of black musical production. Moreover, it was [End Page 119] a political category and statement, crafted in part to write blackness back into rock, a genre from which black performers and audiences had been, for all intents and purposes, expelled by the early 1980s, especially from the point of view of the music industry and, consequently, black audiences. McMahon perceives black rock as defined by the BRC as a "critical intervention into what was for black musicians an impossible situation" (8). As McMahon and BRC members see it, black rock had been turned into an oxymoron by the music industry, black audiences, and notions of what constituted authenticity in a black context. That is, codes of black authenticity required that blacks neither listen to nor play rock music. Part of the BRC's goal was to reclaim the right of its members to play rock and, by extension, to participate in any type of cultural and material production they desired rather than confining themselves to artistic categories and prohibitions not of their own making. BRC members, as well as the author, were members of what McMahon refers to as the "post-liberated generation" of middle-class black Americans who had attended integrated schools, were not a part of the black underclass featured so prominently in (white) media representations, and, importantly for this project, were "deep into music" (59), especially rock music. The BRC was therefore much more than an affinity group of like-minded black musicians (although it served that purpose); it was a crucial site of identity and cultural politics.

The next three chapters provide thick descriptions...