‘Good Booty’: The Sexual Power of Music

GOOD BOOTY
Love and Sex, Black & White, Body and Soul in American Music
By Ann Powers
Illustrated. 418 pp. Dey St./William Morrow. $26.99.

“Tutti frutti, good booty,” ran the pre-bowdlerized version of Little Richard’s hit song, one of the lyrics the NPR music critic Ann Powers cites to demonstrate the intersection of evocative gibberish and open, transgressive eroticism that, she says, is “at the heart of American popular music.” The line encompasses sexual frankness, piratical rapine, the backside in fetish and dance and a wordless endorsement of the pleasure principle. All this through the flamboyant vessel of a performer who himself embodied complexities of sexuality, race and the slippage between the spiritual and the carnal.

And “embodiment” is the relevant term for Powers. Her argument, that “we, as a nation, most truly and openly acknowledge sexuality’s power through music,” is intimately tied to the body: enslaved and objectified black bodies, the erotic sublimation and liberation of dance, the dialogue between charismatic performer and enraptured audience and the problem of “cyborg” singers like Britney Spears. She stresses the primacy of the voice, the flesh and the communion of bodies in a room together over the atomized experience of listening to disembodied sound (while acknowledging new forms of intimacy introduced by the age of recording). Powers connects her early attraction to popular music explicitly to its “erotic pull,” the “physicality” of live performance, and the centrality of music to the sexual awakenings of herself and her friends. She decided, she says, “to write a book about American music and American sex, one that would really be about American dreaming, violence, pleasure, hunger, lies and love.”

It’s a self-consciously ambitious program (the jacket copy prepares the reader for a “magnum opus over two decades in the making”) befitting one of the rare rock critics with a national audience, and a key female voice in the field. It’s also one that Powers admits will be necessarily incomplete: “To talk about what’s revealed within the sexiest moments of American music … is to recast its history in terms that are more inclusive, and less dominated by old ideas of artistic genius or great works. … This retelling of American popular music doesn’t always focus on the big stories. It has gaps.” Powers does spend time with obscure artists like Florence Mills and Jobriath, and fruitfully explores the colorful, gender-fluid world of early gospel music. However, her story hews to a broadly conventional narrative — the intersection of African-American expression, white curiosity and appropriation, and the dialogue between the spiritual and the secular — that begins in Congo Square ring shouts and leads with inexorable circularity back to the New Orleans of Beyoncé’s “Lemonade.” Familiar figures like the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison stand in for “the sexual revolution and its discontents,” while Madonna and Prince do the same for the MTV ’80s. Meanwhile, the centrality of eroticism in Powers’s narrative necessitates a de-emphasis on canonical artists without an obvious erotic component to their personas (Louis Armstrong, Bob Dylan), and inconclusive glosses on others (Chuck Berry, Michael Jackson) whose sexual and racial stories are more complicated.

Powers allows herself the veteran rock critic’s slangy informality (Buddy Holly “was … getting laid on the regular”), which can create a tonal instability when set against historical filler (“By 2000 … people spent more and more time within the virtual realm made possible by a new phenomenon called the World Wide Web”) and quotations from academic sources. She has a zest for bold assertions, and some of them land: Her attention to the physical intimacy between Creole women and their black servants, the domestic eroticism of “gospel mothers,” the sensuous intimacy of soft rock, and the puritan sexual disgust of punk are all useful diversifications from the bawdy journey through national puberty that is the book’s primary narrative. Some are more debatable: Was Mick Jagger’s appropriation of blues “codes of potency” really a result of LSD? Do girl group and doo-wop’s “nonsense syllables” and “baby talk” really constitute inarticulate “play preceding full adult sexuality,” the “revelatory babble of an emerging generation”? Did Jim Morrison’s “sacrifice” of his member “on the altar of silence … strike like a final blow” to the ’60s?