The fleur-de-lis will be showcased in Sunday’s Super Bowl as the symbol of the Saints.
But it is much more than just the logo of a modern-day football team. Throughout history, the fleur-de-lis has represented many things, including royalty and religion. The symbol, an artistic representation of a flower (a lily or an iris), has been found on ancient Greek and Roman coins.
Like an inkblot in a psychological test, the fleur-de-lis of the Saints can have several interpretations. Some may see it as a most aggressive flower or as the tip of a spear or an arrowhead.
New Orleans players like it but vary in their awareness of its meaning. Linebacker Jonathan Vilma said he did not know of its floral origin. Linebacker Marvin Mitchell called it a “fleur-de-leaf.” ...
Jonathan Casillas, another linebacker, said of the logo, “I love it, man” and called it “very powerful.” He also said he was impressed to see women with fleur-de-lis tattoos.
Darren Sharper, a defensive back, said that if the Saints win the Super Bowl, he will get a fleur-de-lis tattoo, “so I guess I’ll be a New Orleans Saint forever.”
Apparently, neither the Times nor these players remember one of the most potent uses of the fleur-de-lis in New Orleans history. As part of the French code noir which governed the treatment of enslaved Africans, the branding of the fleur-de-lis on the backs of slaves was part punishment, part record-keeping. After one runaway attempt, a slave received the brand on one shoulder, in addition to losing an ear. After another runaway tempt, another fleur-de-lis would go on the other shoulder, and the individual's hamstring would be cut. A third runaway attempt, and the penalty was death.
Check out the comments to this story for some examples of how the symbol is still much contested in New Orleans.
Zoe Lang, over at amusicology, has a thoughtful post up looking at the recent discussions in our field over threatened cuts at many schools--most vividly, the elimination of the important Department of Paleography at King's College. She has several good points about the need to have a diverse "musicological toolbox" available. She also notes that there is a certain undercurrent of hostility in some of the discussion towards what is called "critical studies," a term left somewhat undefined, but which I think can be taken to mean those of us who use methodologies and theories common in the humanities at large, like feminist theory or postcolonial studies or what have you. Zoe very rightly points out that it is exactly in these approaches to studying music that connections with other disciplines are most often found, and that we need as much engagement as we can get.
I promised myself I wouldn't get baited by the AMS-l discussion--not even when my own former but dearly-beloved graduate program was described as full of "contemptible levels of narcissism, waste, and entitlement." Alas, I succumb. Luckily, Zoe says it very well. I would only make it a bit bolder: faced with severe economic pressures as we are, defensively circling the wagons around one's own small corners of musicology is exactly the wrong approach. Frankly, paleography of the sort studied at King's doesn't make an ounce of difference to my scholarship. A lot of musicological scholarship doesn't. If I read Jonathan's new book on Chopin's Op. 38, it would only be out of curiosity, not because I need to. But it would never occur to me to suggest that these other approaches and subfields of study are somehow not worthy of study, and not valuable to the discipline at large. They are both. They are exactly what make our field so unusually rich.
Making the case for musicology, like any humanities discipline, is not easy in the era of the rapidly-privatizing university. There are plenty of folks out there who would love to see the performing arts relegated to extracurricular activity, and the liberal arts banished entirely. Those are the attitudes that need changing, not the fact that you might not like someone applying feminist theory to Beethoven. Bashing the work of your colleagues strikes me as an obviously wrong-headed manner in which to articulate the important of our field. Perhaps we could instead chill out and let each other take our own scholarly paths, respectfully disagreeing when those paths cross. Save that anger for the endowment fund managers and state legislatures. The word, I believe, is "pluralism," and it is the sign of a healthy discipline.
If you've never checked out the NAACP papers at the Library of Congress--I blogged about them a little while back--here's a chance to do so without leaving home. The Library has put a bunch of materials in an "online exhibition." The selection of documents (70, with more to come) is only a tiny fragment of what's available, but it should be enough to whet your appetite. There's also an online collection of primary sources aimed at secondary school educators, which is pretty cool. If you're unable to get to DC, remember that most of the collection was microfilmed awhile back, and is in many a research library collection. I prefer the actual ink-on-paper myself--microfilm is no proper replacement for holding W.E.B. Dubois's hand-scrawled letters in one's greasy little hands.
And yes, I learned about this exhibition because I'm a "fan" of the LoC on Facebook. Which is only slightly less nerdy than being a fan of JSTOR, which I also am.
If you'll pardon a brief foray into urban policy, did you see that article linked to at the Times about Obama's "War Against Suburbia"? The author, Joel Kotkin, constructs an argument that goes something like, "Many of Obama's advisors are from Chicago" plus "Obama is putting money into high-speed rail" plus "Obama cares about urban schools" equals Obama is declaring war on Suburbia. And since everyone--EVERYONE--wants to live in the suburbs, they are going to turn on Obama and he will lose horribly his next election.
Never mind that a great deal of Obama's support of mass transit is for projects designed to ease the commute of the average suburbanite. Or that an important reason many leave for suburbs is because they are being priced out of the urban core, not because they necessarily want to. Or that the very idea of "suburbs" as a homogenous entity is laughable, a point Kotkin inadverdently makes himself in pointing out their increasing diversity. Heck, a lot of people these days move to suburbs because they are diverse, closer to work, and more, dare I say, urban!
And the flip side of the coin, as many commenters on the article point out, is that the government puts an enormous amount of funding into subsidizing home ownership. And in many cases, even in the deepest depths of cities, the kind of urban density Kotkin is being imposed on freedom-loving citizens is actually illegal. As Atrios is fond of pointing out, the dense residential neighborhoods of a city like Philadelphia could never be built today--there are too many zoning requirements that require parking garages and such. That's why attractive urban residential areas are so pricey--the housing stock is limited by law. If any kind of war is being fought in this country, it's against those of us who would like to be able to take the bus to work and walk to the grocery store. Instead, we end up with neighborhoods like the one pictured above. That's the "neighborhood" around my Trader Joe's down here in Virginia--a forest of lamp-posts and empty lots as far as the eye can see.
The author, Joel Kotkin, is just kind of a wanna-be policy wonk with no policy and no wonk, but he does give give voice to a certain paranoid strain in American politics. Actually, here's where I can make the connection to some of my academic work. In the United States, at least, success political discourse is all about trying to find an imaginary category to which your audience can imagine themselves belonging, and then constructing that category as simultaneously universal and under attack. In our contemporary scene, that category is the "middle-class", to which we all invariably belong and for which every single politician in this country pledges to be working. Other variations include "families" (everyone fights for American families!) or in the not so distant past, "white people"; a little further back then that, white Protestant men. Kotkin is trying very hard to make "suburbanite" a similar universal-but-marginalized category.
What's actually hilarious is that I then learned that Kotkin also has this theory about what he calls "Gentry liberalism." Apparently it was "so hot a year ago"--seriously those are his words--but now it is in its death throes. If I only had known at the time that I was at the head of a hot political movement!
An update on my oh-so-fascinating post about the logistics of assigning music in class. There are some good comments to that post you should check out if you are interested. Among other things, Glenn reminded me that iTunes files are only playable on Apple players like the iPod or iPhone. The more I thought about that, the more it stuck in my craw. As prevalent as iPods are, I just didn't want to endorse such a closed system.
So instead, I've decided to use the Amazon MP3 store. There isn't a system for creating lists nearly as elegant as the iMix, but it was easy enough to create a series of links in my Blackboard site for the necessary tracks. Not everything was available, but I was surprised at how much was, even some of the random Americana I have assigned in my US Music survey. (My main regret was that they didn't have the recording of Gottschalk's The Banjo I wanted, the one by my old teacher Neely Bruce. Not available as an MP3 as best as I could tell.) A few things were available out there for free: George Gaskin's 1893 recording of "After the Ball," for example, is available from the UCSB Cylinder Preservation Project and I'm just going to go ahead and give them La Monte Young bootlegs, since, you know, they're bootlegs.
Now all of this is, I should say, just supplementary. A set of audio CDs will be on reserve in the library. I will let you all know, however, how many people end up buying music themselves. It would cost about $100 to download everything, so I don't kid myself that they'll buy all of it. And I'm sure there will be some judicious copying between classmates. You can't control everything, and I feel that by providing the option to buy, I've at least done my part.
And I should have asked this earlier: I know a number of my former students read this blog. If any of you feel like chiming in on how you like to have your music delivered to you, please feel free to leave a comment!
Happy new year! My semester starts next week; time to get back on the blogging train, no?
One of the more interesting end-of-year/end-of-decade reviews was Ann Powers's piece "Authenticity Takes a Holiday." Her argument, with which I basically agree, is that unlike the 1990s (or at least the first half of the 90s), the 2000s were marked by a decline in the discourse of authenticity. For those of you who don't do pop music studies, this is the omnipresent discourse in which good music is music that is "real," that speaks truths about the one who makes it.
That's the philosophy behind the concept, at least. In practice, authenticity comes to mean very particular aesthetic judgments. When I have authenticity day in my classes, I try to tease it out by first brainstorm with the class a list of artists or songs they find "authentic." Working from that, we then try to figure out what musical qualities are shared by these songs, and often find that those qualities are remarkably similar in a lot of genres--simpler instrumentation, biographical details in the lyrics, "live-sounding recording" (which I put in scare quotes since the work of an authenticist like Steve Albini is just as much a creation of the studio, and what is really meant is a certain style of mic placement), etc.
Obviously these sonic traits can quite easily be separated from their context and used wily-nily. That's why certain self-consciously primitive recording approaches of the last decade--the White Stripes and Amy Winehouse come to mind--can be used in a manner that disrupts any sense of authenticity. The White Stripes might be recording bluesy stripped down rock (authentic!) on old-fashioned magnetic tape recorders (authentic!), but when you're doing it dressed only in red and white...well, Eric Clapton would not approve.
The persistent presence of authenticist effects, however, is why I think it is a little more useful to put the ideological opposition the way Phil Auslander does in his great book on such issues: an opposition between authenticity and "inauthentic authenticity," that is, a discourse that is aware and proud of its inauthenticity--David Bowie is Auslander's prime example. The counterexample would be Milli Vanilli, who attempted to mask, rather than revel in, their inauthenticity. Lost yet? And don't forget, this is very clearly about discursive formulations, not some ontological judgment about what is actually authentic.
Anyways, I definitely agree with Powers that in the past year we have started to see foment in this discourse. Unlike Powers, however, I think Lady GaGa is very much the beginning of a new wave. Sure, when "Just Dance" came out, it seemed like she was just another dance-pop diva in a vaguely Kylie Minogue-esque vain. But as her success grew, and presumably (hopefully?) she gained more creative control, GaGa started to move in fascinating and wonderful directions. There was the video for "Paparazzi" and subsequent performance at the VMAs, which is probably one of the more pleasurably-disturbing things I have seen on MTV this side of Jersey Shore.
Not for the faint of heart (and apologies for the preceding commercial):
So on the one hand you've got classic shock-the-bourgeois sort of thing going on. But the shock isn't of the titillating, ooh-let-me-kiss-Madonna variety we might expect from a pop diva, it's a pretty well-thought out spectacle of modernist primitivism, no? With the blood, and the crutches? Man, lots to say about that, but regardless there is some serious intellectual substance there. I mean, the woman doesn't just wear crazy clothes, she wears a hat designed by Frank Gehry! (And how much do you love the look on P. Diddy's face?!)
And the virtuosic provocation is paired with musical talents that while not perhaps incredibly virtuosic (not yet, at least) are nevertheless real: Lady GaGa is becoming more and more famous, and increasingly hailed, as the pop diva who actually sings live. And while there has always been space for pop divas with musical talent (c.f. Christina Aguilera), it has been fairly uncommon in recent years, and YouTube clips of her singing and accompanying herself on the piano have abounded. On the Ellen Degeneres show:
Pretty great, right? Did you see how she counted in her band with a snap? I don't mean to be too condescending, but literally there are not that many pop singers at the moment who have the musical confidence to count in other musicians. And GaGa isn't shy about her abilities either--when Ellen remarks upon her ability to "actually sing," GaGa responded in mock belief, "I always think that's funny...aren't we supposed to sing? Isn't that part of the gig?"
(It's a fascinating interview in many ways, including that she elaborates on her own experiences of difference. It would be worth teasing that out more, especially given her visible support for the rather assimilationist wings of contemporary gay politics.)
At the same time, the modernist provocations keep her out of the singer-songwriter category, and her phenomenal popularity keeps her out of the realm of a more subcultural sister like Amanda Palmer. GaGa is still pop, and gloriously so. Her proper company can be found with the other great pop singers of 2009 who like GaGa are playing with the boundaries of authenticity--Adam Lambert and Taylor Swift for instance.
Anyways, we're going to watch the "Paparazzi" video on the first day of my "Gender and Sexuality in Music" class next Thursday--stay tuned!
Hat tip to Kariann for telling me about the "Law of GaGa" pictured at top, and apologies to whoever made this image--I can't figure out who you are.
I was looking for ideas for a banner image to put at the top of my Blackboard site for a survey course on American music I am teaching this semester. So I did a Google Image search for the term "American Music," and this was the first picture to come up: Somewhere up there in the great musicological beyond, Oscar Sonneck is having spasms.
