McClary

McClary aptly introduces her essay with Byrne's noted refrain "Same as it ever was" to describe the physicality of music, ever-present in its social impact. Tracing writings on music from Plato to Frith, she outlines the changes in the social perceptions and function of music, maintaining the role of the body as central throughout. McClary identifies gender and race as two social constructs particularly disrupted by music, noting that these subversions often go unnoticed in lieu of commercialism and cultural saturation. Though her historical analysis is broad, its closing seems to draw targeted conclusions regarding the history of African-American exploitation, the prostitution of the pop music performer, and the role of dance in subcultural development.

While I agree that examining this aspect of music is relevant to its overall history, I disagree with McClary's evaluation on the social impact of music since the 1960s, specifically her contention that the political music during Vietnam (i.e. rock'n'roll) disengaged the body from the music. Her theory of "technologies of the body" does little to reconcile music and politics/power, as it still fails to fully describe how one relates to/affects the other. Underscoring this, her subsequent emphasis on the African-American dominance of 20th century cultural imagery (specifically as it pertains to the body) discredits rock'n'roll as perhaps the most significant, if not the most physical, movement in music to popularly emerge at that time.

In my opinion, rock'n'roll did more to subvert social norms by physically empowering youth, the underclass, ethnic minorities, women or gay people than any African-American music between the 1950s and 1980s. Rock'n'roll did so by fostering internal "technologies of the body," which facilitated self-expression, in turn generating new sources of collective identity.
Glam rock with its self-indulgent theatricality, physchedelia tapping into the individual unconscious, punk rock defining youth rebellion with personal fashion and a fuckall ethos, these genres used their own conceptions of the body to manipulate predominant social constructions.

Conversely, the African-American genres McClary cites ("genres designed to maximize physical engagement") were consciously designed to have this corporeal effect, illustrated in her first example of Wilson Pickett. It was a formulaic change in the 'groove' that held sway, a type of calculation that shifted African-American music from the instinctive genres of jazz, blues, and r&b toward the popular genres of pop, soul, and disco (distinguished from the former by commercial potential). It seems that while trends like "the Motown Sound" and other highly stylized genres abandoned the modernist notion of the 'primitive' by glossing over its 'blackness', rock'n'roll adopted an updated primitivism by redistinguishing the individual from the collective by means of physical, personal expression. In my mind, the simple fact that African-American music was more danceable is overshadowed by the physical expressiveness of rock'n'roll; thusly, I believe that the latter has had more of a social impact and can be viewed to better illustrate the theoretical "technologies of the body."

(Granted these two are not mutually exclusive and overlap at numerous points throughout history. Furthermore, both have at one point or another succumbed to rampant oversaturation and commercialism, calling the authenticity of all genres and subgenres into question. I am generally responding to what I view as a generalization in McClary's theory, though I do not disagree with her observation that music, the body, and their effects are inherently, and irrevocably, connected.)

Discussion question(s): what specific musical ideas define something as 'white' or 'black'? What musical ideas (NOT lyrics) can be defined as political? How can we contextualize hip-hop in McClary's idea of music and the body?