Preface
“I know your type”: Scott Isler, “Transactional Analysis with Lou Reed,” Trouser Press, no. 36, February 1979.
Introduction
“[T]he Negro looks at the white man”: Ralph Ellison, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 109.
“the Wolot verb hepi”: Origins of slang usage are slippery, and linguists debate the roots of hip, but Dalby’s case is stronger than the (often fanciful) alternatives. And it calls out the African element in daily American life, which has so often been erased—a central theme of this book.
“implement change after the fact”: William S. Burroughs, quoted in Ann Charters, ed., The Portable Beat Reader (New York: Penguin, 1992), xxxi.
“There is a difference between being off-white”: Al Sharpton, in John D. Thomas, “The Playboy. Comversation,” available at http://www.playboy.com/features/dotcomversation/sharpton/index.html, October 2003.
“Nowadays it’s hip not to be married”: John Lennon, quoted in “Playboy Interview,” Playboy, September 1980.
“There’s only one thing to do”: Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Bantam, 1999), 224.
Andy Warhol formally became the patron: Lewis MacAdams, Birth of the Cool: Beat, Bebop, and the American Avant-Garde (New York: Free Press, 2001), 242.
a world that was doubly foreign: LeRoi Jones [Amiri Baraka], Blues People: The Negro Experience in White America and the Music That Developed from It (New York: William Morrow, 1963), 1.
“the lawless germinal element”: David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Vintage, 1996), 319.
“real genius underneath”: Ibid., 320.
“having one’s hip boots on”: Quoted in Gene Sculatti, ed., Too Cool (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 16.
“Hip…is the sophistication of the wise primitive”: Norman Mailer, “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” in Advertisements for Myself (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 343.
“[I]f the fate of twentieth-century man”: Ibid., 339.
Levi’s borrows the pants: Austin Bunn, “Not Fade Away,” New York Times Magazine, December 1, 2002, sec. 6, 60.
1 | In the Beginning There Was Rhythm
“Do you know what a nerd is?”: Interview by Kevin Kelly, “Gossip Is Philosophy,” Wired, May 1995, 149.
“About the last of August”: Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 174.
not the first African slaves: Ibid., 174.
a 1624 census of Virginia: Ibid.
around 600,000 to 650,000 Africans: Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619–1877 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993), 22.
“slave owners usually hired white workers”: Thomas Sowell, Ethnic America: A History (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 187.
Slave narratives: Henry Louis Gates Jr., ed., The Classic Slave Narratives (New York: Signet Classic, 2002), 1.
“They used to tie me down”: Tom Wilson, quoted in John W. Blassingame, Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 339.
most slaves in North America: Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 17.
“My Mistus use’ta look at my dress”: Sarah Fitzpatrick, in Blassingame, 643.
black slaves born in America outnumbered those born in Africa: Kolchin, 38.
“Negro women are carrying black and white babies”: Fredrick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States, quoted in Kolchin, 117.
“both blacks and whites held a mix of quasi-English”: Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together, quoted in Kolchin, 60.
“In language, the African tradition aims at circumlocution”: Ernest Borneman, “The Roots of Jazz,” in Nat Hentoff and Albert J. McCarthy, eds., Jazz (New York: Rinehart, 1959), 17.
“hints of a future theory”: Walt Whitman, quoted in Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 320.
a record of “brutal necessity”: James Baldwin, “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?” in Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998), 781, 782.
“The slaves, in effect, learned to communicate”: Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Random House, 1974), 437.
evangelical revivals: Kolchin, 55.
“the only institution of the Negroes”: W. E. B. DuBois, “Some Efforts of Negro Americans for Their Own Social Betterment, Report of an Investigation under the Direction of Atlanta University, 1898,” (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press, 1898), 4, 43, repr. in Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 257.
more children of mixed unions were born: Genovese, 415.
“Do not many of our pretty white girls”: J. J. Flournoy, in ibid., 422.
“Like the patriarchs of old”: Mary Boykin Chesnut, quoted in ibid., 426.
“Notably absent from Southern slave folklore”: Kolchin, 154.
Their prominence in slave tales: For analysis of Michael Flusche’s argument, see ibid.
Dickens called William Henry Lane: For Dickens on Master Juba, see James O. Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 159.
“the Only Simon Pure Negro Troupe”: Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds., Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999), 1319.
Rice, born May 20, 1808: The life of Daddy Rice is discussed in W. T. Lhamon Jr., Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 156.
Dressed in a ragged blue coat: For a discussion of Jim Crow, Zip Coon and the form of minstrel show, see Nick Tosches, Where Dead Voices Gather (Boston: Little, Brown, 2001), 10.
The first minstrel characters performed: See Lhamon, p. 59.
the standard minstrel show consisted: Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 5.
Some southern cities: Ibid., 38.
“the best Ethiopian song-writer”: Tosches, 17.
or even south of Cincinnati: Ibid., 16.
wrote and performed minstrel tunes: Berlin’s years at Nigger Mike’s are discussed in Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994), 357.
consider the anthem “Dixie”: Dan Emmett and the Snowdens are detailed in Drew Gilpin Faust, “What They Say About ‘Dixie,’” New York Times, January 9, 1994, sec. 7, 20.
all worked in or beside blackface: The ubiquity of performers who worked in blackface or with blackface minstrels is discussed in Bart Bull, “Does This Road Go to Little Rock?” (Unpublished manuscript, Los Angeles), Appiah and Gates, and Tosches.
Dizzy Gillespie gave his first public performance: Appiah and Gates, 1319.
“all modern American literature”: Ernest Hemingway, quoted in Bruce Cook, The Beat Generation (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1983), 36.
Blackface played a key role: For the importance of minstrelsy in film, see Lott, 5.
Amos ’n’ Andy: For more on this once-popular program, see Mel Watkins, On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying and Signifying (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 275–285.
“the commodification of nigga culture”: Bill Stephney, quoted in Rick Marin, Susan Miller et al., “Coming Up Roses,” Newsweek, July 15, 1996, 45.
“the filthy scum of white society”: Frederick Douglass, quoted in Tosches, 16.
“is something gained, when the colored man”: Frederick Douglass, quoted in Lott, 37.
“the only completely original contribution”: James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan, quoted in Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 76.
“A lot of black people”: Ishmael Reed, in “Hiphoprisy: A Conversation with Michael Franti and Ishmael Reed,” moderated by Bill Adler, Transition, Summer 1992, 8.
“The white imagination”: Josephine Baker, quoted in Ben Ratliff, “Fixing, for Now, the Image of Jazz,” New York Times, January 7, 2001, sec. 2, 1.
“Born theoretically white”: Leslie Fiedler, quoted in Lott, 53.
“Blacks imitating and fooling whites”: Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 76.
“When America became important enough to the African”: Baraka, xii.
“one of the most beautiful spots on earth”: Francis Davis, The History of the Blues: The Roots, the Music, the People—from Charley Patton to Robert Cray (New York: Hyperion, 1995), 18.
three distinct musical traditions: See the discussion of different schools of African music in America in Robert Palmer, Deep Blues (New York: Penguin, 1992), 27–28.
the firms of C. F. Martin and Orville Gibson: Influence of the guitar is discussed in Paul Oliver, The Story of the Blues (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1969), 28.
flattened notes for emphasis of feeling: For a discussion of pitch-tone aesthetics and other surviving African influences, see Palmer, 29.
the emerging individualized music: Ibid., 42.
“A big black man will walk up there”: For this and a discussion of both Johnson and the crossroads myth, see ibid., 60.
“Mighty seldom I played for colored”: Sam Chatmon, quoted in Davis, 23.
2 | The O.G.’s
“Whitman is a rowdy”: James Russell Lowell, quoted in Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 710.
“a stage for transformation”: Bharati Mukherjee, quoted in Diana L. Eck, A New Religious America (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), 339.
“This is what you shall do: Love the earth”: Walt Whitman, quoted in John Tytell, Naked Angels: The Classic Account of Three Who Changed America’s Literature (New York: Grove, 1976), 224.
“Our admiration of the Antique”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “History,” quoted in F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), 646.
“has no use for history”: Mary McCarthy, “Burroughs’ Naked Lunch,” in Ann Charters, ed., Beat Down to Your Soul: What Was the Beat Generation? Memoirs, Notes, Protests, Attacks, and Apologies—from the Beat Explosion That Rocked the World (New York: Penguin, 2001), 358.
“shall have free Liberty to keepe away from us”: Nathaniel Ward, quoted in Daniel J. Boorstin, “How Orthodoxy Made the Puritans Practical,” in The Daniel J. Boorstin Reader (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 12.
the death penalty for Quakers: This and other tales of religious intolerance can be found in Daniel J. Boorstin, “The Quest for Martyrdom,” in ibid., 23.
African-American preachers: The styles and influence of black clergymen are discussed in David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 17.
“black and white, poet and grocer”: Matthiessen, 127.
Taylor’s relationship with Melville and Emerson: in Reynolds, Beneath, 20–21.
“I embrace the common”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in Matthiessen, 34.
“in conspiracy against the manhood”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Portable Emerson (New York: Viking, 1946), 17.
“A boy is in the parlor”: Ibid., 16.
“the only true America”: Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings (New York: MetroBooks, 2001), 171.
“[e]verything belongs to me because I am poor”: Jack Kerouac, Visions of Cody (New York: Penguin, 1972), 33.
“the myths Asiatic”: Walt Whitman, quoted in Reynolds, Beneath, 41.
“a vast unorganized array”: Eugene Taylor, Shadow Culture: Psychology and Spirituality in America (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1999), 9.
“holds exactly the opposite prejudices”: Ibid., 12–13.
“I look upon the size of certain American cities”: Alexis de Tocqueville, quoted in Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 3.
the urban population grew: See ibid., 67.
Five million immigrants came to the north: James Playsted Wood, The Story of Advertising (New York: Roland Press, 1958), 105. For discussion of changing composition of immigrant groups, see Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People, Vol. 3: 1869 Through the Death of John F. Kennedy, 1963 (New York: Penguin, 1975), 80.
60 percent of free blacks: Kolchin, 82.
more than 200 major gang wars: Boyer, 69.
a hotbed of single working women: See Burrows and Wallace, 801.
“startling color combinations”: Ibid., 813.
2 million Americans: Morison, 72.
“You two green-horns!”: Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man (New York: Penguin, 1990), 42.
Born in 1819 in West Hills, Long Island: For a discussion of Whitman’s childhood, see Gay Allen Wilson, introduction to Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (New York: Signet Classic, 1954) v–xx.
“one of the roughs”: Burrows and Wallace, 708–709.
“this great, dirty, blustering, glorious, ill-lighted”: Walt Whitman, quoted in ibid., 706.
opened a basement beer hall: See the description of Pfaff’s in Greenwich Village Gazette, available at www.gvny.com.
Clapp’s circle: See Burrows and Wallace, 711.
“eccentric garb of rough blue and gray fabric”: William Winter, quoted in Luc Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991), 325.
“[m]any of slang words among fighting men”: Walt Whitman, quoted in Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 320.
“Behavior lawless as snowflakes”: Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in Leaves, 84.
loafing was an established franchise: Whitman’s admirable loafing gets its due in Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 64–65.
“I loafe and invite my soul”: Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 49.
“Walt Whitman, a kosmos”: Ibid., 43.
he denied that he was homosexual: The question of Whitman’s sexuality has never been settled beyond reasonable doubt. Likely his life was more complicated than any modern label. The story of the Sodom School and Whitman’s denials of homosexuality are in Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 70–71.
“I mind how once we lay”: Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 52.
Astor Place Riot: good description of conditions leading up to Astor Place Riot, see Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 164.
Already there had been riots: Ibid., 163.
On Macready’s opening night: Ibid., 164.
For the next performance: On the city’s preparations to prevent riots, and careful overview of the events, see Burrows and Wallace, 763.
crowd of 10,000 to 15,000 people: For body counts and an overview of the riot, see Barbara Lewis, Museum of the City of New York, www.mcny.org, and Burrows and Wallace, 764.
Thoreau had advised American writers to reject “imported symbols”: Matthiessen, 83.
“the barbarism and materialism of the times”: Ralph Waldon Emerson, quoted in ibid., 29.
“peculiarly American combination”: Reynolds, Beneath, 91.
“the enemy, this word culture”: Walt Whitman, quoted in Michael Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the 20th Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 29.
“a book for the criminal classes”: Walt Whitman, quoted in Reynolds, Beneath, 312.
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately”: Thoreau, 75.
“civilized in externals but a savage at heart”: Herman Melville, quoted in Reynolds, Beneath, 181.
“to find the significance of life in subjective experience”: Alan Watts, “Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen,” in Ann Charters, ed., The Portable Beat Reader (New York: Penguin, 1992), 611.
“I have now a library”: Henry David Thoreau, quoted in Matthiessen, x.
“though I have wrote the Gospels in this century”: Herman Melville, quoted in Reynolds, Beneath, 291.
“full of riffs, man”: Ralph Ellison, in Albert Murray and John F. Callahan, eds., Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 170.
“Death of a Once Popular Author”: Stephen Matterson, introduction to Melville, Confidence-Man, ix.
“Henry Melville”: Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 344–345.
another new voice, the squeal of advertising: For more on Volney Palmer and the early years of the advertising game, see Wood, 137.
“the day will come”: Volney Palmer, quoted in Burrows and Wallace, 679.
Palmer’s old age: For more on Greeley’s relationship with the difficult Volney Palmer, see Wood, 137.
Palmer’s revolution was in effect: For a discussion of the expansion in ad business, see Frank Spencer Presbrey, The History and Development of Advertising (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1968), 210.
“People keep seeing destruction or rebellion”: Allen and Louis Ginsberg, Family Business: Selected Letters Between a Father and a Son (New York: Bloomsbury, 2001) 80–83, quoted in Charters, Beat Down, 1.
“If any one imagines that this law is lax”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Portable Emerson, 26.
“[Who] need be afraid of the merge?”: Walt Whitman, quoted in Tytell, 226.
3 | My Black/White Roots
“It is the glory of the present age”: Randolph Bourne, “Youth,” in The Radical Will: Randolph Bourne Selected Writings 1911–1918 (New York: Urizen Books, 1977), 104.
“In the African sense”: Robert Farris Thompson, interview with author, 2003.
“[t]he reason the New York boys became such high-class musicians”: Tom Davin, “Conversations with James P. Johnson,” Jazz Review, June 1960, p. 16.
Ethel Barrymore, doyenne: Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Hill & Wang, 1963), 228.
“the world has changed less since the time of Jesus Christ”: Charles Péguy, quoted in Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New, rev. ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 9.
New technologies moved people and information: For a discussion of the impact of powered flight and the Model T, see Morison, 225.
revenues rose to $3 billion: Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 64.
town crier yielded: For a discussion of the rise of media, including film receipts, see ibid., 61.
population that consumed this culture: Boyer, 189.
one-third of all Americans: Immigration figures from U.S. Census report, “Pro-file of the Foreign-Born Population in the United States: 2000,” December 2001, 23–206.
“Culture,” he wrote, “follows money”: F. Scott Fitzgerald, quoted in Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 4.
born Ferdinand Joseph Lamothe: Morton’s New Orleans years and milieu described in Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 31.
according to one legend: This is likely an apocryphal story, but it is typical of the myths Morton wove around himself. See Gioia, 41.
“If you can’t manage to put tinges of Spanish in your tunes”: Jelly Roll Morton, quoted in Gary Giddins, Visions of Jazz: The First Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 70.
Any tune could be fit to any idiom: For the transit of tunes between idioms, see Davin.
changed the way Americans danced: James Lincoln Collier, The Making of Jazz: A Comprehensive History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), 76.
the Charleston is little more than a recasting: Baraka, 17.
were up to 100 million: Collier, 78.
Original Dixieland Jazz Band: Collier, 72–73.
brought the blues out of the Harlem cabarets: Mamie Smith’s recording was both a landmark and a new turn in the history of exploitation, by which African Americans were judged by their stage characters. The recording is discussed in Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 391.
“[W]hen you came into a place you had a three-way play”: James P. Johnson, in Davin, 14.
more than 300 gospel and blues: Gioia, 17.
“Perhaps one reason many American Negroes sing a sad song happy”: Thompson wrote two versions of this essay; this is from the first. Robert Farris Thompson, “Toward an Aesthetic of the Cool,” African Forum, 1966, 85–86.
“so many radical young people”: Randolph Bourne, “Youth,” 104–105.
“proletariat of the arts”: Malcolm Cowley was the most arch and incisive chronicler of the Lost Generation, but had little empathy with prior Village bohemians. See Exile’s Return (New York: Penguin, 1976), 48.
“a Murger complex”: For good evocations of the Village scene, see Allen Churchill, The Improper Bohemians: A Re-Creation of Greenwich Village in Its Heyday (New York: Dutton, 1959), 238.
Rebellion in the Village: The plights of Sanger, Goldman, Berkman and the moderns are inventoried well in Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 37.
Hammerstein offered her a thousand dollars: Ibid., 85.
the Justice Department cracked down: Ibid., 315.
ordered the arrest: More on the Palmer Raids can be found in Morison, 217.
barred from the mails: The crackdown on the mails smothered communication between the moderns and the outside world, and between themselves. Stansell, 316.
Mabel Dodge moved her salon: Ibid., 317–318.
“As We Are Reported”: The article is cited in Churchill, 251.
“I had rapidly become a mythological figure”: Mabel Dodge, quoted in Stansell, 103.
“neither wit nor beauty”: Max Eastman, quoted in Churchill, 16.
“The faculty I had for not saying much”: Mabel Dodge, quoted in Stansell, 103.
“grown up to find all Gods dead”: F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (New York: Modern Library, 1996), 322.
“It was characteristic of the Jazz Age”: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Jazz Age (New York: New Directions Bibelot, 1996), 3.
the French ambulance corps: The corps and the damage seen are described in Cowley, 38.
“The Village in 1919 was like a conquered country”: Ibid., 71.
Reared in Baltimore: Stein’s education and the weight of her breasts are courtesy of James R. Mellow, Hemingway: A Life without Consequences (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 148.
“It became the period of being twenty-six”: Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Modern Library, 1993), 212.
were not so much expatriates: The generation’s rootlessness and loss of patria are discussed in Noel Riley Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation (New York: Norton, 1983), 162.
“Dinners, soirees, poets”: Hart Crane, quoted in Mellow, 173.
“deracination” of industrial society: This concept is discussed in Cowley, 28.
“People have done me the honor of believing I’m an animal”: Josephine Baker, quoted in Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 52.
“an idiom for the proper transposition of jazz into words”: Crane, quoted in Paul L. Mariani, The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), 91.
announced she had launched: For Melanctha as the source of 20th-century literature, see the demure account by Stein, 54.
“the scum of Greenwich Village”: Ernest Hemingway, quoted in Mellow, 164.
“He usually wore workman’s clothes”: Eugène Jolas, quoted in Robert Kiely, “Lost Man of the Lost Generation,” New York Times, January 3, 1999, sec. 7, 20.
“Hemingway poses as a non-literary sportsman”: Ellison, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” in Collected Essays, 109.
“It was like a course in bull-fighting”: Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (New York: Scribner’s, 1926), 219–220.
“his great studies into fear”: Fitzgerald’s quote, along with other assessments of his peer and rival, are in Mellow, 307.
At the turn of the century: Good overview of the Harlem Renaissance motives and movements in Richard B. Sherman, The Negro and the City (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 5.
African Americans’ future: Booker T. Washington’s agrarian plan is in Ibid., 1.
half a million blacks left the debt cycle: A good overview of roots and patterns of the Great Migration can be found in Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (New York, Vintage, 1992), 16.
the price of cotton in the Mississippi Delta plunged: Ibid., 15.
African Americans in the North tripled: For the changing northern demographics, see Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 73.
“[i]n ten years Negroes have been actually transported”: Charles S. Johnson, quoted in ibid., 74.
“the migrant masses, shifting from countryside to city,”: Alain Locke, “Enter the New Negro,” in Sherman, 91.
“[j]azz, the blues, Negro spirituals, all stimulate me enormously”: Carl Van Vechten, caught in an unflatteringly—and uncharacteristically—flip phrase, quoted in David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Penguin, 1997), 98.
Langston Hughes (1902–1967): John Henrik Clarke, ed., Harlem: A Community in Transition (New York: Citadel, 1964), 62.
“It was a period when almost any Harlem Negro”: Langston Hughes, Big Sea, 228–229.
Harlem hostess A’Lelia Walker: For good descriptions of Walker’s parties and other splendid indulgences, see Lewis, 166.
“You go sort of primitive up there”: Jimmy Durante, quoted in Steven Watson, The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-American Culture, 1920–1930 (New York: Pantheon, 1996), 5.
“The Old Negro goes”: Quoted in Lewis, 24.
The Civic Club, known for its liberal politics: As usual, Lewis has the best descriptions of the meeting and its social surround. See Lewis, 90–94.
“midwives of the Harlem Renaissance”: Ibid., 121.
“The world does not know that a people is great”: James Weldon Johnson, quoted in ibid., 149.
“We claim no part of racial dearth”: Gwendolyn Bennett, quoted in ibid., 94.
“What American literature decidedly needs at this moment”: Carl Van Doren, quoted in ibid., 93–94.
“‘[T]hat good-for-nothing, trashy Negro’”: Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (New York: HarperPerennial, 1996), 178.
“more to gain from the rich background of English and American poetry”: Countee Cullen, quoted in Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 340.
“And as for the cultured Negroes”: Langston Hughes, The Ways of White Folks (New York: Vintage, 1990), 110.
“We sensed that the black cultural as well as moral leaders”: Benny Carter, quoted in Gioia, 95.
“Among those who disliked this form of entertainment”: Willie “the Lion” Smith, quoted in ibid., 95.
“thinking the Negroes loved to have them there”: Hughes, Big Sea, 225.
“White readers just don’t expect Negroes to be like this”: White editor to Jessie Fauset, quoted in Lewis, 124.
“finished running their inheritance”: Charlotte Mason, quoted in ibid., 155.
“These people who was coming to make records”: Sidney Bechet, quoted in ibid., 172.
no figure was as freighted: A good thumbnail biography of Van Vechten’s pre-Harlem years can be found in Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 93–95.
“almost an addiction”: Carl Van Vechten, in Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 288.
“Don’t let nobody tell you you can’t sing”: Bessie Smith, quoted in Lewis, 183. On the same occasion, she slugged Fania Marinoff, Van Vechten’s wife, after Marinoff tried to kiss her.
forfeited much of his goodwill: For the negative reaction to Van Vechten after Nigger Heaven, see Lewis, 181.
“If you young Negro intellectuals don’t get busy”: Carl Van Vechten, Nigger Heaven, quoted in Lewis, 187.
“the picture within a picture within a picture”: Baraka, 110.
“Be yourselves!”: Eugene O’Neill, quoted in Lewis, 115.
4 | Would a Hipster Hit a Lady?
“From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class”: Raymond Chandler, The High Window (New York: Vintage, 1988), chap. 5.
uncomfortable with its own manhood: Jung’s travels in America are recounted in “America Facing Its Most Tragic Moment,” New York Times Magazine, September 29, 1912.
“unfurling and flying and hissing at incredible speeds”: Jack Kerouac, On the Road (New York: Penguin, 2003), 237.
“yield up his liberty, his property and his soul”: H. L. Mencken, “In Defense of Women,” quoted in Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (New York: Anchor, 1987), 6.
“profound national impulse [that] drives the hundred millions”: Carl Van Doren, “The Negro Renaissance,” Century Magazine, quoted in Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1966), 180.
“He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life”: Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon, in The Complete Novels (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1999), 444.
“out of step, and not into step, with life”: Ibid.
“I giggled and socked him”: Raymond Chandler, Farewell My Lovely, in The Big Sleep and Farewell My Lovely (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 405.
“And Darkness and Decay and Death”: Edgar Allan Poe, “The Masque of the Red Death,” quoted in Reynolds, Beneath, 238.
“No one in this world, so far as I know”: H. L. Mencken, Chicago Tribune, September 19, 1926.
“[R]ight and wrong are not written on the statues for me”: Carroll John Daly, quoted in William Marling, “Hard-Boiled Fiction,” Case Western Reserve University, available at http://www.cwru.edu/artsci/engl/marling/hardboiled.
“Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it”: Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder,” quoted in Daniel Stashower, “A Thin Man Who Made Memorable Use Of His Spade,” Smithsonian, May 1, 1994, 114.
“Everybody,” as Spade says, “has something to hide”: Hammett, Maltese Falcon, 517.
“We didn’t exactly believe your story”: Ibid., 416.
“not as sick as I would feel if I had a salaried job”: Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), 191.
“I first heard Personville called Poisonville”: Hammett, Red Harvest, in The Complete Novels, 5.
“Once you have had to lead a platoon”: Raymond Chandler, quoted in Frank MacShane, The Life of Raymond Chandler (New York: Dutton, 1976), 29.
English public schools: Chandler’s upbringing and disastrous oil career are discussed in ibid., 20–40.
MGM screen test: McCoy’s travails in Marling, available at http://www.cwru.edu/artsci/engl/marling/hardboiled/McCoy.html.
“loitered on the corners”: Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust (New York: New Directions, 1969), 60.
“I used to like this town”: Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister, quoted in Philip Durham, “Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles,” in John Caughee and LaRee Caughey, eds., Los Angeles: Biography of a City (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 333–334.
Los Angeles was built for pulp disillusionment: Chandler’s perception of Los Angeles as myth is discussed in MacShane, 64.
“The ignorant, hopelessly un-American type of foreigner”: Charles Fletcher Lummis, quoted in Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 89. See Starr for accounts of the city’s founding and abuse of political influence.
“I smelled Los Angeles before I got to it”: Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), chapter 13. This is Chandler at his most bitter.
“an utter swine”: Raymond Chandler, quoted in MacShane, 4.
“An hour crawled by like a sick cockroach”: Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (New York: Vintage, 1992), 137. This novel was Chandler’s attempt to transcend pulp, and richer than his previous books.
“All I wanted when I began”: Raymond Chandler, from a letter dated January 7, 1945, quoted in Joyce Carol Oates, “The Simple Art of Murder,” New York Review of Books, December 21, 1995, 40.
“parvenu insecurity”: Raymond Chandler, quoted in MacShane, 10.
hero’s “moral and intellectual force”: Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder,” quoted in MacShane, 70.
“To hell with the rich”: Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (New York: Vintage/Black Lizard, 1992), 64.
“I watched the band of white”: Chandler, Long Goodbye, 87.
“desire is all there is”: Geoffrey O’Brien, Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir (New York: Da Capo, 1997), 70. O’Brien provides an excellent overview of the pulp pantheon.
“the corpse on reprieve within each of us”: Andre Bazin, quoted in James Naremore, “American Film Noir: The History of an Idea,” Film Quarterly, December 1, 1995.
“every kind of writer I detest”: Raymond Chandler, in a pissy, competitive mode, quoted in MacShane, 101.
“Striking at people that way”: Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me (New York: Vintage, 1991), 5.
“You can do that, split yourself in two parts”: Jim Thompson, Savage Night (Berkeley: Black Lizard, 1985), 95.
“Hollywood basically killed him off”: His sister’s remarks, and excellent overview of Thompson’s life and work, are in Robert Polito, Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson (New York: Vintage, 1996), 392–402.
“nothing but desert, parched”: Jim Thompson, quoted in Polito, 366.
“biggest, baddest, sickest, ugliest”: Ellroy’s sentiments, along with biographical details, can be found in Jim Shelley, “Portrait: A Genre’s Demon Dog,” Guardian, January 7, 1995.
“Try and pick up every waitress”: The quote and biographical details are from Steve Boisson, “James Ellroy, Crossing the Dividing Line,” Writer’s Digest, July 1, 1996, 26.
“If there’s one rule I’d like to break”: James Ellroy, interviewed in ibid.
“your shakedown artist, your rogue cop”: Ibid.
cut the manuscript: Ellroy describes the honing of his style in ibid.
“telegraphic shorthand style”: Ibid.
“Hip hop lives in the world”: Greg Tate, Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 129. For two decades, Tate has been the most incisive commentator on the play of art and politics in hip-hop.
Bambaataa, born Kevin Donovan: Bambaataa’s background and the origins of his name are in David Toop, Rap Attack 2: African Rap to Global Hip Hop (New York: Serpent’s Tail, 1991), 56.
“They had graffiti artists, breakdancers”: Ice-T, in Brian Cross, It’s Not about a Salary: Rap, Race and Resistance in Los Angeles (New York: Verso, 1993), 183–184.
“I am a nightmare walking”: Ice-T, “Colors,” Colors, CD, Warner, 1998.
“The boy JB,” Eazy-E, “Boyz-N-the Hood”: Eazy-Duz-It, CD, Ruthless/Priority, 1988.
“But why be a thug?”: Kevin Powell, “This Thug’s Life,” in Alan Light and Vibe magazine, eds., Tupac Shakur (New York: Crown, 1997) p. 29.
“where cowards die”: Tupac Shakur, “California Love,” All Eyez on Me, CD, Death Row, 1996.
“a fool not to be born a Frenchman”: This and the other European reactions to noir and pulp in Naremore.
“They didn’t get it”: Dream Hampton, interview with author, 2002.
“I’m expressing with my full capabilities”: N.W.A., “Express Yourself,” Straight Outta Compton, CD, Ruthless/Priority, 1988.
“What did it matter where you lay once you were dead?”: Chandler, Big Sleep, 228.
5 | The Golden Age of Hip, Part 1
“The goatee, beret, and window-pane glasses were no accidents”: Baraka, 201.
Parker arrived at the club: The account of the Argyle Show Bar incident is drawn from Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 107–108, and Al Aronowitz, “Retropop Scene: Bird’s Christmas,” Blacklisted Journalist, col. 4, December 1, 1995, available at http://www.bigmagic.com/pages/blackj/column4.html.
“[Y]ou’d see hundreds of heads nodding”: Jack Kerouac, “Lamb, No Lion” in Ann Charters, ed., The Portable Jack Kerouac (New York: Viking, 1995), 564.
“Be-bop cut us off completely”: Gilbert Sorrentino, “Remembrances of Bop in New York, 1945–1950,” in Kulchur, Summer 1963.
“We were the first generation to rebel”: Don Asher and Hampton Hawes, Raise Up off Me: A Portrait of Hampton Hawes (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2001), 8.
The son of an itinerant entertainer: Parker’s childhood is described in Ira Gitler, The Masters of Bebop, exp. ed. (New York: Da Capo, 2001), 17.
One day in December 1939: Details of Parker’s discovery of bop changes are related in Michael Levin and John S. Wilson, “No Bop Roots in Jazz: Parker,” from Down Beat, September 9, 1949, in Carl Woideck, ed., The Charlie Parker Companion: Six Decades of Commentary (New York: Schirmer, 1999), 71.
“[T]he moment I heard Charlie Parker”: Dizzie Gillespie with Al Fraser, To BE or Not…to BOP (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979), 116–117. 114 the other half of his heartbeat: Parker and Dizzy’s relationship and closeness are discussed in Giddins, Visions of Jazz, 265. Here and elsewhere, Giddins provides the most sensitive, thoughtful analysis of the musical changes wrought by bop.
his playing pitted the past against the future: For a good analysis of Monk’s piano style, see Laurent de Wilde, Monk (New York: Marlowe, 1997), 2–20.
got him fired from Hill’s band: See the discussion of Clarke’s career in Gitler, 175–176.
“To understand that you are black”: Baraka, 185.
“Bop comes out of them dark days”: Langston Hughes, “Bop,” from Best of Simple (New York: Hill & Wang, 1961), 118–119.
“Daddy-o, now you and me”: Malcolm X with Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove, 1965), 124.
“It’s another one of those nicknames”: Max Roach, interviewed in Arthur Taylor, Notes and Tones: Musician to Musician Interviews (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1982), 118–119.
“There was a message in our music”: Kenny Clarke, in Robert Gottlieb, ed., Reading Jazz: A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and Criticism from 1919 to Now (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996), 563.
“Miles and Max Roach were speaking like men”: Tony Williams, quoted in Greg Tate, “Preface to a One-Hundred-Eighty Volume Patricide Note: Yet Another Few Thousand Words on the Death of Miles Davis and the Problem of Black Male Genius,” in Gina Dent, ed., Black Popular Culture / A Project by Michele Wallace (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), 243.
bop style spread: in Roy Carr, Brian Case and Fred Dellar, The Hip: Hipsters, Jazz and the Beat Generation (London: Faber & Faber, 1986), 12–13.
“We’re not the kind of people who can sit back”: Max Roach, in an amusingly confrontational interview with Frank Owen, “Hip Hop Bebop,” Spin, October 1988, 60.
“Café au Lait Society”: Roi Ottley, New World a Coming: Inside Black America, 167–185, quoted in Eric Porter, “Dizzy Atmosphere: The Challenge of Bebop,” American Music, December 22, 1999.
“the most dangerous Negro in America”: For a good description of racial unrest during the war years, see David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 763.
threatened a march: See the narrative of the showdown between Randolph and Roosevelt in ibid., 768.
Record sales fell: in Gioia, 135. His account is thorough, and he pays attention to financial details. 121 new medium of radio: Ibid., 136.
Palomar Ballroom: Ibid., 140.
“I criticized Louis”: Gillespie with Fraser, 295–296.
“You got no melody to remember”: Louis Armstrong, quoted in Gioia, 217.
Minton’s was a scene: Davis with Troupe, 132–133. For more on the black kids dancing at Catherine Market, see Lhamon, 5–20.
Monk and Powell sometimes held hands: Ann Douglas, “Feel the City’s Pulse? It’s Be-Bop, Man!” New York Times, August 28, 1998.
“there were always some cats showing up there who couldn’t blow”: Dizzy Gillespie, speaking in Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff, eds., Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya: The Story of Jazz as Told by the Men Who Made It (New York: Dover, 1966), 337.
“That’s not the way we play”: Thelonious Monk, in Douglas, “Feel the City’s Pulse?” 125 Weston remembered hanging after hours: Jack Chambers, Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis (New York: Quill, 1989), 68.
“scientists of sound”: Davis with Troupe, 63.
“no grinning”: Ibid., 83.
Davis famously turned his back: For Miles’s claim that he simply wanted to hear his musicians, see Davis with Troupe, 356.
waged “war with the complicated fact”: Stanley Crouch, “Bird Land,” in Woideck, 256.
“trying to play clean”: Charlie Parker, quoted by Levin and Wilson, 70.
announcing his desire to study with Edgard Varese: Gioia, 231.
Living on 10th Street and Avenue B: Courtesy of Bill Cross, editor of Metronome, in Gitler, 48–49.
his daughter Pree died: Gioia, 231.
most of the New York newspapers: Giddins, “Bird Lives!” in Woideck, 9.
Parker wasn’t really dead, just “hiding out somewhere”: Charles Mingus, quoted in Gioia, 233.
“Bird was responsible for the actual playing”: Billy Eckstine, quoted in Shapiro and Hentoff, 352.
Dizzy would “be sticking his tongue out at women”: Davis with Troupe, 9.
little in the way of record sales: Giddins, Visions of Jazz, 285.
maintained that he wore the beret: Gitler, 80.
“[T]he black people in the audience were embarrassed by it”: George Russell, in Alyn Shipton, Groovin’ High: The Life of Dizzy Gillespie (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 200.
Pozo was killed: A good account of Gillespie’s partnership with Chano Pozo is in Shipton, 202.
“who can deny that globalization”: Kennedy, 855.
wanted “to create something that they can’t steal”: Mary Lou Williams, quoted in Shapiro and Hentoff, 341.
“the only way the Caucasian musician can swing is from a rope”: Art Blakey, quoted in Charley Gerard, Jazz in Black and White: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Jazz Community (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998), 9.
“tall, thin, white guy”: Davis with Troupe, 122.
“What bothered them”: Minnijean Brown Trickey, member of the Little Rock Nine, interview with author, 1997.
“Why’d you put that white bitch on there?”: Davis, quoted in Giddins, Visions of Jazz, 347.
“it was the same old story, black shit was being ripped off”: Davis with Troupe, 141.
“We were trying to sound like [the white bandleader] Claude Thornhill”: Ibid., 119.
“something entirely separate and apart”: Parker, quoted by Levin and Wilson, 70.
“It was the bebop tradition”: Coleridge Goode, quoted in Chambers, 67.
6 | The Golden Age of Hip, Part 2
“[It’s] a story of many restless travelings”: Jack Kerouac, Selected Letters, 1940–1956 (New York: Viking, 1999), 226.
Meltzer lined up the affinities: In comparing Beats and beboppers, Richard Meltzer performs his usual free-associative wonders in “Another Superficial Piece about 158 Beatnik Books,” in Holly George-Warren, ed., The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats: The Beat Generation and American Culture (New York: Hyperion, 1999), 71.
“I am not the poet of goodness only”: Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 66.
“Great is Wickedness”: Whitman, quoted in Reynolds, Beneath, 109–110.
“It’s all bop”: Allen Ginsberg, quoted in Tytell, 101.
“At lilac evening I walked”: Kerouac, On the Road, 179–180.
“wild, undisciplined, pure”: Jack Kerouac, quoted in Tytell, 143.
are at least two worth mentioning: Ginsberg’s encounters with Monk are in Michael Schumacher, Dharma Lion: A Critical Biography of Allen Ginsberg (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992), 295, 348, and “Innerview,” an interview with Harvey Kubernik, in George-Warren, 259.
fewer than 300 people came to his funeral: Eric Ehrman, “Kerouac Retrospective,” in George-Warren, 133.
“[I]t went beyond anything we ‘planned’”: Allen Ginsberg, quoted in Cook, 242.
“absolute personal freedom at all times”: The quote, along with an account of Kerouac’s Navy career and early years, are in Gerald Nicosia, Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac, (New York: Grove, 1983), 104, 106.
Kerouac returned to New York: For more on Kerouac’s return and first book, see the good, myth-chasing essay by Douglas Brinkley, “The American Journey of Jack Kerouac,” in George-Warren, 110.
a fellow Horace Mann alum: Kerouac’s friendship with Buckley and his Horace Mann experiences are dicussed in Brinkley, 109, and Dennis McNally, Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, The Beat Generation, and America (New York: Da Capo, 2003), 336.
$200 scholarship: Schumacher, 23.
seeking a bond: Ginsberg’s childhood, including the scene with Louis, is treated with sensitivity in Mykal Gilmore, “Allen Ginsberg, 1926–1997,” in George-Warren, 227–240.
“Burroughs’s addicts, Kerouac’s mobile young voyeurs”: Baraka, from The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America (New York: Corinth, 1963), quoted in Charters, Portable Beat Reader, 339–340.
“the spectralized color of blue cheese”: Neal Cassady, quoted in Tytell, 93.
“sensitive vehicle for a veritable new consciousness”: Allen Ginsberg, quoted in Charters, Portable Beat Reader, 145.
“Subway Mike had a large, pale face and long teeth”: William S. Burroughs, Junky, excerpted in ibid., 112.
a reformatory kid: Cassady’s biographical details are in ibid., 187.
“What got Kerouac and Ginsberg about Cassady”: Gary Snyder, quoted in ibid., 189.
“I have renounced fiction and fear”: Jack Kerouac, quoted in Brian Hassett, “Abstract Expressionism: From Bird to Brando,” in George-Warren, 25.
“The Cold War”: Allen Ginsberg, quoted in George Plimpton, ed., Beat Writers at Work: The Paris Review (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 58–59.
“What kind of war”: Edgar Jones, “One War Is Enough,” Atlantic Monthly, February 1946, quoted in Kennedy, 794.
“The burden of my generation”: John Clellon Holmes, Nothing to Declare, quoted in Charters, Portable Beat Reader, 4. I find Holmes defensive and somewhat clunky, but cite him as a window on how the Beats felt about themselves.
Thanks to the industrial buildup: For the growth of the American economy, including manufacturing and oil, during World War II, see Kennedy, 857.
The country’s growth product: Ibid.
“a lazy man or a shirk”: See Charters, Beat Down, xxiii.
“‘It’s a sort of furtiveness’”: Kerouac speaking to Holmes, from Nothing to Declare, quoted in Nicosia, 252.
in the church of Ste. Jeanne d’Arc: Brinkley, 113.
“will to believe,” despite “the valueless abyss of modern life”: Holmes, in Charters, Portable Beat Reader, 6.
“literary wing of the environmental movement”: Michael McClure, “Painting Beat by Numbers,” in George-Warren, 39.
“‘Honey, you see, we all thought experience itself was good’”: Diane di Prima, Recollections of My Life as a Woman (New York: Viking, 2001), 202–203.
“the two strands of male protest”: Ehrenreich, 52.
“the only really genuine experience I feel I’ve had”: Allen Ginsberg, quoted in Graham Caveney, Screaming with Joy: The Life of Allen Ginsberg (New York: Broadway Books, 1999), 55.
“cultivate the terror, get right into it”: Allen Ginsberg, quoted in Barry Miles, Ginsberg: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 103.
“a human voice and body”: McClure, quoted in Charters, Portable Beat Reader, xxviii.
“For Carl Solomon”: See the account of Solomon and Six Gallery in ibid., 167–168.
Burroughs fatally shot his wife: Tytell, 46.
“[We] felt like blacks caught in a square world”: John Clellon Holmes, quoted in Tytell, 22.
“the myth of Lester Young”: Allen Ginsberg, interviewed in Plimpton, 35.
“I want to be considered a jazz poet”: Jack Kerouac, introduction to Mexico City Blues.
he hit the Harlem nightclubs: Nicosia, 65–67.
“Yes, jazz and bop”: Jack Kerouac, interviewed by Ted Berrigan, in Plimpton, 116.
“anything but what I was so drearily”: Kerouac, On the Road, 182.
“has exactly the attitude toward the American Negro”: Kenneth Rexroth, “What’s Wrong with the Clubs,” Metronome, 1961, repr. in Rexroth, Assays (Norfolk, Conn.: J. Laughlin, 1961), and World Outside the Window: Selected Essays of Kenneth Rexroth (New York: New Directions, 1987). Though Rexroth was clearly not impartial, his criticism is both sound and reflective of the sniping that set in.
“Bird Parker who is only 18”: Jack Kerouac, “The Beginning of Bop,” Escapade, 1959, in Charters, Portable Kerouac, 556.
“the new White Negro has not arrived at black culture”: Carl Hancock Rux, “Eminem: The New White Negro,” an astute and ungentle essay in Greg Tate, ed., Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture (New York: Broadway, 2003), 38. Besides Rux’s essay, this book includes an incisive introduction by Tate and a fascinating autobiographical sketch by Jonathan Lethem that test-drives some of the racial themes he treated more expansively in The Fortress of Solitude (2003).
“conformists masquerading as rebels”: Robert Brustein, “The Cult of Unthink,” in Charters, Beat Down, 51.
Rexroth, who had championed the Beats: For Rexroth’s disaffection, see Charters, Beat Down, 494; for a more nuanced appraisal, see his essay in same collection, “Disengagement: The Art of the Beat Generation,” 494–508.
“[S]elf-expression and paganism”: Cowley, 62.
“Join the beat generation!”: William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932–1972 (New York: Bantam, 1975), 592.
“Atlantic is the label in tune with the BEAT”: Charters, Beat Down, xxi.
“You were headed for the Remo”: Ronald Sukenick’s amusing and idiosyncratic, if occasionally self-righteous, Down and In: Life in the Underground (New York: Collier, 1987), 18–19.
“the images of their disappointment”: Anatole Broyard, quoted in ibid., 35.
“In actuality,” he wrote, “there was only a handful of real hip swinging cats”: Jack Kerouac, “About the Beat Generation,” in Charters, Portable Kerouac, 560.
“Make a mistake”: Thelonious Monk, quoted in Douglas, “Feel the City’s Pulse?” 156 “jewel center of interest”: Jack Kerouac, “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” in Charters, Portable Beat Reader, 58.
“no revisions”: Ibid.
This commandment was somewhat disengenuous: See Brinkley, 112.
“[W]hatever it is that Neal represented for them”: Carolyn Cassady, in Gina Berriault, “Neal’s Ashes,” in George-Warren, 119.
“always trying to justify ma’s madness”: Kerouac on Ginsberg, in Schumacher, 114.
“This book is a must for anyone”: William S. Burroughs, quoted in Steven Watson, The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters, 1944–1960 (New York: Pantheon, 1995).
“Those who would have good government”: Watts, 607.
“the first great American poet to take action”: Allen Ginsberg, letter to John Allen Ryan, September 9, 1955, in Charters, Beat Down, 218.
“I am the poet of slaves, and of the masters of slaves”: Whitman, quoted in Reynolds, Beneath, 109.
“solitary Bartlebies staring out the dead wall window”: Jack Kerouac, quoted in Charters, Portable Beat Reader, xviii.
“I discovered a new Beat Generation a long time ago”: Jack Kerouac, quoted in Brinkley, 119.
“It occurs to me that I am America”: Ginsberg, “America” (1956), in Charters, Portable Beat Reader, 76.
“I quietly declare war”: Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience,” in Walden, 297.
“are presented as mostly motivated”: George W. S. Trow, My Pilgrim’s Progress: Cultural Studies, 1950–1998 (New York: Pantheon, 1999), 202.
“And this was really the way”: Kerouac, On the Road, 9, 10.
7 | The Tricksters
“The biggest difference between us and white people”: Alberta Roberts, quoted in John Langston Gwaltney, ed., Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America (New York: Random House, 1980), 105.
“lords of the in-between”: Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (New York: North Point Press, 1998), 6.
“The secret source of humor itself is not joy, but sorrow”: Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World (New York: Dover Publications, 1989), 119–124.
“Look, up in the sky!”: Richard Pryor, from Who Me? I’m Not Him, CD, Poly-gram, 1994.
“As long as you think you’re white, I have to think I’m black”: James Baldwin, quoted in Hyde, 237.
the terrapin and the deer: Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford, 1977), 115. Levine is a reminder of how valuable the liberal-biased scholarship of the post–civil rights era was, even if it is no longer in fashion.
“Don’t ask me nuthin’ about nuthin’”: Bob Dylan, “Outlaw Blues,” Bringing It All Back Home, LP, Columbia, 1965.
Yoruban trickster Esu-Elegbara: Hyde, 111–112, 117n, and Palmer.
“individuality, satire, parody, irony”: Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 6.
“had done teached the black folks”: Zora Neale Hurston, “High John De Conquer,” American Mercury 57: 450–458, October 1943, quoted in Bill R. Hampton, “On Identification and Negro Tricksters,” Southern Folklore Quarterly, March 1967, 60.
“The humorous story is American”: Twain, “How to Tell a Story,” in How to Tell a Story and Other Essays (New York, Oxford University Press, 1996).
“a form of rebellion against fate”: Ernst Kris, Psychological Explanations in Art, 1953, quoted in Hampton, 60.
“A lot of things are said with words or body language”: Chuck D (Carlton Rydenhour), interview with author in “Armageddon in Effect,” Spin, September 1988.
“The blacks are the great humorists”: Unnamed traveler, quoted in Constance Rourke, American Humor: A Study of the National Character (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1953), 71.
“If you will hear men laugh, go to Guinea”: W. E. B. DuBois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept, 148–149, quoted in Levine, 299–300.
“the dry mockery of the pretensions of white folk”: W. E. B. DuBois, “The Humor of Negroes,” Mark Twain Quarterly, Fall–Winter 1943, quoted in Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voices (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 61.
“Down in the jungle near a dried-up creek”: Unnamed source, quoted in Levine, 378.
first true American celebrity: For a good discussion of Barnum’s biography and hoaxes, see Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 265–267.
His first great hoax: Wood, 150.
“The public,” he noted, “appears to be amused”: P. T. Barnum, quoted in Lears, “The Birth of Irony,” New Republic, November 12, 2001.
“For me it was a liberation to lose myself”: Richard Hell, interview by author, 2003.
“I think I made it for Richard”: Richard Hell, ibid., 172 They “looked as deep into my eyes”: Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History Of Punk, exp. ed. (New York: Penguin, 1997), 173.
“The Black concept of signifying”: Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, “Signifying,” in Language Behavior in a Black Urban Community (Monographs of the Language-Behavior Lab, University of California at Berkeley, no. 2, Feb. 1971), 87–129, quoted in Fisher Fishkin, 60.
“Signifying,” as the novelist John Edgar Wideman defined it: John Edgar Wideman, “Playing, Not Joking, With Language,” New York Times, Aug. 14, 1988.
“at a sort of crossroads, a discursive crossroads”: Gates, Signifying Monkey, 65.
“I fucked your mama”: H. Rap Brown, Die Nigger Die! (New York: Dial, 1969), 25–26, quoted in Levine, 346.
“And the teacher expected me to sit up in class”: Brown, 25–26, quoted in Levine, 346.
“to dozen”: Hyde, 273.
“The crowd did not dream when they laid down their money”: Muhammad Ali, quoted in Levine, 350.
“I was playmate to all the niggers”: Twain, quoted in Dixon Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), 75.
he watched a local overseer kill a slave: Geoffrey C. Ward et al., Mark Twain: An Illustrated Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), 11–12.
“All I care to know is that a man is a human being”: Twain, quoted in ibid., 193–194.
“as one who receives a revelation”: Twain, quoted in ibid., 30.
“Aunt Rachel, how is it that you’ve lived”: Twain, “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word As I Heard It” (1874), repr. in ibid., 98.
“No Huck and Jim, no American novel”: Ellison, “What America Would Be Like without Blacks,” in Collected Essays, 577–585.
“a sound heart and a deformed conscience”: Mark Twain, quoted in Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), 198.
Times Square strip clubs: Bruce’s upbringing is traced in Tony Hendra, Going Too Far (New York: Doubleday, 1987), 115.
“That Bojangles, Christ, could he tap-dance!”: Lenny Bruce, quoted in ibid., 121.
“Adolf, my friend”: Bruce, quoted in ibid., 135–137.
“The important thing in writing”: Terry Southern, in Eric Pace, “Terry Southern, Screenwriter, Is Dead at 71,” New York Times, October 31, 1995.
“breezy compound of street jive and Madison Avenue knowingness”: Luc Sante, “Everywhere Man,” Village Voice, May 15, 2001, 116.
“I was a nigger for 23 years”: Richard Pryor, quoted in Wil Haygood, “Why Negro Humor Is Black,” American Prospect, December 18, 2000, 31.
“Art is the ability to tell the truth”: Richard Pryor, quoted in Watkins, On the Real Side, 559.
“the first African-American stand-up comedian”: Ibid., 562.
“Pryor belongs to the sassing tradition”: Ishmael Reed, interview with author, 2003.
“Well, I’ve changed music five or six times”: Davis with Troupe, 381.
The son of a middle-class sign painter: Ali’s background and significance in David Remnick, King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero (New York: Random House, 1998), 207, 212.
“before he ever got in the ring”: Muhammad Ali, quoted in Ibid., 141.
“If the fans think I can do everything I say I can”: Muhammad Ali, quoted in Ibid., 139.
He stole albums: Dylan’s misadventures get a gossipy treatment in Howard Sounes, Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan (New York: Grove, 2002), 56.
Jean Ritchie sought credit: Ibid., 132.
Dylan’s Yakuza borrowings, which were no big deal, made the front page.: Jonathan Eig and Sebastian Moffett, “Dylan’s Lyrics Seem Like An Author’s Back Pages—but Writer Sings Praises,” Wall Street Journal, July 8, 2003. The borrowings are no more than what blues musicians have done from the beginning.
“[M]aybe it is not the trickster who is unruly”: Hyde, 279, 300.
8 | Hip Has Three Fingers
“People have a reluctant admiration”: Chuck Jones, quoted in Kevin S. Sandler, “Gendered Evasion,” in Kevin Sandler, ed., Reading the Rabbit: Explorations in Warner Bros. Animation (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 162.
“It’s preliterate thinking”: Art Spiegelman, interview with author, 2001.
Felix the Cat: There is a good description of early cartoon history, including Otto Mesmer and his famous black cat, in Stefan Kanfer, Serious Business: The Art and Commerce of Animation in America from Betty Boop to Toy Story (New York: Scribner, 1997), 39.
“All mythical heroes have been exaggerations”: Max Eastman, quoted in Matthiessen, 640.
“gathered for a weekly bout of sex”: Seamus Culhane, quoted in Kanfer, 71.
“The only god I ever relied on was Mark Twain”: Chuck Jones, interview with author, 2001.
“The thing about the [African] voodoo aesthetic”: Ishmael Reed to Reginald Martin, “Interview with Ishmael Reed,” Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. 4, Summer 1984.
“Cohen” and “Coon”: Kanfer, 18.
his own tie to minstrelsy: Early Warner history is discussed in Hank Sartin, “From Vaudeville to Hollywood, from Silence to Sound: Warner Bros. Cartoons of the Early Sound Era,” in Sandler, 73.
“the colored people are good subjects for action pictures”: E. C. Matthews, How to Draw Funny Pictures, 64, quoted in Terry Lindvall and Ben Fraser, “Darker Shades of Animation,” in ibid, 124.
“Afro-American history is full of examples of ‘racist’ benevolence”: Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Talkin’ That Talk,” in Gates, ed., “Race,” Writing, and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 404–405.
“You must love what you caricature”: Chuck Jones, Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989), 101.
Count Basie and Fats Waller: Norman M. Klein, 7 Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon (New York: Verso, 1993), 9.
the first color talking cartoon: Kanfer, 81.
dependent on royalties: Klein, 7 Minutes, 53–54.
Disney budgets could reach as high as $100,000: Kanfer, 95.
“Disney was making Rolls Royces”: Jones interview.
“I wouldn’t work in a shit-hole like this”: Leon Schlesinger, quoted in Jones, Chuck Amuck, 87.
“We never previewed [ideas] for Schlesinger”: Jones interview.
“a snazzily dressed Gila monster”: Jones, Chuck Amuck, 89, 92.
“Roll the garbage!”: Schlesinger, quoted in ibid., 90.
“Jeethus Cristh, that’s a funny voithe!”: Schlesinger, quoted in ibid., 91.
“I’ve never seen more glamour anywhere”: Jack Kelson, quoted in Steven Isoardi et al, eds., Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
Ross watched a loose-limbed dancer: Klein, 7 Minutes, 193.
Louis Armstrong expressed interest: Lindvall and Fraser, “Darker Shades,” in Sandler, 131.
forced to delete all references: Walter Lantz’s complaints were typical in the industry; see Kanfer, 182.
9 | The World Is a Ghetto
“To me, if you live in New York”: Lenny Bruce, How to Talk Dirty and Influence People (New York: Fireside, 1992), 5.
“I wanna be black”: Lou Reed, “I Wanna Be Black,” Street Hassle, LP, Arista, 1978.
“might have been a little minstrel”: Joshua Neuman and Nancy Schwartzman, interviews with author, 2003.
peppered his act with Yiddish: Jeffrey Melnick, A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 121. Melnick makes compelling arguments for the influence both ethnic groups wielded on each other, and for the impact they had on American pop.
a family of Lithuanian Jewish junk peddlars: Louis Armstrong, who spent his life writing his autobiography in print and on tape, wrote about his Jewish roots toward the end of his life after an illness. See Laurence Bergreen, Armstrong: An Extravagant Life (New York, Broadway, 1997), 55–57, 267.
“Life is not worthwhile without it”: Harry Belafonte, interview with author, 2001.
“the most modern of modern people”: Cornel West, in Michael Lerner and Cornel West, Jews and Blacks: Let the Healing Begin (New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1995), 2.
Jewish activists and philanthropists: Jonathan Kaufman, Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times between Blacks and Jews in America, updated ed. (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 31.
“[m]onkey talk, jungle squeals”: Henry Ford, The International Jew, chap. 11. A loathsome document.
“We thought that we were black”: Mike Stoller, interview with author, 2003. Though Stoller’s comments out of context can seem naïve, they are not. The problem is that we don’t have language for people who are comfortable on more than one side of a line.
“Is you black or is you white”: Unnamed customer to Phil Chess, in Nadine Cohodas, Spinning Blues into Gold: The Chess Brothers and the Legendary Chess Records (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 29.
“It was the concept of performance as a spiritual thing”: Aaron Fuchs, interview with author, 2003.
“One regards the Jews the same way as one regards the Negroes”: Voltaire, quoted by David M. Goldenberg, “The Curse of Ham: A Case of Rabbinic Racism?” in Jack Salzman and Cornel West, eds., Struggles in the Promised Land: Toward a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 21.
A joke told by African Americans: William Pickens, American Aesop: Negro and Other Humor (New York: AMS Press, 1969), 113–115.
“That gets very hairy”: Jerry Wexler, interview with author, 2003. Wexler’s position is understandable. On this topic, the chances for misunderstanding are high.
“Are black folks saving nerdy Jews”: Bill Adler, interview with author, 2003.
“Italians are niggaz”: Chuck Nice, quoted in Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno, Are Italians White? (New York: Routledge, 2004), 1.
The first Jews arrived: Salzman and West, 1. 209 2. 5 million Jews: Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 305.
“miserable darkened Hebrews”: From American Hebrew, quoted in Hasia R. Diner, In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915–1935 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977), 8–9.
popular entertainment was ripe: Melnick, 23.
Typical of the newcomers: Laurence Bergreen, As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin (New York: Viking, 1990), 3.
affinity for these coon songs: Ibid., 22–27.
“Negro-ist” white man: Melnick, 50.
“improvisations of my father’s”: Harold Arlen, quoted in Max Wilk, They’re Playing Our Song: From Jerome Kern to Stephen Sondheim—the Stories behind the Words and Music of Two Generations, 153, quoted in Melnick, 173.
“Where did he get it?”: Cantor Arluck, in Wilk, 152–153, quoted in Melnick, 190.
established Tin Pan Alley: Melnick, 33.
“Jazz is Irving Berlin, Al Jolson”: Samson Raphaelson, quoted in ibid., 103.
“not a nationality, but a trans-nationality”: Randolph Bourne, quoted in Marshall Berman, “Love and Theft,” Dissent, July 1, 2002.
“If the Jews were proscribed”: Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York, Crown, 1988), 5–7.
“One reason why ragtime, jazz, and blues”: Melnick, 23.
“minority even more unloved”: James Baldwin, “The Harlem Ghetto,” in Collected Essays, 51.
“not only proved their credentials as Americans”: Hasia R. Diner, “Between Words and Deeds: Jews and Blacks in America, 1880–1935,” in Salzman and West, 91.
“the Jewish performers transformed it”: Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 562–563. Howe does not say how Jewish minstrelsy was more humane for others, or acknowledge that African Americans might not receive it as such.
“every colored performer is proud of him”: Thomas Cripps, “African Americans and Jews in Hollywood: Antagonistic Allies,” in Salzman and West, 263.
“I never felt that I was renting the blues”: Jerry Leiber, on American Routes radio program, Public Radio International, September 11, 2002.
“The idea of hip”: Wexler interview.
“We felt we were authentic”: Stoller interview, 2003.
“[W]e became more than business associates”: Muddy Waters, quoted in Cohodas, 40.
“I didn’t even sign no contract”: Muddy Waters, quoted in Palmer, 162.
The complaints against the Chess brothers: Cohodas, 309–310. The definitive records were destroyed.
the shadow of exploitation: Early accusations and suits are covered in Melnick, 34.
“Those illiterates”: Hy Weiss, quoted in Dorothy Wade and Justine Picardie, Music Man: Ahmet Ertegun, Atlantic Records, and the Triumph of Rock ’N’ Roll (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), 70.
“As a Jew, I didn’t think I identified with the underclass”: For this quote and an account of the threats, see Jerry Wexler and David Ritz, Rhythm and the Blues: A Life in American Music (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 227–228. Since I mentioned Wexler’s demurral earlier I should point out that in the book he holds little else back.
“get rid of that devil real simple”: Ice Cube, “No Vaseline,” Death Certificate, CD, Priority, 1991.
“I thought, wow, one of these days, if I play my cards right”: Fuchs interview. 219 Black Swan Records: “On the Blackhand Side,” in Wax Poetics, Spring 2003.
Leonard Chess used to empty the change: Cohodas, 52.
“Lenny paved the way for all of us”: Redd Foxx, in Watkins, 486.
“Man, those records caused a traffic jam”: Mezz Mezzrow with Bernard Wolfe, Really the Blues (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972), 201–202.
“I just felt so much more at ease”: Adler interview.
“They open industries for us”: Russell Simmons, “Hip Hop Fridays,” available at www.blackelectorate.com.
10 | Criminally Hip
“[T]he roots of the counterculture”: Albert Goldman, Grass Roots: Marijuana in America Today (New York: HarperCollins, 1979), p. 7, quoted in Cecil Brown, Stagolee Shot Billy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 12–13.
“a malignant matriarchal society”: William S. Burroughs, quoted in Victor Bockris, With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker (New York: Seaver Books, 1981), xvii.
“It sounded good to me”: William S. Burroughs, Junky (originally titled Junkie) (New York: Penguin, 1977), xii.
“constitutes an implicit criticism of traditional mores”: Hyman E. Goldin, Frank O’Leary and Morris Lipsius, eds., Dictionary of American Underworld Lingo (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1950), introduction.
“Looking back now”: Jack Black, You Can’t Win, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: AK Press/Nabat, 2000), 22.
“I began to view”: Jay Robert Nash, Bloodletters and Badmen: A Narrative Encyclopedia of American Criminals from the Pilgrims to the Present (New York: M. Evans, 1991), 6.
the Old English word lagu: For a discussion of lagu, utlaga and the outlaw, see Frank Richard Prassel, The Great American Outlaw: A Legacy of Fact and Fiction (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 3–4.
the tale took on the twist: Discussion of Robert Hod and Robin Hood in ibid., 10.
Another was to use convicts: For a discussion of imported criminals, see Frank Browning and John Gerassi, The American Way of Crime (New York: Putnam, 1980), 88, 93.
50,000 English prisoners: Convicts were a commodity for trade; see Prassel, 52.
France supplied the feminine enticements: Browning and Gerassi, 90.
story of Jesse James: Jesse James’s biography gets the mythopoetic treatment in Carl Breihan, The Complete and Authentic Life of Jesse James (New York: F. Fell, 1953), 183.
“halo of medieval chivalry”: John Edwards, in Prassel, 127–128. 229 Jesse Woodson James was born: Biographical detals are taken from Breihan, 70.
only to die from a fever: Ibid., 71.
Accounts of Jesse as an adult: Such descriptions are typical of mythic accounts; see ibid., 85, 87, 190.
“an exact account of this hold-up”: Ibid., 115–116.
“booty is but the second thought”: This spectacular misconception by Edwards is quoted in Prassel, 127–128.
“Why has the free-running reprobate”: Emmett Dalton, quoted in ibid., 262.
When he died: For details of Dillinger’s fall and his setup by the Lady in Red, see ibid., 281.
crime actually dropped in the 1930s: See ibid., 272–273.
Harlem heroin kingpin Leroy “Nicky” Barnes: Fred Ferretti, “Mr. Untouchable,” New York Times Magazine, June 5, 1977.
“I need a handkerchief”: Ibid.
he bought the Apollo Theater: Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm and Blues (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 162–163.
“Always remember whether you be a sucker or hustler”: Iceberg Slim (Robert Beck), Pimp: The Story of My Life (Los Angeles: Holloway House, 1987), 74.
killing a band of Mexicans “just to see them kick”: Ramon F. Adams, A Fitting Death for Billy the Kid (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982), 62.
“blue dragoon jacket”: Ibid., 44–45.
“I would see myself gigantic and powerful”: Iceberg Slim, 77.
“the insult of rehabilitation”: Ann Douglas, quoted in Charters, Beat Down, 238.
“the greatest storyteller I know”: Jack Kerouac, quoted on American National Biography Online, http://www.anb.org/articles/16/16-03457–article.html.
“The gangster is the ‘no’ to that great American ‘yes’”: Robert Warshow, quoted in Prassel, 268–269.
“In such places as Greenwich Village”: Mailer, 340.
“What differentiated the characters in On the Road”: John Clellon Holmes, “The Philosophy of the Beat Generation,” in Charters, Beat Down, 229.
“In case a crime has been committed”: Unnamed writer, quoted in Prassel, 326.
11 | Where the Ladies At?
“That whole obsession with hip”: Kim Gordon, interview with author, 2003.
“I can’t watch this”: This quote, and a good account of the shooting is from MacAdams, 142–143.
The daughter of a factory manager: Brenda Knight, Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution (Berkeley, Calif.: Conari Press, 1996), 49–53. Like most books about the Beats, this is too blindly laudatory, but given the absence of women in other accounts, it comes as a necessary corrective.
he and Joan lived together: Knight, 49–53.
“Her cunt is sweet”: Kerouac, Visions of Cody, 23.
“Hip definitely seems like a male term”: Gordon interview.
“There were women, they were there”: Gregory Corso, quoted in Knight, 141.
“a woman without a man didn’t exist at all”: Di Prima, Recollections, 176.
a distinctly feminine cast: Thompson interview.
“work, produce, consume”: Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums (New York: Viking, 1958), 77.
“‘Pretty girls make graves’”: Ibid., with a good discussion in Ehrenreich, 52.
“When the world began to change”: Hutchins Hapgood, Victorian in the Modern World, 152, quoted in Stansell, 225.
“Life was ready to take a new form”: Mabel Dodge Luhan, Movers and Shakers, 151, quoted in Stansell, 40.
“trained by the essence of our nature”: Frances E. Willard, quoted in Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 242.
“My people are in no way a part of me”: Louise Bryant, quoted in Stansell, 253.
“out to hurt their mother”: Mary Heaton Vorse, quoted in ibid., 29.
did not have children: Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 98.
“look the whole world in the face with a go-to-hell look”: Margaret Sanger, quoted in Stansell, 238.
small-press magazines: Ibid., 152.
sexual freedom: Ibid., 259–260.
“the wife who married for money”: Emma Goldman, quoted in Alix Kates Shulman, ed., Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 1998), 151.
“[U]nder the contract of marriage all duties lie upon the man”: H. L. Mencken, “In Defense of Women,” quoted in Ehrenreich, 7.
“whatever their outward show of respect”: Ibid.
“Feminism is going to make it possible”: Floyd Dell, “Feminism for Men,” The Masses, July 1914, 19, quoted in Stansell, 226.
“expend greater effort in their work”: Hugh Hefner, quoted in Ehrenreich, 46.
Edie Parker, who earned $27.50: Joyce Johnson, “Beat Queens: Women in Flux,” in George-Warren, 43.
“I wanted the life of an outlaw”: For this quote and her early relationship with Kerouac, see Joyce Johnson’s remarks in “Panel Discussion with Women Writers,” in Charters, Beat Down, 629.
“It wasn’t the moment then”: Ibid., 616.
“I knew interesting creative women who became junkies”: Anne Waldman, fore-ward to Knight, x.
“surely poetry’s representative in the flesh”: For this quote and details of the abusive relationship, see Bonnie Bremser, Love for a Day, quoted in Alix Kates Shulman, “The Beat Queens: Boho Chicks Stand by Their Men,” Village Voice, Voice Literary Supplement, June 1989, 19.
Elise Cowen, a Barnard rebel: Knight, 142.
“Many, myself included, wanted far more”: Hettie Jones, “Babes in Boyland,” in George-Warren, 53.
“I sensed that Allen was only,”: Diane Di Prima, Memoirs of a Beatnik, quoted in Charters, Beat Down, 116.
“Di Prima, unless you forget about your babysitter”: Kerouac, quoted by di Prima, Recollections, 202.
“we didn’t do like the Supremes”: Ronnie Spector, quoted in Gerri Hirshey, We Gotta Get out of This Place: The True, Tough Story of Women in Rock (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001), 61.
“I cannot make love to Jews anymore”: Nico, and story of Nico in the band, in McNeil and McCain, 10.
“The only people who had any money”: Roberta Bayley, interview with author, 2003.
“I was always Flash Gordon”: Patti Smith, interview with Penny Green, Interview, 1973, available at www.oceanstar.com/patti/intervus.htm.
“Hung-up women can’t produce anything but mediocre art”: Patti Smith, interview with Nick Tosches, Penthouse, April 1976.
“For the most part, cool attributes”: Kathleen Hanna, Girl Power, repr. in Andrea Juno, Angry Women in Rock, vol. 1 (New York: Juno Books, 1996), 98.
“The Beach Boys were still singing these happy songs”: Gordon interview. 256 Moving to New York: Alec Foege, Confusion Is Next: The Sonic Youth Story (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 45–48, and Gordon interview.
“just seemed like a very easy scene”: Jim Sclavunos, quoted in Foege, 31.
“They’d take a big hit”: Gordon interview.
“What would it be like to be right at the pinnacle of energy”: Gordon, “Boys Are Smelly: Sonic Youth Tour Diary, ’87,” Village Voice, Rock & Roll Quarterly, Fall 1988, October 12–18.
“Hey fox, come here”: Sonic Youth, “Pacific Coast Highway,” Sister, CD, SST, 1987.
“when people say, what’s it like to be a woman in rock”: Gordon interview.
12 | Behind the Music
“Heroin was our badge”: Red Rodney, quoted in Ira Gitler, Swing to Bop: An Oral History of the Transition in Jazz in the 1940s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 282.
“in the strictest sense of the word”: Terry Southern, in Paul Krassner’s Impolite Interviews (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1999), 190.
“to a certain extent come out of drug-taking”: Norman Mailer, quoted in “Hip, Hell, and the Navigator: An Interview with Norman Mailer by Richard G. Stern,” in Advertisements for Myself, 381–382.
“[i]f marijuana was the wedding ring”: Mailer, “White Negro,” 340.
“the Negro’s normal separation from the mainstream”: Baraka, 201.
from the Dutch doop: Jill Jonnes, Hep-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams: A History of America’s Romance with Illegal Drugs (New York: Scribner, 1996), 30.
“See, most people”: Drugstore Cowboy, written and directed by Gus Van Sant, DVD (1989; Artisan Entertainment, 1999).
“Light up and be somebody”: Mezz Mezzrow, quoted in David T. Courtwright, Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 43.
$64 billion on illegal drugs: Office of National Drug Control Policy (www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov), the Motion Picture Association of America (www.mpaa.com) and the Recording Industry Association of America (www.riaa.com). Obviously, the drug figure is an estimate and subject to political manipulation.
“no sniffers please”: Lou Reed, in liner notes to Metal Machine Music, quoted in Victor Bockris, Transformer: The Lou Reed Story (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 118.
“Then, with Sid trailing along behind me”: Dee Dee Ramone with Veronica Kofman, Lobotomy: Surviving the Ramones (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2000), 115.
“With good white benny tablets”: Jack Kerouac to Donald Allen, December 1959, in Selected Letters, 1957–1969 (New York: Viking Penguin, 1999), 239.
A semisynthetic derivative: Sadie Plant, Writing on Drugs (New York: Picador, 1999), 6.
“Only drugs that were widely used”: Courtwright, 69.
“I go to this heart specialist”: Charlie Parker, quoted in James Gavin, Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 100.
“Diz, why don’t you save me?”: Parker, quoted in Gillespie with Fraser, 393.
Born in Oklahoma: Gavin, 9–12, 47.
“It wasn’t for cheap thrills that I took heroin”: Chet Baker, “30,000 Hell-Holes in My Arm,” Today (U.K.), February 2, 1963, quoted in ibid., 188.
“When you looked at her”: Art and Laurie Pepper, Straight Life: The Story of Art Pepper (New York: Da Capo, 1994), 83.
“I said, ‘This is it’”: Ibid., 85–86.
“which seek to exist apart”: Herbert J. Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 121.
“Junk” Burroughs wrote, “is not”: Burroughs, Junky, xvi.
Body Bag, Hellraiser: Ann Marlowe, How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 34. An evocative drug tale that was controversial because Marlowe suffered little damage for her experiments, and did not pity those who did.
“Nonusers wonder why”: Ibid., 57.
“Junkies run on junk time”: Burroughs, Junky, 97.
“exorcise the darkness”: Lou Reed, quoted in Bockris, Transformer, 71.
“I take drugs just because”: Ibid., 85.
“negative, strung-out”: Details of Reed’s life at Syracuse and the early days of the band and the song are in ibid., 71.
“I think he might start writing some good songs again”: John Cale, quoted in Nick Kent, The Dark Stuff: Selected Writings on Rock Music, updated ed. (New York: Da Capo, 2002), 169.
his parents sent him: Bockris, Transformer, 13, 71.
“You can’t read a book”: Lou Reed, quoted in ibid., 15.
“I stopped, and being a little wacky”: Maureen Tucker, in Clinton Heylin, From the Velvets to the Voidoids: A Pre-Punk History for a Post-Punk World (New York: Penguin, 1993), 23.
“gave dignity and poetry and rock ’n’ roll to smack”: Lester Bangs, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves,” in Greil Marcus, ed., Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (New York: Vintage, 1988), 170–171.
“because he stands for all the most fucked up things”: Ibid., 171.
“There was commitment there”: John Cale, quoted in Heylin, 10.
America’s first drug epidemic: Jonnes, 25.
passed the Harrison Narcotic Act: See ibid., 47.
the artist’s stock in trade: Barry Miles, William Burroughs: El Hombre Invisible (New York: Hyperion, 1992), 98.
“Sal, we gotta go”: Kerouac, On the Road, 240.
“in emphasizing as he does the importance of the ‘kick’”: Harold Finestone, “Cats, Kicks, and Color,” Social Problems, 5(1), 1957, 7.
“I don’t want your money”: William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (New York: Grove, 1992), 182.
“When you have a bad day”: Parker, quoted in Gillespie with Fraser, 291.
“Of that time which we call the present”: De Quincey, quoted in Plant, 146.
“He’d wasted his entire life”: Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992), 37–38.
“In the nod, I felt less guilty”: Marlowe, 45, 58–59.
“It was a matter of pushing the envelope”: Martin Scorsese, quoted in Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ’N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 377.
“I thought that one used heroin to play”: Frank Morgan, quoted in Gary Giddins, “The Scene Is Clean,” Village Voice, December 16, 1986.
“I paid tribute to Bird”: Frank Morgan, quoted in David W. Grogan, “Frank Morgan: After Three Decades of Drug Addiction, a Jazz Genius Comes Back from the Depths,” People, July 18, 1988, 93.
“I guess that’s when I decided to fail”: Frank Morgan, quoted in Giddins, “Scene.” 281 “not a turning loose of emotion”: T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot (New York: Harvest, 1975), 43.
13 | “It’s Like Punk Rock, But a Car”
“Hip capitalism wasn’t something on the fringes”: Thomas Frank, Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 26. Frank’s skeptical analyses are invaluable, though I do not share his sense of betrayal.
American ambition: The story of Kroc and the McDonald brothers is told in David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Villard Books, 1993), 155–171.
“so bad that it used to send chills through me”: Davis with Troupe, 196.
“cannot trust some people who are nonconformists”: Ray Kroc, quoted in Halberstam, 165.
“The American middle class had come to the end of its Puritan phase”: Floyd Dell, Homecoming, 360, quoted in Stansell, 335.
“the hipster parodied and packaged”: Herb Gold, quoted in Sukenick, 113.
“When a thing is current, it creates currency”: Marshall McLuhan, quoted in Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: Picador, 2002), 71.
“one of those cornball ideas”: Allen Ginsberg, quoted in Sukenick, 121–122.
“Bohemia could not survive”: Michael Harrington, “We Few, We Happy Few, We Bohemians,” Esquire, August 1972, 99, quoted in Frank, Conquest, 29.
“the fucking needy indie fascist regime”: Kurt Cobain, quoted in Charles R. Cross, Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain (New York: Hyperion, 2001), 301.
“They’re hipper than you can ever hope to be”: Thomas Frank, “Why Johnny Can’t Dissent,” in Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland, eds., Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from the Baffler (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), 44–45.
“It was weird”: Troy Pierce, quoted in Bunn.
“It is our willingness to forgive”: Nikki Giovanni, in Tate, Everything But the Burden, cover.
“things were isolated from their origins”: Lears, Fables of Abundance, 5.
age of advertising revenues: are taken from Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 64.
“Brevity is the soul of lingerie”: Dorothy Parker, ad slogan, in ibid., 66.
“Only in America was advertising”: Ibid., 65.
“Modernism offered the opportunity”: Ernest Elmo Calkins, Annals of an Adman, 239, quoted in Jackson T. Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880–1930,” in Richard Wightman Fox and Jackson T. Lears, eds., The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980 (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 22.
“People don’t always drink the beer”: Burt Manning, quoted in Leslie Wayne, “How a Popular Beer Fell out of Favor,” New York Times, March 3, 1985.
“If a manuscript was sold to an established publisher”: Winifred Bryher, in Fitch, 61.
“By the end of the 1940s”: Klein, No Logo, 7.
“What is a brand?”: Lance Jensen, interview with author, 2001.
faster than any medium: James L. Baughman, “Television Comes to America, 1947–1957,” Illinois History, March 1993.
“Better to live simply”: Gary Snyder, “Notes on the Beat Generation,” in Charters, Beat Down, 518–519.
“found in the ideas of people like Jerry Rubin”: Frank, Conquest, 121.
“The only people for me are the mad ones”: Kerouac, On the Road, 5–6.
“Rent a Genuine Beatnik”: Schumacher, 320.
“get to the so-called squares”: Ted Joans, quoted in Sukenick, 118.
“None of the kids I grew up with”: Kris Parker, interview with author, 1999.
“We was young entrepreneurs”: Afrika Bambaataa, quoted in Jim Fricke and Charlie Ahearn, Yes Yes Y’all: The Experience Music Project Oral History of Hip-Hop’s First Decade (New York: Da Capo, 2002), 45–46.
“These pioneers made the bold claim”: Klein, No Logo, 4.
“You see Disney going into the cruise business”: Frank Biondi, quoted in John Seabrook, “In the Demo: The Power at MTV,” New Yorker, October 10, 1994.
“The indie skateboarders”: Klein, No Logo, 64–65.
“[h]ardly anyone without a pretty strong ambition”: Larry Rivers, “Where Has All the Floating Energy Gone?” New York Times book review, November 1, 1987, 34.
“We’re putting money back”: Tim Barnes, interview with author, 2001.
“exactly the places where the deepest”: Allen Ginsberg, letter to Richard Eber-hart, May 18, 1956, quoted in Charters, Beat Down, 213.
“not because it’s politically correct”: Leon E. Wynter, American Skin: Pop Culture, Big Business, and the End of White America (New York: Crown, 2002), 152.
“immense, protective power”: Alexis de Tocqueville, quoted in Christopher Newfield, The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 63.
14 | Do Geeks Dream of HTML Sheep?
“Today, coolness isn’t outright rebellion”: Alan Liu, quoted in Shari Caudron, “Cool Defined,” Workforce, vol. 77, no. 4, April 1, 1998, 56.
“A lot of this stuff was started by a bunch of people on drugs”: Patrick Kroupa, interview with author, 2003.
“Trust thyself”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), 260.
“True jazz is an art of individual assertion”: Ralph Ellison, “Shadow and Act,” quoted in Robert G. O’Meally, ed., The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 5.
“just as the beatniks anticipated the hippies”: Paul Saffo, “Cyberpunk R.I.P.,” Wired, September–October 1993, p. 90.
“You could use the computer as a fulcrum”: Kroupa interview.
“Working 90 Hours a Week And Loving It”: John Markoff, “Saying Goodbye, Good Riddance to Silicon Valley,” New York Times, January 17, 1999.
“Cool is being redefined from how you look to how you think”: Margie Mader, quoted in Caudron, “Cool Defined,” 56.
jukebox inside a ’57 Chevy: Shannon Henry, “A High-Tech Hothouse: Mario Morino’s New Building in Reston Will Be a Hip Home for Internet Start-Ups,” Washington Post, November 9, 1998, F12.
“Any company in any industry in any location”: Sharri Caudron, “Be Cool,” Workforce, vol. 77, no. 4, April 1, 1998, p. 50.
“For most of those young dot-comers”: Howard Rheingold, interview with author, 2003.
“the information rich…the most powerful people”: Louis Rossetto, Wired prelaunch manifesto, quoted in Gary Wolf, Wired—a Romance (New York: Random House, 2003), 34.
“The Net used to have a somewhat Bohemian air”: Steve G. Steinberg, “Hype List,” Wired, July–August 1993, 103.
“had his own way”: Louis Armstrong, quoted in John Atlee Kouwenhoven, The Beer Can by the Highway: Essays on What’s American About America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 40.
“The union is only perfect”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “New England Reformers,” Essays and Lectures, 599.
“prepare us for acts of improvisation”: Brian Eno, quoted in “Gossip Is Philosophy,” interview by Kevin Kelly, Wired, May 1995.
“No class in history has ever risen as fast”: Peter Drucker, quoted in “Post-capitalist,” interview by Peter Schwartz, Wired, July–August 1993, 80.
“The traditional factors of production”: Ibid.
“It somehow goes with the paradigm”: DJ Spooky, quoted in Richard Harrington, “Prolific DJ Spooky Mixes Media Projects,” Washington Post, January 10, 2003.
“You’re sort of destroying this received object”: DJ Spooky, quoted in Hugh Gallagher, “Gimme Two Records and I’ll Make You a Universe,” Wired, September–October 1993, 87.
twelve things: Kouwenhoven, Beer Can, 42.
“Break music is that certain part of the record”: Bambaataa Aasim (DJ Afrika Bambaataa), “The Beginning of Break Beat (Hip Hop) Music,” Tommy Boy poster. 323 teenagers playing video games: Brian D. Johnson, “Mind Games with William Gibson,” Macleans, June 5, 1995, 60.
“A consensual hallucination”: William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1994), 51.
“a kind of ghostly teenage DNA”: Ibid., 57.
“This was it”: Ibid., 58.
breakdown of urban inner space: Dani Cavallaro, Cyberpunk and Cyberculture: Science Fiction and the Work of William Gibson (New Brunswick, N.J.: Athlone Press, 2000), xiii.
“Whatever appears on the television screen”: Videodrome, written and directed by David Cronenberg, DVD (1983; Universal, 1998).
“The sky above the port was the color of television”: Gibson, 3.
Hermes typewriter: noted in Saffo.
“That was one of the most hallucinatory pieces”: William Gibson, quoted in Laurence B. Chollet, “William Gibson’s Second Sight,” Los Angeles Times, September 12, 1993, 34.
“in a culture saturated with artificial substances”: Cavallaro, 24.
“All I did was free up the fashion options”: William Gibson, quoted in Stephen Lynch, “Mnemonic Conversion: The Cyberpunk Movement Bemoans the Popularization of Its Image with the Release Of ‘Johnny Mnemonic,’” Orange County Register, May 28, 1995, F10.
“Gibson basically created a whole mythology”: Kroupa interview.
hacker underground: Kroupa interview and Katie Hafner and John Markoff, Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier (New York: Simon & Schuster), 20.
“rushing through the phone line like heroin”: The Mentor, in “The Conscience of a Hacker,” Phrack, vol. 1, no. 7, phile 3, quoted in Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (New York: Bantam, 1992), 85.
“What Gibson wrote about didn’t exist then”: Kroupa interview.
“It is the DJ who presides”: Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey (New York: Grove Press, 2000), 5.
no ordinary crank: Steve Ditlea, “Ted Nelson’s Big Step,” MIT’s Technology Review, vol. 101, no. 5, September 1, 1998, 44.
“the Orson Welles of software”: Owen Edwards, “Ted Nelson,” Forbes, vol. 160, no. 4, August 25, 1977, S134.
“Computer Power to the People”: Quoted in Wolf, 20.
subcultural proclivity: Ibid.
Rossetto arrived at Columbia: Ibid., 6.
This credo: Louis Rossetto and Stan Lehr, “The New Right Credo—Libertarianism,” New York Times Magazine, January 10, 1971.
launched Wired: Wolf is good on details, like the Ultimate Porno boondoggle; see Wolf, 8.
“Suddenly you could be two Stanford students”: Rheingold interview.
“The future is already here”: Kevin Kelly, quoted in Wolf, 67.
“I heard two kids in here, maybe 25”: Jim Marshall, interview with author, 2000.
progenitor of bling: Hirshey, 23.
“Many things that were anchored to the balance of power”: Don DeLillo, Underworld (New York: Scribner, 1997), 76.
“One is Hip or one is Square”: Mailer, “White Negro,” 339.
9.5 million visitors: Romesh Ratnesar and Joel Stein, “Everyone’s a Star.Com,” Time, June 5, 2000.
15 | Everybody’s Hip
“You know it’s gone to hell”: Charles Barkley, quoted in Peter Vecsey, “Barkley Looking Like a Real Gem These Days,” New York Post, October 22, 2000.
Immigrants started about 25 percent: Richard L. Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 253.
“The great cultural legacy of the sixties”: Ibid., 202.
best predictor of economic growth: John Leland, “On a Hunt for Ways to Put Sex in the City,” New York Times, December 11, 2003.
Economists disagree: For Glaeser’s analysis, which is less mystical in its causes than Florida’s, but with the same effects, see Edward L. Glaeser, Jed Kolko and Albert Saiz, “Consumer Cities,” Journal of Economic Geography 1:27–50, 2001.
Spotted in the early 2000s: Julia Chaplin, “Noticed: A Hat That’s Way Cool. Unless, of Course, It’s Not,” New York Times, May 18, 2003.
your hat was your honey: Clarence Major, Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang (New York: Penguin, 1994), 225.
“I have, in fact, worn a fedora hat,”: George W. S. Trow, Within the Context of No Context, repr. (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997), 119.
Between 1970 and 2000: U.S. Census, “Profile of the Foreign-Born Population in the United States: 2000,” December 2001, p. 23–206, available at: http://www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/p23-206.pdf.
In New York, 40 percent: Bruce Lambert, “40 Percent in New York Born Abroad,” New York Times, July 24, 2000.
Latinos in 2001 made up 71 percent: Gregory Rodriguez, “The Nation: Where Minorities Rule,” New York Times, February 10, 2002.
whose numbers doubled: Felicia R. Lee, “Does Class Count in Today’s Land of Opportunity?” New York Times, Jan. 18, 2003.
were living as white: Robert P. Stuckert, “African Ancestry of the White American Population,” Ohio Journal Of Science 58 (3), May 1958, 155. Stuckert assumes that a constant and estimable percentage of light-skinned people of mixed race will identify themselves as white each year, even though one or both of their parents identified as black. But there is no reason to believe this flow is steady or knowable. The essay is more provocative for the questions it asks than the answers it provides.
the beginning of meaning: Hyde, 65. Hermes created meaning by moving Apollo’s cattle from one realm to another.
“How the fuck can I be white”: Eminem, “Role Model,” The Slim Shady LP, CD, Interscope, 1999.
“two souls, two thoughts”: W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 5.
“Of every hue and cast am I”: Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 62.
“stupider than the animals”: Carl Jung, quoted in Hyde, 43.