TRIPPING THE BLACK FANTASTIC: NOTES FROM THE BEACH
We have all – or have we? – been to the sea, and for most of us, it’s a trip. Tramping up and down the boardwalk, barefootin’ in the sand, we feel the edge and end of things, of continents or at least land. The beach is by definition a boundary, geographically and geologically. But American tourists and locals alike have encountered the shore as a liminal social zone as well, a vacation void. Then the boardwalk may become a cultural borderlands to respect or transgress, a third space hovering between home and away, earth and water. However, “Beach Music,” a bleary term that juxtaposes two words to which many of us stake intensely personal claims of understanding and experience, does not mean what it seems. In combination, an alchemical transformation takes place, resulting in a regional definition particularly confounding to curious Californian and Northeastern ethnographers like yours truly. As a chorus of Carolinian voices patiently extrapolated upon our ignorant early impressions, we found our own interests in Beach Music narrowing toward five deeply enmeshed aspects: alterity (radical racial stereotyping and segregation); appropriation (both concrete and cultural); aesthetics (determined through a deliberate curatorial practice, and ambiguous at best to novices); affect (how the music means to its fans via an ineffable beachy feeling); and age (which bestows a certain authority, both in the vintage of songs and of community leaders.) These streams all lead to the sea, as streams do.
The “Beach” in “Beach Music” describes an imaginary space and a sentiment – something resembling nostalgia, but it’s not that simple. The scene’s annual awards show, the CAMMYS – behind the blunt rhyme with “GRAMMYS” – is an acronym for “Carolina Magic Music Years.” Magic, indeed. The “Beach” refers ostensibly to coastal North and South Carolina, designating a symbolic arena of aesthetic license (in both artistic and sensual senses) and myth-muffled “ease” (both social and somatic), but not a specific style and certainly not a set of seaside lyrical subjects. Jimmy Buffett and the Beach Boys need not apply – with a few exceptions, of course. Again, it’s not that simple. (The Tams have toured the Beach Music circuit with Buffett, a longtime Tams fan, and Beach devotees and bands often invoke the B-Boys as representatives of a Western strain, surf. The Wilsons’ supposed enthusiasm for Carolina Beach Music offers a validation of West embracing East, a Carolina absorption of the Beach Boys’ sandy California specter.)
The “Beach” in question represents an historical and historicized site of contested memory. Although the idyllic (and lily-white) legend articulates white dancers and partiers with African American musicians and r&b jukeboxes on the beaches near the border between the Carolinas, whites and blacks obviously have markedly different investments and perspectives in remembering that conjuncture. The first few classic Beach Music epochs (roughly 1947-1970) spanned Jim Crow and the Civil Rights struggle, which burned in buried counterpoise to the Beach myth in the American South. In its original use, Beach Music is essentially a white euphemism for black music, to put it politely, and yet the white Beach Music aficionados and DJs (Beachheads?) with whom we spoke seldom mentioned the concurrent political struggles of the artists who interest them. (African American bands and musicians – and Jimmy Cavallo, who is white, but an Italian from Syracuse, not a Southerner – were of course much more in touch with the politics of performance.) Since the rise of minstrelsy in the mid-19th century, whites have located a certain hipness and cultural capital in African American expressive culture, especially music and dance, so in that sense, what went down in the Carolinas was not that different from the white appropriation of African American r&b in Memphis and London slightly later, and of the lindy, jitterbug, and swing jazz in Harlem even earlier. (However, the earliest Beach Music tended to embrace the horn-heavy jump blues and doo-wop strands of popular African American music rather than the guitar blues that white Memphis rockers appropriated and highlighted with syncretic gospel and country tinges. The Beach Music community has only allowed hybrid forms to emerge relatively recently.) The beach was simply a convenient, sanctioned, and relatively guilt-free and anonymous space for Southern white youth to stumble accidentally (oops!) onto those exciting records and bands played on late-night radio, but within a like-minded crowd of other white youths, shaggin’ the night away to the piccolo.
What remains distinct – and frankly disturbing to outsiders like us – about white audiences who self-identify with Beach Music as opposed to rock, hip-hop, or even the master category of r&b and soul, is the persistent, morbid obsession with race and mortality. Listeners, shaggers, and DJs have a code for their preferences: “B & D” indicates a request for music by “black and dead” artists. This embalmed notion of a racial authenticity still pervades the scene, despite the coincident gradual erasure of blackness via a partial replacement with all-white bands and a subsequent shift in style starting in 1980. (Now Huey Lewis and Delbert McClinton can comfortably coexist with the Showmen and Sticks McGhee in a DJ set.) The automatic alterity (and invisibility) granted by death somehow buttresses, authenticates, and tames those fanged bits of blackness perceived as dangerous or unsavory to white norms, quietly disarming deceased African American artists and removing them from Beach Music’s economic equation. However, the occasional ugliness of the racialist assumptions, oppositions, and conflations endemic to Beach Music doesn’t diminish the power and beauty of the music itself, most of which is likewise situated within other various genres and curatorial models too. To a certain extent, you’re free to choose what you call it. Like so much American music vexed by scarred race relations, Beach Music involves both despicable and idealistic elements and attitudes. It’s hardly singular in that respect. But it can be hard to prize apart the songs themselves from their thick Carolina context. Indeed, it has become difficult for us to consider come of these tunes outside our Beach Music experience, even those with which we were quite familiar before we began. “Under the Boardwalk” and “Stagger Lee” have been completely and permanently recontextualized for us. Who, if anyone, owns a canon or category of music? What cultural desires – access, identification, authenticity – can a set of songs fulfill? What can Beach Music reveal about aesthetics and cultural control?
Here’s where things get more complicated. Beach Music does not contain a coherent or stable genre, a fact that several of our consultants slyly celebrate. (Our status as academics and non-Carolina natives elicited a lot of laughter and sighs; we might never understand…) Instead, it’s a slippery, constantly shifting transgenre aesthetic, often seemingly contradictory and deliberately mystified beyond a core canon of mid-tempo shuffle jump blues, rhythm and blues, doo-wop, boogie, rock and roll, Motown, and sweet soul (heavy on the harmony, light on the shouting) dating from the mid-1940’s through last week. Country boogie, gospel, and that amorphous category known as “oldies” also make appearances—DJ ‘Fessa John Hook even maintains that he invented both “cowboy shag” and “gospel shag” subgenres. Applied retroactively after its coinage in the mid to late-`60’s, the Beach Music label was once nearly synonymous with shag music, though since the 1980’s, the two categories have diffused and drifted apart. In the contemporary context, Beach Music has developed into an affective complex as much as an aesthetic complex—songs (and much more rarely, artists) are chosen for obscure criteria of feeling, ways to access emotionally (or to time-travel to) that nostalgic beach space of yore, as much as for formal elements conducive to shagging. As a result, Beach Music today seems more heavily historicized, mythologized, and aestheticized than shag music, which has become more dynamic because technical or tempo-based in definition, with 120 beats per minute as the gold standard. What lies herein leans unabashedly toward the Beach Music side of the divide. In the interest of managing scale and scope, we limited our immersive albeit brief investigation to DJs and musicians, not shaggers.
Musicians have been almost entirely disenfranchised by the ascendancy of the (white) celebrity DJ in the Beach Music community over the past twenty-five years. Bands are denied agency; DJs make the decisions, and musicians have no say as to whether they are a beach band or not. Style points, profiles, and profits apply as much to the DJ as to the record in question, which can be tempo-altered and edited, anyway. This subculture’s playlist (and guest list, both largely male, unless you’re a female shagger) can vary depending on your standing as DJ or label bigwig within the community. The very force of the DJ’s personality and personal style crown him as tastemaker, positioning him as the ultimate authority and arbiter of quality and Beach qualification. Beach Music today relies on and functions through DJ curation. It is whatever a respected DJ says it is––beach music can be almost anything, if you can convince an audience to follow you beyond B & D, a fact to which DJ Mike Lewis attests. And if a given tune doesn’t feel quite right, you can tweak it, live on turntables or a CD mixer or (more commonly now) with software at home, before heading out to the club. DJs employ tempo shifts, truncation and dilation, collage tricks, and multitrack layering of two or more tunes – mash-ups – to trademark their set and tailor it to their fans. In its contemporary DJcentric emphasis on curatorial control, audio technology, and sound-manipulative performance tactics, Beach Music resembles hip-hop or Jamaican soundsystem culture more than the historical r&b forms to which it stridently appeals. Although most Beachheads vehemently denounce and disavow hip-hop as irrelevant and amusical, it strikes us as not completely coincidental that Beach and shag DJs developed their methods in the early 1980’s, parallel to the explosion of hip-hop. Could this innovation represent a reactionary reclaiming of DJ identity and Beach Music’s cherished, even fetishized, collections of antique African American records in the face of black youths’ emergent radical restructuring of recorded music through hip-hop sampling, mixing, and rapping?
Beach Music is both populist and elitist; it’s organized by the dictates of middle-aged to elderly male white fans, DJs, and shaggers, who police the borders while allowing a certain amount of immigration. DJ Mike Lewis argues that it’s the hardest market in the country to break into, more exclusive than New York dance club culture. Our consultants welcomed our questions and participation with a healthy dose of skepticism if not suspicion, but we are still certainly outsiders. Although a youth movement through at least three of its generations or “waves,” the community has apparently failed to recruit in great numbers past the ‘80’s wave. (The most popular accessory for balding men at this year’s SOS – Society of Stranders – beach/shag event in North Myrtle Beach was a visor with a built-in gray-spiked, carpet-thick hairpiece.) But musically, DJs have made serious attempts to reach out to new fans and to move away from B & D vampires. The appropriative aesthetic has transformed into something oddly omnivorous and finicky at once. Despite Carolina artists like Clyde McPhatter, the Five Royales, and Maurice Williams, and its strictly localized use as a term, Beach Music has never been regionally specific in selecting artists, but much broader in scope, one of the thorniest aspects for an outsider to understand. (In fact, it favors New Orleans artists to bands from the Carolinas or even soul capitals like Memphis.) DJs are constantly redefining and revising the canon, and this dynamism manifests today primarily in careful, halting expansion, not contraction, incorporating such seemingly “safe” pop crossover artists as Cher, and even Outkast and the Black-Eyed Peas. (Although, when it comes to using crossover hip-hop hits like the latter, DJs sometimes digitally excise “non-musical” rapped sections or even replace them with elements of the original sampled soul song. John Hook’s remix of Sean Kingston’s “Beautiful Girl” – a recent hit by a Jamaican-born pop-dancehall artist – replaces segments with Ben E. King’s “Stand by Me,” the sample source, resulting in a weird syncretism twice-removed from the original.)
This wide-ranging phenomenon both affirms and explodes essentialist notions of culture, appealing to Southern white experience and memory as aesthetic attributes. If almost anything can be Beach Music, then what is it we’re talking about? Is the category destined for irrelevance? Yes, it can be nasty and racially and politically regressive. But there is hope, so let’s not bury our heads in the sand just yet. Let that song play out. “Rock and roll will stand,” sang General Johnson of the Showmen (and later the Chairmen of the Board) in the 1961 Beach Music anthem “It Will Stand.” “It’ll be here forever enough”: The song has outlived its original targets (critics of African American youth music) and now poignantly applies to Beach Music fans who were just kids when it was recorded in 1961. For Johnson, “rock and roll” provides an overarching and integrated rubric for the music he makes, an eternal and inclusive expression of African American artistry. He advises against the formulaic labeling of this “free-flowing” music: “Don’t you nickname it, don’t nickname it, you might as well claim it.” And yet “some folks don’t understand it”—maybe that’s why the leaky “Beach Music” container exists. But with the community’s increasing embrace of new musical forms and perhaps some younger recruits, hopefully the racist overtones of the history will wash away with the coming tide. “Forgive them for they know not what they’re doin’”…