Although several issues arise when looking at white covers of songs originally sung/written by black artists, one thing that really stood out to me was the practice of white singers removing the more "sexual" or even slightly provocative lines in the original songs in order to make them more appropriate for the radio and its white audiences.
Some of the line changes made a bit of sense, such as changing "way you wear those dresses, the sun comes shinin' through" to "wearin' those dresses your hair done up so nice" in "Shake Rattle and Roll"; that's certainly a more obviously inappropriate line I can see offending older radio listeners, or parents worried about their children listening to anything risqué. However, some lines are so subtle that you'd need to be listening closely to catch (such as "she rocks to the east, she rocks to the west" which was changed to "I've been to the east, I've been to the west" in "Tutti Frutti"), or one with only the slightest connection to anything sexual ("get out of that bed" was turned into "get out in that kitchen" in "Shake Rattle and Roll").
I find it interesting just how far white singers (and most likely their producers) went to avoid having anything that could be vaguely construed as sexual in their music. Obviously, the black artists had no such worries about the content of their music, which suggests that the white singers were altering the songs for the purpose of making them more popular. It makes sense that they would want their music to be popular; that is part of the commercial music game. However, the fact that they felt like a song needed to be changed to become popular does suggest that these singers were, at least partially, more interested in getting songs onto charts than honoring the original song. The other problem this act of changing songs suggests is that those covering songs by black artists and those listening to the covers believed that the original songs were not good enough on their own, and needed to be "purified" by white singers to be listened to and enjoyed more.
It's understandable for radio audiences to be worried about sexual content in their music, but one point to be made from that is that all of those "purified" songs I mentioned were songs by white artists, while the black artists were the ones being left off the charts because of the content of their songs. While Americans made an effort to control the sexual content in songs being played in the fifties, they also damaged the ability of black singers to hear their songs on the radio, unless they chose to remove the more risqué content or let them be covered by white singers.
Allie does a great job here pointing out the role of commercial objectives undoubtedly played in the decisions to sanitize certain songs when covering them. It points to the big difference between making music for a niche market (R&B) and trying to get national airplay on top 40 radio. And as Allie says, it does seem like something producers would be more interested in than the singers--though we'd have to dig into the specific evidence to verify that hypothesis.
ReplyDeleteOne issue this points to more broadly: what material is (in)appropriate to sing about in mainstream popular music? Undoubtedly, there is far more latitude for obscenity and sexual content nowadays. Nevertheless, that isn't to say that there isn't controversy still; we still have uproar about songs, and sometimes that uproar comes from the conservative/religious end of the spectrum, while other times it comes from the leftist and/or feminist end of the spectrum. Controversy about this kind of stuff is interesting to study in any era
This post also opens up some interesting racial issues that Even talks about in his blog mushroomtexture.blogspot.com. I encourage people to read that.
I agree with everything that you & this very mysterious Unknown have said here—the question of motive (does the cover primarily function as an homage to the original or as a new version that's designed to be more profitable?) is an important one. I also think looking at how these sanitized, desexualized covers became super popular points to something we dealt with in the sitcoms unit: how much of the success reflects how the music really represented people's tastes and values, and how much did the success of the music change people's tastes—or how much of the success was due to a lack of other, easily accessible (i.e. aired on radio) options? I don't really have an answer to this off the top of my head, but I wonder if there would be a way to definitively answer that.
ReplyDeleteThat's a really good point Alice. "Reflection vs. Manipulation" or "Producer vs Consumer", however you want to put it, is a theme we'll have to keep coming back to all year...
DeleteI think you're right to point out that white musicians removed sexually suggestive lyrics from their songs in order to become more popular and sell more albums. As you mention, older audiences might have been shocked by sexual connotations, and so sexual material simply wouldn't appeal to a broader audience. However, I wonder if these white artists might have felt a need to replace these lyrics not because the sex in and of itself would shock their audience, but because it would violate the constructed superiority of white people who saw themselves in opposition to the blacks with their free mention of sex and lack of restraint. [I couldn't post this earlier due to technical problems]
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