Cultural Postmodernism and Bobby McFerrin: A Case Study of Musical Production as the

Composition of Spectacle
Author(s): Stephen Hartnett
Source: Cultural Critique, No. 16 (Autumn, 1990), pp. 61-85
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
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Cultural Postmodernism and Bobby McFerrin:
A Case Study of Musical Production
as the Composition of Spectacle

Stephen Hartnett

Introduction

Fredric Jameson characterizescultural postmodernismas a pas-

tiche of regurgitated signifiers that have been wrenched from
their historicalcontext and wielded as "blankparody."These sev-
ered elements of a once-local project are here seen as the glossy
sheen on a global cultural project specifically geared toward the
excess consumption of commodities not only in the classicalMarx-
ian terms of projected use value, but also in the contemporary
sense of commodities as symbol value, as simulacra, as aesthet-
icized plugs to fill in the empty holes of a now-dehistoricizedsocial
consciousness.' Jean-Fran(ois Lyotard refers to this dynamic as

Portions of this paper were presented at the "Cultural Borders" conference at

the University of California, Santa Cruz, 13-14 May 1988. Subsequent drafts
have benefited greatly from discussions with and detailed textual commentaries
by Michael Davidson, Andrea Slane, and Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto.
1. Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capital-
ism," New Left Review, no. 146 (July-August 1984): 53-92.
? 1990 by Cultural Critique. 0882-4371 (Fall 1990). All rights reserved.

61

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62 StephenHartnett

the production of kitsch and suggests that such dehistoricizing

stylistic maneuvers foster a situation in which "eclecticism is the
degree zero of contemporary culture."2 Jacques Attali, on the
other hand, characterizes such historical and cultural intermin-
gling as representative of a new social discourse in which the
abundance of signifying practices allows for "the creation of one's
own code" and for the pursuit of a "free and revocable choice to
interlink with another's code."3 Central to each of these projects is
the examination of how contemporary culture generates subject-
positions. An analogous question-one on which Jameson, Lyo-
tard, and Attali are conspicuously silent-is that of how the con-
struction of subject-positions relates to and is dependent upon the
mass representation of gender. Sections 1 ("Cultural Postmodern-
ism") and 2 ("Performance Roles, Vocal Register, and Gender")
will explore the necessary interconnectedness of these issues.
Selecting Bobby McFerrin's musical productions as a field
within which to explore these questions stems from a confusion
that-mixed with a cautious tremor of epiphany-has persisted
since my first introduction to his work. Is McFerrin's music critical
parody? pastiche? an unfortunate reconstruction of "minstrelsy"
relations? a radical experiment in gender-position flexibility? Per-
haps all of these and/or none of these? Sections 3 ("Reading His-
torical Markers") and 4 ("Composing as Play: Utopia or Pluralist
Charade?") will address these questions. A representative exam-
ple of such a confusing simultaneity of apparently antagonistic
possibilities is McFerrin's "Thinking About Your Body,"4 where we
hear a rhythm track produced by hand tapping on chest and foot
on floor, where a cupped hand over mouth produces a muted
wah-wah effect, where a "walking" bass line meets a falsetto lead
intermixed with the squeals of a child and numerous other un-
nameable and yet familiar sounds-all produced simultaneously
by one human body with the aid of one microphone. The fact that

2. Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The PostmodernCondition: A Report on Knowledge,

trans. Brian Massumi and Geoff Bennington (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 1984), 76.
3. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economyof Music, trans. Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 132.
4. Bobby McFerrin, "Thinking About Your Body," Spontaneous Inventions
(Blue Note Records: 4BT-85110, 1986), track 1, side 1.

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 Cultural Postmodernism and Bobby McFerrin 63

such a remarkable array of sounds is produced solely by the body

of one performer brings us directly to the question of subject-
positionings, for not only does this suggest a possible refusal to
participate in the current trend toward the manipulation of dis-
embodied high-tech musical gadgetry, but it also suggests what we
might read either as yet another example of the breakdown of the
myth of the unified subject or as further evidence of the means by
which a now-pluralized and yet still-unified subject appropriates
difference.
What follows is an attempt to transcode each of these poten-
tial readings of cultural production through the lens of the others.
Specifically, how can we situate postmodernism as a cultural theo-
ry and/or McFerrin as a cultural worker within some larger histor-
ical context? Underlying this exploration is the question of how
McFerrin's project enacts the possible roles of popular culture
within the social construction of subjectivity, with special emphasis
given to the analogous question of how this process is related to
the representation of potential gender-position flexibility.

1. Cultural Postmodernism

There is a general agreement among the various philoso-

phers of cultural postmodernism that the fundamental movement
of this epoch entails both a blurring of cultural and aestheticbound-
aries and a breakdownof staticsubject-positions.
Jameson, for example,
is concerned with what he terms "the effacement of some key
boundaries or separations, most notably the erosion of the older
distinction between high culture and so-called mass or popular
culture."5 Lyotard shares this concern and labels such border
effacement as the result of the grab bag, eclectic logic of kitsch.
For both writers this new cultural and aesthetic mobility is the
product of the latest movement of capitalism toward an ever-
greater stage of global market saturation, one in which, as Lyo-
tard writes, "in the absence of aesthetic criteria, it remains possible

5. Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Culture," in The Anti-Aesthetic:

Essays on PostmodernCulture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press,
1983), 112.

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64 StephenHartnett

and useful to assess the value of works of art according to the

profits they yield."6 Attali sees such market-generated symbol and
commodity multiplication as the fourth stage of a cultural project
that has gone through the historically specific cycles of "forget-
ting," "believing," and "silencing," in order to arrive at the current
postmodern stage of "composing." We may summarize the first
three stages as follows: (1) Music is used and produced in the
"ritual" in an attempt "to makepeopleforget the general violence";(2)
Music is used in the heroic premodern phase of the rising bour-
geoisie and nation-state "to makepeople believein the harmonyof the
world, that there is order in exchange and legitimacy in commercial
power";(3) Music is used in the modern capitalist/imperialist ep-
och (i.e., Adorno's "Culture Industry") as a means of "silencing,by
mass-producinga deafening, syncretickind of music, and censoring all
other human noises."7
The fourth and present stage, that of "composing," com-
prises the postmodern moment in which the mass production of
"repetition" has accelerated the multiplication of signifiers to the
delirious point of meaninglessness. To be specific: the madden-
ing capitalist chase for creating and then satisfying wants has
necessitated-owing to its own structural delay of such gratifica-
tion-the proliferation of products/signs (all products are signs)
so infinite in scope that we can now look back upon the culture
industry not as passive victims of commodities with always already
fixed meaning/effects, but as active consumers in a global mall
where meaning/production is only completed through consump-
tion; where value is "composed" only through the consumer's
ability to reposition the commodity within a specific cultural con-
text. In short, the orthodox Marxian paradigm of the blitzed con-
sumer wired for the purchase of already value-sealed com-
modities is here shifted toward a recognition of the consumer-as-
composer. Attali writes that "in composition, stability, in other
words, differences, are perpetually called into question. Composi-
tion is inscribed not in a repetitive world, but in the permanent
fragility of meaning after the disappearance of usage and
exchange."8

6. Lyotard, PostmodernCondition, 76.

7. Attali, Noise, 19.
8. Ibid., 147.

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 Cultural Postmodernism and Bobby McFerrin 65

Attali's concept of "composition" can here be seen to rotate

upon an axis of double exclusion: on the one hand, we are not in a
world free from usage and exchange; on the other hand, the very
differences he calls into a state of "permanent fragility," by being
based solely on orthodox notions of usage and exchange, ignore
those aspects of "meaning"-such as gender-that cannot be so
easily conflated with the economic. Indeed, when we talk of the
postmodern breakdown of cultural and aesthetic categories or
boundaries, we need to talk not only about some new and challeng-
ing sociocultural and economic intermingling but also about an
increasingly successful critique of the elaborate attempts of high
modernism to repress the question of gender.9 This brings us to
the realization that the above-cited discussions of pastiche, kitsch,
and composition essentially repeat one of the exclusionary gestures
of high modernism, for their postmodern discussions still exclude,
or at least avoid, the question of gendering.'1
If the concern with the breakdown of cultural and aesthetic
boundaries signals-at least with Attali-the radical potential for
"composing" new codes and historical subject-positions, then cer-
tainly one key component of this potential is gender flexibility.
When we speak of postmodernism, then, we need to recognize the
fact that feminism-as the study of the production of these gender
divisions-can no longer be seen as an adjunct or subcategory but
as the essential study of what such postmodern blurrings of
boundaries and meaning re-"compositions" suggest in the direc-
tion of constructing new gender-flexible subjects.'1 As such, we

9. For further consideration of the question of how modernism "constituted

itself through a conscious strategy of exclusion" and of how this generated a
certain relationship to both mass culture and the representation of women, see
Andreas Huyssen, "Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other," in his After the
GreatDivide: Modernism,Mass Culture,Postmodernism(Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1986), 44-62.
10. For a critique of this strange absence of discussion on gender in the work of
certain theorists of the postmodern, see E. Ann Kaplan, RockingAround the Clock:
Music Television,Postmodernism,and ConsumerCulture(New York: Methuen, 1987),
151. "Certain theorists are drawn to postmodernism," Kaplan writes, "precisely
because it seems to render feminism obsolete-because it offers a relief from the
recent concentration on feminist discourse."
11. The possibility of such gender mobility is central to contemporary feminism
and is often discussed in relation to the concept of gender/subject flexibility as
allowing for the mutual recognition of the other as (an)other self. See in particular
Jessica Benjamin, "A Desire of One's Own: Psychoanalytic Feminism and Inter-

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66 StephenHartnett

might suggest that gendering and subject-positionflexibility are

among the numerous frontiers along which postmodern composi-
tions will become most productive of difference.'2 What follows,
then, is a discussion of gendering as it circulates within the gener-
al context of postmodernism, and with specific reference to the
gender-flexible role playing of Bobby McFerrin.

2. Performance Roles, Vocal Register, and Gender

The parallels between feminist writings on gender and male

writings on postmodernism are obvious and yet often left un-
discussed. Lyotard can write, "I define postmodern as incredulity
towards metanarratives,"13 and yet fail to cite gendering as one of
these metanarratives. I use "gendering" here to designate that
historical process by which sexual differences are sealed within a
naturalized symbolic order so as to conceal their historically con-
structed genealogy. Such "suturing" of indigenous historical ele-
ments into a larger metanarrative entails a movement backwards
from the self-reflexive criticism of cultural constructs to the seam-
less representation of difference as being "natural," as the mirror
reflection of preexisting biological facts.14 Gendering is therefore a

subjective Space," in FeministStudies/CriticalStudies,ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloom-

ington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 78-101, and Drucilla Cornell and Adam
Thurschwell, "Feminism, Negativity, Intersubjectivity," in Feminismas Critique,ed.
Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1987), 143-62.
12. The term frontier is borrowed from Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe,
Hegemonyand Socialist Strategy:Towardsa Radical DemocraticPolitics (London: Ver-
so, 1987), 134, where they call for "the multiplication of frontier effects," by
which it becomes possible to create "the very identities which will have to con-
front one another." They conceive of the frontier, then, not only as the space
where antagonistic social actors confront one another, but as the very act of
confrontation that in turn redefines the actors. This seems to me to be the most
helpful part of their theory, for it recognizes the reciprocal nature of social
action.
13. Lyotard, PostmodernCondition, xxiv.
14. The concept of "suturing" is most often used in film theory, where it
denotes a process by which the subject is enmeshed in a system of representation,
in a signifying practice. My use of the term is here expanded to suggest that
concepts and image fields may be similarly enmeshed/embedded/homogenized
within a representational system. The concept is frequently discussed in Teresa

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 Cultural Postmodernism and Bobby McFerrin 67

metanarrative, one of the grands recitsof which Lyotard, Jameson,

and Attali are so skeptical. Their silence on issues of gender is
indeed surprising, for the "revocable freedom to interlink with
another's code" (Attali) and the "potentially intense experience" of
exploring a signifying chain now devoid of its previously fixed
meaning effects (Jameson's postmodern "schizophrenia") are both
clearly similar to the renegotiation of gender described by contem-
porary feminists. Judith Butler, for example, tells us that taking on
a gender is implicit to enacting one's Sartrean "freedom of choice"
and that "the body is not a static or self-identical phenomenon, but
a mode of intentionality ... a mode of becoming." She goes on to
state that gender is "a sculpting of the body into a cultural form"
that entails "an interpretation of cultural realities ... a project of
renewing a cultural history in one's own corporeal terms."15
Such cultural reinterpretations and renewals, becomings and
intentionalities, remind us of Jameson's concept of the post-
modern as a montage of pastiched elements, of Lyotard's kitsch,
and of Attali's active composition. When we talk of a "postmodern
condition," then, we must explicitly include the question of gen-
der flexibility, for both projects rest on the logic of renegotiating
high modernist borders and exclusions. Our analysis here will
benefit from moving into a more concrete discussion of how
McFerrin enacts such a postmodern project of gender flexibility
via cultural renewal, pastiche, and composition. Such gender flex-
ibility will be addressed here as it is bound up in McFerrin's per-
formance role and vocal-register flexibility.
One need only recall the imagery surrounding Elvis Presley
or Frank Sinatra to understand the force with which machismo
comes to be associated with certain vocal registers. The cases of

de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't:Feminism,Cinema, Semiotics(Bloomington: Indiana Uni-

versity Press, 1984), and is central to much of the work of Stephen Heath. Also
helpful is chapter 5, "Suture,"of KajaSilverman,TheSubjectof Semiotics(Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1983), 194-236.
15. Judith Butler, "Variationson Sex and Gender: Beauvoir, Wittig, and
Foucault,"in Feminismas Critique,128-131. I must admit that I find it hard to
read the rhetoric of "free choice" without squirming: the co-optation of such
phrases for the ideological purposes of hyperconsumerismwould seem to force
us into a more criticalanalysisof the concept of "choice."The Bush administra-
tion's menacing attitude towardabortion might, however,suggest that the ques-
tion of "free choice" is again coming to represent serious political differences.

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68 StephenHartnett

Presley and Sinatra are particularly representative in that for both

performers singing in a falsetto would not be in keeping with the
macho image.16 Or take the example of Nat King Cole, where a
fixity within a limited vocal range is coupled with a smooth vibrato
delivery to create a masculine image.17 We can cite further exam-
ples of how a fixed vocal range corresponds to gender roles by
noting the carefully constructed imagery surrounding Billie Holi-
day, or, more to the point, Ella Fitzgerald, who became the culture
industry's queen royale of the show tune.18 The point here is that
earlier vocalists nurtured a fixed and definitive performance
character that was reflected in their fixity within a particular vocal
range. McFerrin, on the other hand, has no such fixed position
either in terms of his performance character or in terms of his
place within a vocal register.
Perhaps the most obvious example of McFerrin's gender-
position flexibility as expressed via vocal-register flexibility was
when he performed The Wizardof Oz on Garrison Keillor's syndi-
cated radio show, "A Prairie Home Companion." McFerrin sang
the parts of Dorothy, the witches (both good and evil), the

16. The reader may object to such generalization and cite the contrary exam-
ples of tenors in doo-wop groups and barbershop quartets. We need, however, to
note that in both cases the tenor's falsetto is legitimized by its bounding within a
specifically masculine construct. Indeed, the requirement of extensive private
practice (which both bonds the group members and isolates them from others)
first overrides the question of public gender re-representation; the specifically
play-acting nature of performance (particularly with barbershop quartets) then
again overrides the question of any serious gender-position critique when the
group does perform in public. In both cases the use of a falsetto is legitimized by
the patriarchal context of its performance. Recall the irony of Brian Wilson's
beautiful falsetto: his remarkable vocal flexibility was neutralized in terms of
suggesting a potential gender flexibility by the fact that it was situated within
Mike Love's consistentlyjuvenile anthems for cars, surf heroes, and mythic "surf-
er girls."
17. A particularly obvious example is Cole's remarkably sexist "Walking My
Baby Back Home," The Nat King Cole Story(Capitol: SWCL-1613, 1961), track 3,
side 3.
18. Fitzgerald is, of course, a brilliant technician and undoubtedly one of the
great vocalists of all time, and yet she came to be a plaything of the show-tune
elite-the African-American vocalist who played to audiences that had paid to
hear the cliched productions of Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin,
Richard Rodgers, etc. Such "Ella-sings-the-songbook-of..." albums did, how-
ever, produce some of my favorites in her sassy versions of Cole Porter's show
tunes. Such are the antagonisms of recognizing the role of the culture industry
while unashamedly loving certain of its creations.

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 Cultural Postmodernism and Bobby McFerrin 69

Munchkins, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion;
he provided sound effects of houses dropping, hurricanes blowing,
and witches melting; and, of course, the castle guards doing their
famous chant. Such vocal gymnastics require not only incredible
technical control but also the willingness to assume an entire cast
(literally) of roles previously restricted along lines of gender, age,
color, species, etc. Such role playing requires a dramatic expansion
of the performer's vocal range, as well as a willingness to re-
version/recompose accepted standards of gender-specific perfor-
mance roles and imagery. Such playful gender-position flexibility
was evident again in McFerrin's recent performance with the Tan-
dy Beal Dance Company,19 where he was at various points-in
addition to the characters from Oz-birds, cats, fish, balloons,
wind, water, trees, children, polysexual jungle creatures, and
African-American accompanist to and sometime participant with
the white dancers. What does such eclectic role playing and its
required vocal-register flexibility suggest in the manner of a
postmodern critique of gendering?
We can begin by stating the obvious fact that none of McFer-
rin's characters fit into our preexisting notions of male pop-star
imagery. This is not a very helpful statement, however, for what
makes McFerrin's project so tricky is exactly the fact that he simul-
taneously engages in a number of apparently conflicting strat-
egies. On one level his project would seem to resemble a certain
postmodern playing with Oedipal positions, or perhaps a non-
violent and uncynical experiment with androgyny, but in each of
these cases his sense of gender flexibility appears to be based
upon almost pre-Oedipal concerns that are nonetheless situated
within what we would recognize as a standard romantic frame-
work. The real twist is that with McFerrin we never see either the
loss implied in self-differentiation or any concern with the "ro-
mantic" pursuit of sexual relations. Indeed, what is so striking
about McFerrin's heterogeneous role playing is that it appears as if
all is childlike fulfillment and happiness.20
The question is whether we see this complex role playing as a

19. Performance at the University of California, San Diego, Mandeville Per-

forming Arts Center, 29 January 1988.
20. The terminology used here is drawn in large part from Kaplan, Rocking
Around the Clock, 55.

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70 StephenHartnett

politically motivated refusal of suture or as a pluralist and pre-

Oedipal masquerade.The photography of Cindy Sherman is here
exemplary of the former. For Sherman the reappropriation of
movie stills and other culturally loaded signifiers literally "enacts
the notion of femininity as masquerade, as a representation of
male desire."21As such, her project is at least intended as a de-
constructive movement, as what Kate Linker calls "a refusal of
suture, which opens points of rupture within dominant ideol-
ogy."22 Such refusal of suture is at least arguably apparent within
the music world in the fascinating role playing of Prince and in
the early (but definitely not recent) work of David Bowie.23
McFerrin, however, seems to lack any such critical intent and
seems instead to enact the eclectic nonrelational kitsch/pastiche
derided by Jameson and Lyotard. Indeed, I would suggest that
McFerrin'srole playing is not critical,but simply a masquerade,a
childlikevaudevilleof nostalgia,a pluralist bazaar of joyous charac-
ters to try on and take off. Craig Owens describes such uncritical
pluralism as a situation in which we are reduced "to being an
other among others; it is not a recognition, but a reduction of
difference to absolute indifference, equivalence, interchangeabil-
ity."24We might conceive of the difference as between the threat-
eningly hellish laughter of the carnival (Prince, the early Bowie,
and perhaps certain punk artists)or the momentary playactingof
the spectacle (McFerrin).This distinction is central to Mary Rus-
so's "Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory," in which she
states that the experience-which I'm here suggesting as consis-

21. Craig Owens, "The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism," in

Anti-Aesthetic,75.
22. Kate Linker, "Representation and Sexuality," in Art After Modernism:Re-
thinkingRepresentation,ed. Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contempor-
ary Art, 1984), 414.
23. Both of these examples are, however, open for much debate. Bowie's early
musical work as well as his brilliant performance in The Man Who Fell to Earth
have recently been overshadowed by his notoriously bad video with Mick Jagger,
and, even worse, his recent appearance in a Pepsi commercial. Prince is equally
contestable as a positive example here, for while his musical performance charac-
ters are indeed complex and challenging in terms of standard representations of
gender, his performance in the movie Purple Rain left little doubt as to where he
stands on the questions of gender politics.
24. Owens, "Discourse of Others," 58.

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 Cultural Postmodernism and Bobby McFerrin 71

tent with McFerrin's project-involves nothing more than a "tem-

porary loss of boundaries" in which such "topsy-turvy time-out" is
"inevitably set right and on course" so as to "redefine social
frames." Such a movement is described by Russo as "essentially
conservative."25
McFerrin's role playing with gendered positions might be
seen then as utilizing the postmodern tactics of pastiche and cul-
tural renewal, but of doing so without the critical/parodic edge
described by Jameson, Attali, Butler, and Linker. It is as if what
Constance Penley calls "the passive specularity of the woman, her
objectification as spectacle by and for the masculine gaze,"26 has
here been renegotiated by McFerrin as his own willing and playful
self-specularization for the appreciative gaze of the live audience
and the mediated gaze of the record-buying public. McFerrin
seems, then, to be enacting not a critique but a playful staging of
gender-position flexibility as spectacle.

3. Reading Historical Markers

We will now proceed to analyze McFerrin's particularly com-

plex relation to the question of how such postmodern spectacles
and pastiches function with reference to historical conscious-
ness-specifically, with how the crossing of "borders" may signal
either a conscious renegotiation and re-versioning of history, or
simply, as Jameson suggests, a blank dehistoricizing and decontex-
tualizing for the sake of enhancing a commodity's ability to func-
tion either as a simulacrum or as part of a spectacle.27 The com-

25. Mary Russo, "Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory," in FeministStud-

ies/Critical Studies, 215.
26. Constance Penley, "A Certain Refusal of Difference: Feminism and Film
Theory," in Art After Modernism, 384.
27. Spectacle and simulacra are not the same. Spectacles are reproductions or
re-representations of an "absent reality," or, as Guy Debord writes in his Societyof
the Spectacle(Detroit: Black and Red, 1983), #6, "It is the heart of the unrealism
of the real society," in which social divisions and alienation are buried beneath
the veil of social unity. It is, in short, commodity fetishism gone wild. Obvious
examples here are the Super Bowl and the Olympics. Simulacra are, on the other
hand, yet a more advanced stage of spectacle, in which-as Baudrillard writes in
his "Precession of the Simulacra," in Art After Modernism-"It is no longer a

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72 Stephen Hartnett

plexity of McFerrin's relation to these questions stems from the

fact that his work is riven with antagonisms: instances where con-
fusing and often opposing versions of the above-stated tactics
seem to be at work. Notice, for example, that McFerrin has thor-
oughly obviated all previous notions of cultural "borders," but
that his "transgressions" extend in multiple directions: on the one
hand, extending a different cultural perspective into new arenas
while, on the other hand, willfully participating in and even en-
couraging the further market exploitation of African-American
culture. In both actions (and there are many more), the use of
historical markers and quotations is central, as is the sense of
enacting cultural "border" crossings. Within the past three years,
for example, McFerrin has performed with jazz legends Herbie
Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and Jon Hendricks, with such hybrid
high/low, jazz/rock/show-tune groups as Weather Report and
Manhattan Transfer, within such pseudofolk arenas as Garrison
Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion," with a 135-piece or-
chestra for Austrian TV, as the lead instrument for the theme
song to Tavernier's film Round Midnight, as the musical overdub
for a Levi's 501 Blues TV commercial, and as a musical-and
sometimes dancing-component in joint improvisations with the
Tandy Beal Dance Company.
The notion that such transgressing of cultural and historical
borders is in some way indicative of a specifically postmodern
condition is highly problematic, for within the so-called "low arts"
this hybrid borrowing and outright pilfering of different positions
has always been central-particularly within African-American
culture. Notice, for example, that many of the first-known African-
American spirituals were actually Methodist hymns written and

question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even parody. It is rather a ques-

tion of substituting signs of the real for the real itself" (254). As Baudrillard sees
it, spectacles function "to mask the absence of a basic reality," whereas simulacra
"bear no relation to reality whatsoever" (256). Jameson furthers our understand-
ing of this distinction when he states in his "Cultural Logic" essay that simulacra
are "identical copies for which no original has ever existed" (64). In Recodings:
Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Seattle: Bay Press, 1985), Hal Foster echoes the
reading given by Debord when he writes that spectacles "operate via our fascina-
tion with the hyperreal, with perfect images that make us whole at the price of
delusion, of submission" (82). The distinction is particularly tricky and will thus
be left for later discussion; for now I will argue that McFerrin circulates within
both strategies.

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 Cultural Postmodernism and Bobby McFerrin 73

disseminated (in the effort to "convert the heathens") by the white

evangelist Charles Wesley and the British composer Isaac Watts. Or
note that Cole Porter's show tune "Blow Gabriel Blow" (from his
Anything Goes [1934]) is actually a re-version of an African-
American traditional spiritual.28 Such re-versioning of old stan-
dards is in fact one of the central traditions of much popular
culture in general, and American music in particular. There are,
for further examples, Coltrane's many wonderful re-versions of
"My Favorite Things" (from Richard Rodgers and Oscar Ham-
merstein's 1959 musical The Sound of Music),29or the fact that "rag"
was essentially a re-versioning of traditional piano pieces in which
the advent of a "stride" bass technique (first invented to produce a
danceable rhythm for prostitutes in the bordellos of Baltimore) was
coupled with melodic improvisation to break up (to "rag") the
piece's previous unity. Such re-versioning is evident in much reg-
gae, and is absolutely fundamental to the construction of hip-hop,
in which teams of DJs compose fragments snatched from albums,
the radio, TV, etc., over a mechanized rhythm track. My point here
is twofold: first, to suggest that the transgression of cultural bound-
aries is in fact a fundamental element of much African-American
musical production; second, to suggest that such compositions
reproduced through re-versioning are inherently loaded with his-
torical significance.
McFerrin's eclecticism might be read, then, not as an erasure
of historical contextuality but as representative of the African-
American tradition of juxtaposing musico-historical quotations.
An obvious example is McFerrin's recent re-version of Dizzy
Gillespie's monumental "A Night in Tunisia," which McFerrin aptly
titled "Another Night in Tunisia."30 The original was written by
Gillespie and Frank Paparelli and first recorded by Gillespie on 22

28. For a discussion of some early examples of such cultural intermingling, see
Paul Oliver, "Spirituals," in The New GroveGospel,Blues, andJazz, ed. Paul Oliver,
Max Harrison, and William Balcom (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1986), 1-
19.
29. A representative example is his Coltrane:Live at the Village VanguardAgain!
(Impulse: A-9124, 1966), all of side 2, where the four-minute candy-sweet origi-
nal is both de- and reconstructed through twenty-one minutes of ensemble im-
provisation at the hands of Coltrane, with the help of Alice Coltrane (piano),
Rashied Ali (drums), Jimmy Garrison (bass), and Pharaoh Sanders (tenor sax).
30. McFerrin, SpontaneousInventions, track 6, side 1.

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74 Stephen Hartnett

February 1946 at the 52nd Street Victor Studios in New York.31 In

the remake, Gillespie's famous trumpet style is referred to via
McFerrin's hand-muted vocal; the original comping of Bud Powell
(piano) and Charlie Parker (sax) is here substituted by the Trans-
fer's vocals. In both cases we find a historical quote that is simulta-
neously deconstructed: first, Gillespie's style is shown to be repeat-
able (i.e., not organically his own); second, the very distinction
between the sound regions of instrumentation proper and vocals is
here seen as flexible. We're thus given the chance to reconstruct the
historical aspect of the original technique while simultaneously
watching it splinter into replication, mutation, and revision.32
McFerrin's version also features a solo by Jon Hendricks.
Hendricks is famous from his days with the Lambert-Hendricks-
Ross singing group, and here he scats in a style that clearly calls
upon his 1962 recording of "Good Old Lady."33Again we find a
historically specific style arising in the present. What is of particu-
lar interest is the juxtaposition of Hendricks's scatting against the
Transfer's harmonies, for we discover a specifically African-
American improvisational style layered over the Transfer's care-
fully arranged show-tune harmonies. We might remember that
Gillespie and other jazz players spent much time in Europe and
Africa, where they were relatively free from the racism in the
United States, and we might also recall the specifically co-opta-
tional history of scat (two key examples being that both Louis
Armstrong and Scatman Crothers came to be little more than
culture industry puppets, professional minstrels34). We might fur-

31. There are numerous versions, but many musicians and critics alike have
come to regard the cut from the May 1953 gig at Massey Hall in Toronto as
perhaps the most exemplary. The lineup that night included Gillespie (on a
borrowed trumpet!), Charlie Parker (alto sax), Bud Powell (piano), Charles
Mingus (bass), and Max Roach (drums). See Dizzy Gillespie, The GreatestJazz
ConcertEver (Prestige: 24024, 1973), track 3, side 2.
32. Here I echo the writing of Rosalind Krauss, who says in The Originalityof the
Avant-Gardeand OtherModernistMyths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 170, that
"it is from a strange new perspective that we look back on the modernist origin
and watch it splintering into endless replication."
33. Jon Hendricks, "Good Old Lady," Fast Livin' Blues (Columbia: C5 8605,
1962), track 2, side 2.
34. The image of the artist as puppet is used to convey the relations of produc-
tion between the individual performer and the company during the heyday of

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 Cultural Postmodernism and Bobby McFerrin 75

ther note the Transfer's recent trip to Brazil, during which they
were introduced to Brazilian rhythms, instruments, and song ma-
terials, many of which showed up in their latest album. In this
instance, we have a complex allegory for racial exclusion and mu-
sical co-optation. McFerrin's recording of "Another Night in
Tunisia" may thus be read simply as a tribute to Gillespie and the
other great beboppers, but we cannot help but remember why
these musicians traveled to foreign places such as Tunisia in the
first place: specifically, to escape racism. McFerrin's invitation for
Hendricks to sing his scat solo might also be seen, on the one
hand, simply as a tribute to Hendricks's important role as one of
the early great African-American vocalists, but, on the other
hand, we cannot help but feel the tension between a vocal style
that was historically co-opted by the dominant white culture in-
dustry and the new musical co-optation occurring under the guise
of the Transfer's venture into Brazilian music. The question,
then, is how to read such cultural and historical juxtapositions.
Perhaps one strategy is to reassert that such postmodern
compositions of musico-historical markers cannot obscure their
market relations. I stated earlier that many jazz players ventured
abroad to escape racism, and I need now to add that they made a
nifty profit while doing so. The profitable openness of the Euro-
pean market for jazz is thus ironically echoed in the fact that
McFerrin's re-version of Gillespie is garnering millions of dollars
in record sales. At this point we need to recall Jameson's assertion
that using historical fragments such as "A Night in Tunisia" actu-
ally serves to accelerate the commodification process and that
such loaded signs are marketable specifically as nostalgia, as the
welcome voice of some mythicized past. There can be no doubt
that such a process is at work here. This is, however, not as heavy-
handed a statement as a quick reading might suggest, for we've
already established (via Attali) that meaning is only completed
through the consumer's utilization of the commodity as raw mate-
rial for his or her own recomposition. Indeed, it is the renegotia-
tion of meanings that takes place via consumption that is seen

the culture industry. For a statistics-packed history of this period see Dave
Harker, One For the Money: Politics and Popular Song (London: Hutchinson and
Co., 1980), which, incidentally, displays a cover of an artist-as-puppet.

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76 StephenHartnett

here as potentially liberating. With this reading of Attali we find

an almost-giddy sense of utopian pleasure, a thrill in reclaiming
the right to compose spontaneously one's own code from the ruins
of previous codes. The problem, however, is whether Attali's
utopian code re-versioning and happy composition requires (as
Jameson suggests) the abandonment of historical consciousness.
The above analysis of McFerrin'sre-version of Gillespie should
suggest that both elements are at play. In the following section
we'll explore further this question of how composition works,with
specific emphasis on McFerrin'sprojectionof music-as-improvisa-
tion and composition-as-play.

4. Composing as Play: Utopia or Pluralist Charade?

"Walkin"is a fine example of McFerrin'sconstant attention to

music-as-play. In "Walkin,"McFerrin and jazz legend Wayne
Shorter adopt the classicaljazz form of dual improvisation,where
each player takes turns with lead and comping roles. The piece
thus recalls the classicjazz and bluesjams where musicians "trade
fours"and eights (meaning the number of bars for which you play
lead). The object of the game is to stretch your instrument and/or
voice to its limits in terms of pitch (both playersgo as high and low
as physically possible) and sound variation (Shorter squeaks and
squeals while McFerrinimitates a stand-up bass, a high-hat, and a
muted trumpet). The goal here is not to dominate the other play-
er but to interactplayfully in a manner that highlights each other's
abilities.This is composition-as-play,music as an activitythat is, to
quote Attali, "a taking pleasure in the tools of communication, in
use-time and exchange-time as lived and no-longer stockpiled,"as
a "production of one's own enjoyment."35
Such enjoyable production of communication is particularly
satisfyingwhen undertaken within a collectiveframework,for it is
while interactingwith another that mutual recognition of self and
other-as-a-self is achieved. Such playful interchanging of roles
and spontaneous inventing of a collective space is deeply utopian.
The great philosopher of hope, Ernst Bloch, wrote that musical

35. Attali, Noise, 142, 143.

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 Cultural Postmodernism and Bobby McFerrin 77

"joy"is the result of a voice involved in a "productive develop-

ment, a music of yearning, calling, believing,"and that such year-
ning could help foster "a birth of faith out of music."36 For Bloch
this utopian yearning for faith and joy was expressed by alluding
to the "not-yetconscious,"to "thatwhich does not yet exist, which
is lost and dimly sensed . . .our utopia calling."37Perhaps we
might seek to read McFerrin'sconstructionof music-as-playasjust
such a utopian gesture toward faith and believing (McFerrinis,
after all, extremely religious), as an attempt to enact musically
what cannot yet be found in the social. We might further contex-
tualize the issue and discuss McFerrin'sutopian aspect within the
specific history of African-American culture, for this history is
one of oppression: a perverse dialectic that is readily apparent in
the entrenchment within the African-American community of
self-loathing and lack of identity, in the phenomenal level of di-
vorce, and in the incredible number of children born to unpart-
nered mothers.38 Against this backdrop McFerrin's recent
number-one seller and Grammy Award-winning "Don't Worry,
Be Happy"39might be seen as a Bloch-like attempt to prefigure
what is "not yet," to envision the humanjoy and self-contentment
historicallydenied to African-Americancommunities.
For this reading to stick, however, we need to examine the
methods by which McFerrin constructs this potentially utopian
vision, for as we listen more closely certain contradictionsbecome
apparent. One of these contradictions is that McFerrinhere for-
goes all musical complexity and instead relies on a catchy melody
that is easily consumed owing in large part to its tonal familiarity
and constant repetition (McFerrineven tells us to "singalong"and

36. Ernst Bloch, "The Philosophy of Music" (excerpt from Geist der Utopie,
1918), in his Essayson thePhilosophyof Music, trans. Peter Palmer (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1985), 42.
37. Ibid., 133.
38. In this context we come to see the inexplicable lack of consciousness behind
Michael Jackson's megabillion seller "Billie Jean," Thriller (Epic: QE 38112,
1982), track 2, side 2, where he sings "Billie Jean is not my lover/ she's just a girl
who claims/ that I am the one/ but the kid is not my son." Amiri Baraka com-
mented on the unforgivable nature of such lyrics in a lecture at the University of
California, San Diego, 11 February 1988.
39. McFerrin, "Don't Worry, Be Happy," SimplePleasures (EMI-Manhattan: El-
48059, 1988), track 1, side 1.

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78 StephenHartnett

to "learn it note-for-note"). We should also comment on the use of

multiple tracking. In McFerrin's previous work the emphasis was
on solo vocal performance, or, when other musicians performed,
on dual improvisation (as with Shorter on "Walkin,"with Hancock
on "Turtle Shoes," with comedian Robin Williams on "Beverly Hills
Blues"), but here McFerrin utilizes the more standard multiple-
track method to create a rather standardized musical arrangement.
The piece contains bass, piano (two voices sing in harmony so as to
create a sparse comping effect), lead voice, and lead melodic "in-
strument." Each component is rendered by McFerrin's voice, but
the duplication is such that we sense not a conscious exploration of
new possibilities but a simple re-production or vocal simulation of
an already legitimized form of arrangement. Instead of the frag-
mented suggestion of harmonic possibilities offered in live im-
provisational works, we here find not only a standard melodic line
accompanied by a major harmony but the re-introduction of multi-
ple-track recording as made possible by the use of contemporary
studio technology. The musical aspect of the piece is thus paradoxi-
cal: we find a beautiful melody and McFerrin's trademark sense of a
lightness or playfulness, yet the effect is rendered through the
incorporation of previously eschewed forms of studio technology
and melodic repetition.
"Don't Worry, Be Happy" is equally problematic in terms of
its lyrics. Lines such as "aint got no roof above yer head/ some-
body stole yer bed," and "landlord says yer rent is late/ says he
might have to litigate," and "aint got no cash/ aint got no style," all
clearly recall the traditional concept of "singing the blues" and
foreground the economic situation of many African-Americans,
yet lines such as "no girl to make you smile" can only suggest a
certain latent sexism.40 McFerrin's cure-all conclusion is to stop
thinking and just "be happy." He sings, "I'll give you my phone
number/ you call me, I'll make you happy," and says, "I'm not
worried," all with a curiously affected Jamaican accent reminis-
cent of a Rasta priest (Marley?) who even refers to his listeners as
"good little children."41 The question, then, is whether this is a

40. Two fine analyses of such lyrical antagonisms within the blues tradition are
Charles Keil, Urban Blues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), and Paul
Gordon, Blues and the Poetic Spirit (New York: Da Capo Press, 1975).
41. A peculiar twist on this theme is James Taylor's "Handy Man," where he

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 Cultural Postmodernism and Bobby McFerrin 79

utopian allusion to a possible future state of happiness, registering

the voice of protest, or a crude market-generated pastiche, and
thus making public political resignation. The question is clearly
not this black-and-white: a sophisticated analysis needs to show
the simultaneity of numerous alternatives, with special attention
being given to the possibility that each position is in some secret
way dependent on the others. Our reading will hinge, then, upon
an openness to this simultaneity and upon further analysis of the
two most obvious elements of the piece: one, its lyrical directness;
two, its peculiar adoption of a reggae feel. As for the lyrics (in
addition to our earlier comments in the preceding paragraph), we
need to remember that Bloch's musical utopias were never narra-
tive and always allusions: enigmatic and often irrational intima-
tions that were hinted at and sensed through a metaphysical
haze.42 Simply stating "be happy" seems, on the other hand, more
like the too-easy advice of an assimilationist. Walter Kaufmann
writes: "I do not know what I feel. The more deeply and intensely
I feel, the less I know what I feel. If I have words for it, adequate
words, the feeling is not deep and intense."43 This is by no means
an endorsement for Kaufmann's heroic version of philosophy and
aesthetics as the unnameable quest for Godhood, and yet the
above quotation is appropriate for our discussion, for, in short,
McFerrin's advice of "don't worry, be happy" strikes me as entirely
too adequate, as too fulfilled in its simplicity and completeness. As
we stated earlier, McFerrin seems willfully sealed within a pre-
Oedipal mist of totality and wholeness that exists prior to-or
perhaps oblivious to-both social alienation and any problematic
self-differentiation.

constructs an image of a sexually potent mythical figure who is able to satisfy

female desire through his healing and magical lovemaking. The piece is central
to the movie SmoothTalk(1986), where a young woman (played by Laura Dern) is
initiated into sexual consciousness through an eerie encounter with an allegori-
cal embodiment of desire (played by Treat Williams). This is a particularly tricky
film, and I'm more than willing to rethink this reading if anyone has objections.
42. For Bloch, the utopian project must be "completely beyond the scope of
everything verifiable," and it must of necessity rest upon "the play of intuition
and mystical irrationalism." This is the understanding presented by David Drew
in "From the Other Side: Reflections on the Bloch Centenary," introduction to
Ernst Bloch, Essays on the Philosophyof Music, xxv.
43. Walter Kaufmann, Critique of Religion and Philosophy (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1978), 79.

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80 StephenHartnett

We've already discussed certain musical aspects of the piece

(its use of melodic repetition, prearranged harmonies, and studio
multiple-track technology) and will next explore the piece's pecu-
liar adaptation of a reggae feel. Our first point is to realize that
the popular conception of reggae is, for the most part, completely
erroneous. The contemporary celebration of Rasta politics (which
in its most crude formulation gives us the binaries of peace not
war, ganja not guns, dancing not fighting, etc.) is highly problem-
atic, for there are numerous strains and historical phases of reg-
gae, many of which-as Dick Hebdige details in his Cut-n-Mix:
Culture, Identity, and Caribbean Music-have been traditionally
linked with gang violence, the mythicization of drugs and alcohol,
and the blatant objectification of women.44 The shifting of reggae
toward a peaceful and explicitly counterhegemonic politics is a
very recent phenomenon, and its popularization has been made
possible only through the white remixing of Jamaican musical
tendencies: that is, turning down the bass and adding Western
harmonies and more traditional guitar licks (certain of Marley's
original tracks were remixed in British studios by white pro-
ducers; think of the Police, or of Clapton's remake of "I Shot the
Sheriff"). McFerrin's use of reggae thus clearly facilitates his con-
veying a sense of easygoing pseudospiritual togetherness, but in
doing so the piece simultaneously furthers the Westernization of
the more authentic Jamaican form. Simon Frith writes, "It is easy
to move from the directness of music's emotional impact to an
assertion of its natural meaning."45 I would add that this move-
ment is all the more simplified when the performer eschews all
critical intent and chooses instead to utilize a popular market-
generated (mis)conception of a musical form coupled with the
paternalistic invitation to just "be happy."
We still might suggest, however, that McFerrin's melodic
technique is in some way "utopian," for he does-in many
places-literally play with the potential for spontaneous composi-

44. See Dick Hebdige, Cut-n-Mix:Culture,Identity,and CaribbeanMusic (London:

Comedia [Methuen]), 1987).
45. Simon Frith, "Hearing Secret Harmonies," in High TheorylLowCulture:
Analyzing Popular TV and Film, ed. Colin McCabe (New York: St. Martin's Press,
1986), 66.

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 Cultural Postmodernism and Bobby McFerrin 81

tion through a deconstruction of existing musical standards. We

might be more clinical about this activity and state that McFerrin
deconstructs the sutured melodic line so as to liberate its indige-
nous harmonic elements. Thus a line that previously read as a
neat and "well-tempered" flow is fragmented to make room for
drops of an octave or a fifth, leaps up an octave or onto some
other harmonic component. The gravitational tonal center is thus
surrounded by brief glimpses of its own harmonic alternatives so
as to convey a strong sense of melody while simultaneously achiev-
ing a playful sense of chromatic flexibility. We need to clarify,
however, the fact that such tonal creativity is not postmodern.
Indeed, such chromatic flexibility was previously explored-
within the African-American jazz tradition-by Ornette Coleman
(sax), Charles Mingus (bass), George Russell (the musician cre-
dited with the first programmatic use of "modes"), and Teddy
Charles (piano), just to name a few. We should also note the early
explorations of the Vienna School of composers (Schoenberg,
Mahler, Berg, Webern, and others), where such tonal flexibility
took a decidedly atonal turn toward the 12-tone row and later
serial compositions.46 In both traditions there was an emphasis on
recomposing a sense of melody and tonal possibility freed from
the structural demands of consonance.
Placing McFerrin in this tradition becomes problematic when
we realize that his melodic fragmentation is still structured
around a classically tonic-centered melody. His remarkable jumps
and runs throughout the scale still imply a notion of tonality

46. For a concise history of this period of experimentation in African-

American jazz, see Max Harrison, "Jazz Composition II," in The New GroveGos-
pel, Blues, and Jazz, 304-16. Concerning the use of the 12-tone, I want to be
perfectly clear that my references to the 12-tone technique are dependent solely
upon the most basic formal understanding culled from various introductory
texts. I am as baffled by the intricacies of the technique as most musicians (of
which I am one), and here quote Donald Marshall-with somewhat of a sigh of
relief-from his foreword to Stephen Melville, PhilosophyBeside Itself: On De-
constructionand Modernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986),
xi, where he writes that "any amateur can hear an organizing key, but not even
an expert could write out the tone row from hearing a serial composition."
Robert Morgan repeats this theme in his "Secret Languages: The Roots of Musi-
cal Modernism," in CriticalInquiry 10, no. 3 (March 1984): 461, n. 29, where he
speaks of the 12-tone technique's "extraordinary resistance to systematic techni-
cal clarification."

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82 StephenHartnett

known as "horizontal" (i.e., the lateral progression from note to

note creates a series of overtones that cluster around a tonic),
while his use of overdubbed harmonies in "Don't Worry, Be
Happy" and "Drive My Car" (just to name a few) reemploys classi-
cal "vertical" harmonies (i.e., tones stacked on top of one another
so as to create a consonant combination, usually some form of a
triad). That such hackneyed tonal structures here lie side by side
with other tracks of aesthetic creativity appears to represent a
postmodern grab bag of antagonistic elements. I would suggest
again, however, that these antagonistic elements appear to
represent-as with McFerrin's gender playing as well-not so
much a critical recomposition of or utopian alternative to domi-
nant ideologies, but a joyous and playful pluralist pastiche.

5. The Political Aesthetics of Abundance?

I'll begin my conclusion by recalling Hal Foster's statement

that a counterhegemonic and resistant cultural practice would be
one in which we see "the social formation not as a total system, but
as a conjuncture of practices, many adversarial, where the culture
is an arena in which contestation is possible." Foster suggests that
it is as an intervention against the myth of a completely sutured
social body that a postmodern aesthetic might prove itself as polit-
ically motivated, and he argues that such a committed practice can
best serve its interests by aggressively exposing social antago-
nisms.47 There is a peculiar ellipsis here, however, in that the
celebrated multiplication of counterhegemonic subject-positions
is not only analyzed from the specifically limiting perspective of
the "high arts," but that such activity is implied as necessarily
corresponding to an economy of abundance. Attali offers a simi-
lar view when he writes that "composition is not the same as mate-
rial abundance ... it is the individual's conquest of his own body
and potentials. It is impossible without material abundance and a
certain technological level, but it is not reducible to that."48 We

47. See Foster, "For a Concept of the Political in Contemporary Art," in his
Recodings, 139-55.
48. Attali, Noise, 135.

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 Cultural Postmodernism and Bobby McFerrin 83

would appear to be trapped, upon these readings, within a dialec-

tic by which an attack upon the dominant culture is possible only
from the protected enclave of high art and only within that area of
technical and cultural abundance created by the dominant culture
in the first place. It would appear to be a question of seeing the
possibility of resistance as paradoxically dependent on the suc-
cesses of capitalism or, as Jameson suggests, of positioning our-
selves within a counterhegemonic praxis that is able to recognize
capitalism as necessarily constituting both "catastrophe and prog-
ress."49 The case of McFerrin problematizes such thinking, for his
project is clearly based upon a postmodern material abundance of
signifying practices, and yet it is by no means "high art."
Coming to terms with the contradictions inherent in such a
project of postmodern abundance requires returning to our initial
concern with what Attali calls "composition." We've already noted
that Attali shifts his critical emphasis from production per se to-
ward the possibility of self-referential meaning construction. This
is made possible by realizing that signification slippages are embed-
ded within all objects: thus the commodity itself is open for value
renegotiation.50 Attali goes so far as to state that "we are all con-
demned to silence unless we create our own relations with the
world and try to tie other people into the meaning we create."51
Coupled with Attali's previous statement concerning material a-
bundance, we cannot but help sense his critical hope for active
participation within value recomposition slipping toward hyper-
consumerism. Attali is careful, perhaps naive in avoiding this shift
into hyperconsumerism, for he later states that such self-referen-

49. Jameson, "Postmodernism," 86.

50. This is the paradigmatic move of "post-Marxist" thought. It is detailed with
much insight in Andrea Slane's "Self-Referential Gender Deployment and the
Staging of Commodity Fetishism in Television for Girls: The 'Truly Outrageous!'
Case of Jem and the Holograms," unpublished paper, University of California,
San Diego, 1989, where the renegotiation of gender positions is seen to take
place within the sphere of consumption. Here again, the emphasis is on acceler-
ating potential slippages in the construction of meaning effects so as to "refuse
suture." The post-Marxist move is defined by Foster in "Concept for a Political,"
141, as one in which "focus has shifted from class as subject of history to the
cultural constitution of subjectivity, from economic identity to social difference."
51. Attali, Noise, 134.

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84 StephenHartnett

tial compositions are only possible "without commercialization."52

What Attali perhaps romantically suggests as "composition without
commercialization" must be seen, however, within the example of
McFerrin, as amounting to an unfortunate validation of the specta-
cle. Indeed, Attali's postmodern program for composing new
codes through self-conscious pastiches of multiple signifiers is real-
ized in McFerrin's project with a gleeful vengeance, for not only is
McFerrin enacting that which Attali calls for, but he's doing so while
selling millions of records. This is not composition "afterstockpil-
ing and exchange,"53 but composition as stockpiling and exchange.
McFerrin's "composing" of new musical codes and perfor-
mance characters can be seen, then, as resting on exactly that
uncritical and eclectic logic of cultural decontextualization de-
scribed by Jameson as pastiche and by Lyotard as kitsch. Indeed,
McFerrin's project might be seen to symbolize what happens to
Attali's vision when enacted without a critical edge. Dana Polan
refers to such spectacular compositions as concerned solely with
"the virtuosity of performance and showstopping display" and
with "the project of entertainment" as an attempt to "transform
the world into a good show."54 McFerrin's musical compositions
and experiments with gender flexibility follow exactly such a
"showstopping" trajectory. The political underpinnings of this
postmodern pluralist version of "It's a Small World After All" are
best described by Guy Debord: "As the indispensable decoration
of the objects produced today, as the general expose of the ration-
ality of the system, as the advanced economic sector which directly
shapes a growing multitude of image-objects, the spectacle is the
main production of present day society."55
McFerrin's version of this advanced image-object decoration
project is one in which the logic of late capitalism is seen-
precisely as Jameson and Lyotard describe it-as multiplying sig-
nifiers for the sake of producing new but always marketable

52. Ibid., 141.

53. Ibid., 147.
54. Dana Polan, "Above All Else to Make You See: Cinema and the Ideology of
the Spectacle," in Postmodernismand Politics, ed. Jonathan Arac (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 55.
55. Debord, Spectacle, #15.

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 Cultural Postmodernism and Bobby McFerrin 85

codes-codes that obscure their historical context, that elide all

questions of gender critique, and that ultimately compose a musi-
cal vaudeville of the postmodern spectacle of consumerism-as-
play.
The utopian trajectory of Attali's "composing" can be seen,
then, within the context of McFerrin's project, as employing the
postmodern tactics of pastiching decontextualized cultural frag-
ments, yet of actually achieving the "ritualistic" function of telling
the listener "to forget the general violence." McFerrin makes this
twist explicit when he states, "If I can get people to stop thinking
about their pain for a moment, then I'll be successful."56 I would
suggest, then, that McFerrin's work is representative of a postmod-
ernism without critique, of the abundance of signifying practices
melting together in a magical and hypnotic playland of uncon-
sciousness where historical fragments and gender-position flex-
ibility become the raw material for a joyous composition of show-
stopping spectacle.

56. From an information kit provided by Linda Goldstein (McFerrin's man-

ager) of Original Artists (New York), 20 April 1988.

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