Articles and Chapters by Katie Kapurch
Analyzing Recorded Music: Collected Perspectives on Popular Music Tracks, edited by Moylan, Burns, and Alleyne (Routledge), 2023
"Come Together" is the first track on Abbey Road (The Beatles 1969), the last album the Beatles r... more "Come Together" is the first track on Abbey Road (The Beatles 1969), the last album the Beatles recorded. Our chapter reveals the song's competing dynamic of invitational playfulness and hope versus violence, dark desire, and disappointment. We shall argue that an obscured distemper-a ghostly disease-suggests an off-color, failed pursuit of bliss born of intangible yet sultry passions. An examination of John Lennon's inspirations for the song leads to a close reading of its tracking process, lyrics, and music. Our discussion concludes with an ear toward the recording's afterlives in Black American artists' covers, including Sheila E.'s collaborations with Ringo Starr (Sheila E. 2017a and 2017b; Starr, 2020).
AMP: American Music Perspectives, 2022
The congruous timing of Taylor Swift's and the Beatles' 2021 multiplatform media is an occasion t... more The congruous timing of Taylor Swift's and the Beatles' 2021 multiplatform media is an occasion to investigate comparable generic storytelling strategies, especially as they related to gender. Identifying the melodramatic romance of Swift's All Too Well opens up similar dimensions of the Beatles' media narrative, especially as articulated in
Fandom and the Beatles: The Act You've Known for All These Years, edited by Kenneth Womack (Oxford University Press), 2021
This chapter argues for the Beatles' gender fluidity is a key ingredient in their multigeneration... more This chapter argues for the Beatles' gender fluidity is a key ingredient in their multigenerational appeal.
The Beatles in Context, edited by Kenneth Womack (Cambridge University Press), 2020
Just as they did with musical innovation, once the Beatles mastered a fashion, they were on to th... more Just as they did with musical innovation, once the Beatles mastered a fashion, they were on to the next one. The ability to change, to be "in the trend" rather than in front of or behind it, is a key factor in the sustained popularity of the Beatles and their cultural iconography.
Whether they had matching suits or matching mustaches, the Beatles' fashion choices consistently threatened the status quo. Their now-iconic looks, which evolved as their music did, also invited imitation by fans. As such, the objects associated with their styles have graduated to the rank of iconography, sacred relics whose images stand in for songs, as well as the story of the band. The "mop-top" is the crowning glory of their most famous and most unifying style, whose history explains the radical impact of the hair, suits, and boots. The "Fab," as I term it, is a cohesive look born out of previous fashions, but the style is also a foundation for subsequent Beatles aesthetics. The "Pepper" is another unifying style, at once nostalgic and psychedelic, that reinvents the Beatles. The Pepper look includes one ingredient-Lennon's glasses -that begins to signal the band's end, which is also prefigured in the House of Nutter clothing ( or lack thereof) that appears on the last album the band recorded.
Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, 2020
This article explores the historical context, inspirations, and legacy of Paul McCartney's 1968 W... more This article explores the historical context, inspirations, and legacy of Paul McCartney's 1968 White Album song, “Blackbird.” We discover heretofore unexplored connections to the 1926 pop standard, “Bye Bye Blackbird,” as well as the potential for the Beatles' song to house a civil rights message, the nest McCartney tries to build for “Blackbird” in this century. To appreciate the song's availability for civil rights solidarity, we consider Billy Preston, whose cover aligns “Blackbird” with African American culture during the decades in which McCartney was not telling his “Blackbird” legend. Preston's gospel-infused cover, along with his own bird imagery in “Will It Go Round in Circles,” point toward the theme of flight-as-liberation in African American arts. This bird-theme is also exemplified by the folk ballad “Grey Goose,” famously performed and recorded by Lead Belly, a formative influence on the so-called British Invasion rockers. These connections reveal a thematic and political depth to “Blackbird,” illustrating the song's indebtedness to African American music and other arts.
Rock Music Studies, 2020
The Beatles’ White Album is a musical expression of getting naked, revealing anxiety and doubt in... more The Beatles’ White Album is a musical expression of getting naked, revealing anxiety and doubt in songs that fetishize objects and role play while representing impotence and cuckolding. Anxiety and ambivalence about sexual performance track alongside other attitudes toward time, including nostalgia about the past and an ineffectual desire to move forward, that have biographical significance for the Beatles in 1968. The sexually honest double album strips off the psychedelia of the previous year, and The White Album’s unifying theme is, in fact, voiced explicitly on the record itself – not by a Beatle, but by Yoko Ono.
Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, 2019
Bruce Springsteen's film noir-informed innovations on Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978) betray ... more Bruce Springsteen's film noir-informed innovations on Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978) betray his effort to confront hard truths about powerlessness in working-class American culture. These are the same dark themes available in filmmaker David Lynch's contemporaneous 1970s output and that which followed in subsequent decades. Beginning with Springsteen's Darkness and Lynch's Eraserhead (1977) and continuing with examples from subsequent films and television, we reveal an ongoing dialogue between musician and filmmaker. This dialogue demonstrates Springsteen's prescience on Darkness because Lynch's post-1970s oeuvre continues treading the same terrain as that late 70s Springsteen album. Springsteen and Lynch both invoke film noir's fallen-man formula to critique institutional constraints in the late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century US, especially those related to the family and capitalist economic forces. Attention to the fallen-man formula reveals Springsteen's and Lynch's similar invocation of film noir as they explore the hard truths and moral consequences of institutional powerlessness on individuals.
The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper, and the Summer of Love, edited by Womack and Cox (Lexington), 2017
This chapter complicates the assumption that the Beatles, particularly with Sgt. Pepper, ceased t... more This chapter complicates the assumption that the Beatles, particularly with Sgt. Pepper, ceased to appeal directly to girls or to girl culture. When I refer to "girls" and "girl culture," I am informed by girls' studies' approaches to the study of girls as female youth, whereby girl culture is both the culture marketed to girls and the culture girls create and choose for themselves (Inness 3-4). True, the Beatles often used conventionally feminine discourse in their early work, and their gendered modes of address do change throughout the 1960s. Some female listeners were alienated by the Beatles' later work, especially as it became un-danceable, but some were indeed turned on by John Lennon's famous invitation in "A Day in the Life." The album's psychedelic sounds signal a new future, while also negotiating work and domesticity. In addition, Beatles fandom, even in response to the group's later output, becomes a catalyst for some girls' and young women's innovation, especially in terms of musical production.
The chapter proceeds as follows: first, I review key ideas about the Beatles' gendered appeals to audiences before I show how girls and young women are addressed and rhetorically constructed by Sgt. Pepper, both through individual songs and the album's concept and cover art. The album does trade in seemingly masculine or adult forms, such as intellectual complexity, psychedelic imagery, and experimental, technological sound. On Sgt. Pepper, however, the Beatles are still invoking popular themes and genres associated with girl culture and presenting androgynous visions of gender, especially as their songs negotiate the tensions between work, domesticity, and experimentation with alternate ways of being.
Along the way, I discuss actual examples of girls and young women who, inspired by the Beatles, eventually "left home" to pursue lives outside of the domestic sphere after the late 1960s. Chronicling their coming-of-age experiences, Ann and Nancy Wilson's Kicking and Dreaming, as well as Chrissie Hynde's Reckless, credit the Beatles as a formative influence on their lives and musicianship. Born in 1951, Hynde, driving force of the Pretenders, is a contemporary of Heart's frontwomen Ann and Nancy, born 1950 and 1954, respectively. The Wilson sisters' and Hynde's memoirs corroborate theories of girls' early Beatles fandom, while also proving that the appeal of the Beatles' androgyny lasted beyond the mid-sixties. The Wilsons' and Hynde's reflections credit the Beatles for their own musical fascination and production, proving that not all girls
broke up with the Beatles when Billy Shears arrived; girls like the Wilsons and Hynde were turned on by musical complexity that changed as the times changed.
Mediated Girlhoods: New Explorations in Girls' Media Culture, Vol 2, edited by Kearney and Blue (Peter Lang), 2018
In this chapter, we argue that Ella is a "make-do" girl, a discursive construction of girlhood th... more In this chapter, we argue that Ella is a "make-do" girl, a discursive construction of girlhood that defies the "can-do"/ "at-risk" binary. The essay is organized around iconic tropes that the 2015 Cinderella borrows from Disney's 1950 animation: the introduction of orphaned Ella connected to nature and animals; the stepmother's villainy and stepsisters' absurdity; meeting the prince; the transformation before the ball; and the revelation of the slipper leading to the wedding. Isolating these moments reveals new storylines informed by motifs associated with the maternal melodrama and the family melodrama, additions that construct Cinderella as a make-do girl. Although the 2015 Cinderella may appear to invoke Disney's animated film for the sake of homage and non-ironic nostalgia, the film also alludes to earlier folk-fairy tales. Even when the new Disney film replicates the original animation's narrative beats or iconic imagery, it transforms them in ways that critique postfeminist expressions of neoliberalism through the expression of make-do girlhood. This representation suggests consumerist girl-power princess culture is unsuited to the demands of contemporary economic, political, and social realities, which require an other-oriented disposition that accepts the necessity of less-than-ideal work and acknowledges the futility of trying to control outcomes.
The Lion and the Unicorn, 2016
Tangled and Brave are maternal melodramas, a generic association that reveals the films’ reflecti... more Tangled and Brave are maternal melodramas, a generic association that reveals the films’ reflection, negotiation, and confrontation with postfeminism, especially as it informs the social construction of girlhood. Although these films are produced by Disney, a media conglomerate not known for its progressive expressions of gender, melodrama can work as a critical mode of discourse even when shrouded in a conservative dress. In short, melodrama’s excess allows for a critique of the very things melodrama represents. Paying close attention to mother-daughter interactions, especially over Rapunzel’s and Merida’s excesses of hair, reveal the following postfeminist themes as debilitating for girls and detrimental to their relationships with older women: normative femininity and consumerism as empowerment, competing generational feminisms, and the conflicting pressures to articulate individual identity while belonging to female community.
Journal of Lesbian Studies, 2015
This article explores the melodramatic expression of lesbian girlhood and teen romance in Disney'... more This article explores the melodramatic expression of lesbian girlhood and teen romance in Disney's Tangled (2010) and Disney Pixar's Brave (2012), as well as “Meripunzel” femslash, fan-authored romantic pairings of the animations' female protagonists. First, Anne Sexton's poem, “Rapunzel,” offers a literary precedent for exploring lesbian themes in the fairy tale. The next section shows how Tangled and Brave invoke the narrative conventions of the family melodrama. This generic association reveals the films' uses of rhetoric familiar to youth coming-out narratives, as well as other visual and aural coding suggestive of queer styles. The last section shows how Meripunzel femslash taps into the films' existing melodramatic narrative forms and visual aesthetics, rehearsing their coming-out rhetoric while addressing the pleasures of and problems facing lesbian teen romance. I conclude by problematizing the often conventional expressions of lesbian girlhood in femslash, ultimately arguing for their empowering potential, especially as they indicate revised definitions of “princess.”
New Critical Perspectives on the Beatles, edited by Womack and Kapurch (Palgrave), 2016
An exploration focused on melodrama offers insight into the Beatles' popularity among girls, espe... more An exploration focused on melodrama offers insight into the Beatles' popularity among girls, especially twenty-first-century fans whose fascination with the Fab Four is remarkably under-theorized. This chapter explores the relationship between the Beatles and melodrama to argue for the mode's vitality in girl culture and importance to the Beatles phenomenon, specifically addressing two areas of thought. First the Beatles' appeal to girls is, in part, dependent on the way they invoke melodrama, a pervasive mode of discourse in girl culture and one that facilitates our understanding of the Beatles' androgynous gender performance. Second, girl fans' own melodramatic discourse unites girls separated by decades since the Beatles are still vehicles for girls to react to gendered social limitations relevant to distinct historical moments. Identifying melodramatic impulses in Beatle-authored texts and in Beatles fandoms reveals the mode's capacity to promote homosocial and even homoerotic intimacy and to inspire empathy, communicating progressive messages about gender and sexuality in both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
New Critical Perspectives on the Beatles, edited by Womack and Kapurch (Palgrave), 2016
A rhetorical analysis of Paul McCartney's Romantic expressions of racial solidarity shines a crit... more A rhetorical analysis of Paul McCartney's Romantic expressions of racial solidarity shines a critical light on the evolution of post-racial attitudes in America from the 1980s to today. His songs, videos, and live performances are reflections of how many in the US have fooled themselves into thinking that racial equality has been achieved.
This chapter begins by exploring McCartney's duet with Stevie Wonder, "Ebony and Ivory" (1982). Released the following year, "Say, Say, Say" (1983), McCartney's collaboration with Michael Jackson, does not specifically reference racial harmony, but the video nonetheless projects a utopian vision of a historical post-racial America.
Solidifying McCartney's penchant for idealistic visions of racial solidarity is his live performance of "Blackbird"; the 2002 story he tells about the song's origins continues to evolve to this day, tracking alongside current events associated with race and reflecting Americans' attitudes back to the audience.
Nevertheless, McCartney's more recent statements and collaborations with popular Black artists Kanye West and Rihanna offer opportunities for the former Beatle to deconstruct his own idealistic post-racial discourse, revealing a progressive and redemptive shift in McCartney's rhetoric.
Children's Literature Association Quarterly, 2012
As works characterized not only by similar heroines, heroes, and romantic plots, Brontë’s and Mey... more As works characterized not only by similar heroines, heroes, and romantic plots, Brontë’s and Meyer’s novels share a melodramatic reader response. An exploration of melodrama’s significance in these female coming-of-age stories yields insight into the important relationship between Jane Eyre and the Twilight Saga––while offering some justification for the latter’s appeal––and ultimately works to invigorate scholarly appreciation for melodramatic impulses in contemporary young adult fiction.
Teaching Young Adult Literature (MLA, Options for Teaching Series), 2020
This chapter outlines a "girls' studies" pedagogy for teaching Young Adult literature in the coll... more This chapter outlines a "girls' studies" pedagogy for teaching Young Adult literature in the college classroom.
Neo-Victorian Studies, 2012
This article explores the lasting appeal of Jane Eyre through an examination of two neo-Victorian... more This article explores the lasting appeal of Jane Eyre through an examination of two neo-Victorian adaptations, the recent televised mini-series Jane Eyre (BBC1, 2006) and April Lindner's young-adult novel Jane (2010), which both call upon fairy-tale allusions in Charlotte Brontë's novel. These fairy-tale connections function rhetorically to enhance Jane's narrative ownership, promoting empathy with the heroine and defining agency in contemporary girlhood through a dialogue with the Victorian past. The article ultimately gestures toward the larger significance of neo-Victorianism in the representation of contemporary female childhood and adolescence in twenty-first-century popular culture.
Girls' Literacy Experiences In and Out of School: Learning and Composing Gendered Identities, edited by Elaine J. O'Quinn (Routledge), 2013
Using the Twilight Saga as a representative text, my chapter first explores contradictory depict... more Using the Twilight Saga as a representative text, my chapter first explores contradictory depictions of female adolescent agency, particularly in the context of intimate relationships, in popular culture. Noting how Bella's conflicts speak to adolescent girlhood, I suggest Twilight addresses tensions consistent with other well-known depictions of "real life" coming-of-age girls and young women; these connections may help teachers appeal to girls in the English classroom. Following this premise, I argue mass-mediated texts function as agential opportunities for girls to create meaning, particularly through artistic works distributed online. These conclusions not only provide insight into the appeal of contemporary works (for example the Twilight Saga), which inspire critical and creative reflection among girls, but also suggest why popular culture should be harnessed to engage girls in the English classroom.
Genre, Reception, and Adaptation in the "Twilight" Series, edited by Anne Morey (Ashgate), 2012
This chapter explores how sound works along with filmic image in Hardwicke's Twilight, Weitz's Ne... more This chapter explores how sound works along with filmic image in Hardwicke's Twilight, Weitz's New Moon, and Slade's Eclipse to position the viewer in relation to Bella's perspective. Of particular concern are the uses of voiceover as Bella's narration, an area illuminated by French scholar Michel Chion's work on cinematic sound. Ultimately, I suggest that the consistent use of narrating voiceover throughout Hardwicke's Twilight maintains Bella's interiority and continually positions the viewer to identify with her perspective, while Weitz's New Moon reduces this identification by changing the nature and function of that type of voiceover; Slade's film diminishes that identification still further by effectively eclipsing Bella's voice through the limited and forgettable use of narrating voiceover.
Books by Katie Kapurch
From the beginning, the Beatles announced their debt to Black music in interviews, recording cove... more From the beginning, the Beatles announced their debt to Black music in interviews, recording covers and original songs inspired by Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, the Shirelles, and other giants of R&B. Blackbird goes deeper, appreciating unacknowledged forerunners, as well as Black artists whose interpretations keep the Beatles in play.
Drawing on interviews with Black musicians and using the song “Blackbird” as a touchstone, Katie Kapurch and Jon Marc Smith tell a new history. They present unheard stories and resituate old ones, offering the phrase “transatlantic flight” to characterize a back-and-forth dialogue shaped by Black musicians in the United States and elsewhere, including Liverpool. Kapurch and Smith find a lineage that reaches back to the very origins of American popular music, one that involves the original twentieth-century blackbird, Florence Mills, and the King of the Twelve String, Lead Belly. Continuing the circular flight path with Nina Simone, Billy Preston, Jimi Hendrix, Aretha Franklin, Sylvester, and others, the authors take readers into the twenty-first century, when Black artists like Bettye LaVette harness the Beatles for today.
Detailed, thoughtful, and revelatory, Blackbird explores musical and storytelling legacies full of rich but contested symbolism. Appealing to those interested in developing a deep understanding of the evolution of popular music, this book promises that you'll never hear “Blackbird”—and the Beatles—the same way again.
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Articles and Chapters by Katie Kapurch
Whether they had matching suits or matching mustaches, the Beatles' fashion choices consistently threatened the status quo. Their now-iconic looks, which evolved as their music did, also invited imitation by fans. As such, the objects associated with their styles have graduated to the rank of iconography, sacred relics whose images stand in for songs, as well as the story of the band. The "mop-top" is the crowning glory of their most famous and most unifying style, whose history explains the radical impact of the hair, suits, and boots. The "Fab," as I term it, is a cohesive look born out of previous fashions, but the style is also a foundation for subsequent Beatles aesthetics. The "Pepper" is another unifying style, at once nostalgic and psychedelic, that reinvents the Beatles. The Pepper look includes one ingredient-Lennon's glasses -that begins to signal the band's end, which is also prefigured in the House of Nutter clothing ( or lack thereof) that appears on the last album the band recorded.
The chapter proceeds as follows: first, I review key ideas about the Beatles' gendered appeals to audiences before I show how girls and young women are addressed and rhetorically constructed by Sgt. Pepper, both through individual songs and the album's concept and cover art. The album does trade in seemingly masculine or adult forms, such as intellectual complexity, psychedelic imagery, and experimental, technological sound. On Sgt. Pepper, however, the Beatles are still invoking popular themes and genres associated with girl culture and presenting androgynous visions of gender, especially as their songs negotiate the tensions between work, domesticity, and experimentation with alternate ways of being.
Along the way, I discuss actual examples of girls and young women who, inspired by the Beatles, eventually "left home" to pursue lives outside of the domestic sphere after the late 1960s. Chronicling their coming-of-age experiences, Ann and Nancy Wilson's Kicking and Dreaming, as well as Chrissie Hynde's Reckless, credit the Beatles as a formative influence on their lives and musicianship. Born in 1951, Hynde, driving force of the Pretenders, is a contemporary of Heart's frontwomen Ann and Nancy, born 1950 and 1954, respectively. The Wilson sisters' and Hynde's memoirs corroborate theories of girls' early Beatles fandom, while also proving that the appeal of the Beatles' androgyny lasted beyond the mid-sixties. The Wilsons' and Hynde's reflections credit the Beatles for their own musical fascination and production, proving that not all girls
broke up with the Beatles when Billy Shears arrived; girls like the Wilsons and Hynde were turned on by musical complexity that changed as the times changed.
This chapter begins by exploring McCartney's duet with Stevie Wonder, "Ebony and Ivory" (1982). Released the following year, "Say, Say, Say" (1983), McCartney's collaboration with Michael Jackson, does not specifically reference racial harmony, but the video nonetheless projects a utopian vision of a historical post-racial America.
Solidifying McCartney's penchant for idealistic visions of racial solidarity is his live performance of "Blackbird"; the 2002 story he tells about the song's origins continues to evolve to this day, tracking alongside current events associated with race and reflecting Americans' attitudes back to the audience.
Nevertheless, McCartney's more recent statements and collaborations with popular Black artists Kanye West and Rihanna offer opportunities for the former Beatle to deconstruct his own idealistic post-racial discourse, revealing a progressive and redemptive shift in McCartney's rhetoric.
Books by Katie Kapurch
Drawing on interviews with Black musicians and using the song “Blackbird” as a touchstone, Katie Kapurch and Jon Marc Smith tell a new history. They present unheard stories and resituate old ones, offering the phrase “transatlantic flight” to characterize a back-and-forth dialogue shaped by Black musicians in the United States and elsewhere, including Liverpool. Kapurch and Smith find a lineage that reaches back to the very origins of American popular music, one that involves the original twentieth-century blackbird, Florence Mills, and the King of the Twelve String, Lead Belly. Continuing the circular flight path with Nina Simone, Billy Preston, Jimi Hendrix, Aretha Franklin, Sylvester, and others, the authors take readers into the twenty-first century, when Black artists like Bettye LaVette harness the Beatles for today.
Detailed, thoughtful, and revelatory, Blackbird explores musical and storytelling legacies full of rich but contested symbolism. Appealing to those interested in developing a deep understanding of the evolution of popular music, this book promises that you'll never hear “Blackbird”—and the Beatles—the same way again.
Whether they had matching suits or matching mustaches, the Beatles' fashion choices consistently threatened the status quo. Their now-iconic looks, which evolved as their music did, also invited imitation by fans. As such, the objects associated with their styles have graduated to the rank of iconography, sacred relics whose images stand in for songs, as well as the story of the band. The "mop-top" is the crowning glory of their most famous and most unifying style, whose history explains the radical impact of the hair, suits, and boots. The "Fab," as I term it, is a cohesive look born out of previous fashions, but the style is also a foundation for subsequent Beatles aesthetics. The "Pepper" is another unifying style, at once nostalgic and psychedelic, that reinvents the Beatles. The Pepper look includes one ingredient-Lennon's glasses -that begins to signal the band's end, which is also prefigured in the House of Nutter clothing ( or lack thereof) that appears on the last album the band recorded.
The chapter proceeds as follows: first, I review key ideas about the Beatles' gendered appeals to audiences before I show how girls and young women are addressed and rhetorically constructed by Sgt. Pepper, both through individual songs and the album's concept and cover art. The album does trade in seemingly masculine or adult forms, such as intellectual complexity, psychedelic imagery, and experimental, technological sound. On Sgt. Pepper, however, the Beatles are still invoking popular themes and genres associated with girl culture and presenting androgynous visions of gender, especially as their songs negotiate the tensions between work, domesticity, and experimentation with alternate ways of being.
Along the way, I discuss actual examples of girls and young women who, inspired by the Beatles, eventually "left home" to pursue lives outside of the domestic sphere after the late 1960s. Chronicling their coming-of-age experiences, Ann and Nancy Wilson's Kicking and Dreaming, as well as Chrissie Hynde's Reckless, credit the Beatles as a formative influence on their lives and musicianship. Born in 1951, Hynde, driving force of the Pretenders, is a contemporary of Heart's frontwomen Ann and Nancy, born 1950 and 1954, respectively. The Wilson sisters' and Hynde's memoirs corroborate theories of girls' early Beatles fandom, while also proving that the appeal of the Beatles' androgyny lasted beyond the mid-sixties. The Wilsons' and Hynde's reflections credit the Beatles for their own musical fascination and production, proving that not all girls
broke up with the Beatles when Billy Shears arrived; girls like the Wilsons and Hynde were turned on by musical complexity that changed as the times changed.
This chapter begins by exploring McCartney's duet with Stevie Wonder, "Ebony and Ivory" (1982). Released the following year, "Say, Say, Say" (1983), McCartney's collaboration with Michael Jackson, does not specifically reference racial harmony, but the video nonetheless projects a utopian vision of a historical post-racial America.
Solidifying McCartney's penchant for idealistic visions of racial solidarity is his live performance of "Blackbird"; the 2002 story he tells about the song's origins continues to evolve to this day, tracking alongside current events associated with race and reflecting Americans' attitudes back to the audience.
Nevertheless, McCartney's more recent statements and collaborations with popular Black artists Kanye West and Rihanna offer opportunities for the former Beatle to deconstruct his own idealistic post-racial discourse, revealing a progressive and redemptive shift in McCartney's rhetoric.
Drawing on interviews with Black musicians and using the song “Blackbird” as a touchstone, Katie Kapurch and Jon Marc Smith tell a new history. They present unheard stories and resituate old ones, offering the phrase “transatlantic flight” to characterize a back-and-forth dialogue shaped by Black musicians in the United States and elsewhere, including Liverpool. Kapurch and Smith find a lineage that reaches back to the very origins of American popular music, one that involves the original twentieth-century blackbird, Florence Mills, and the King of the Twelve String, Lead Belly. Continuing the circular flight path with Nina Simone, Billy Preston, Jimi Hendrix, Aretha Franklin, Sylvester, and others, the authors take readers into the twenty-first century, when Black artists like Bettye LaVette harness the Beatles for today.
Detailed, thoughtful, and revelatory, Blackbird explores musical and storytelling legacies full of rich but contested symbolism. Appealing to those interested in developing a deep understanding of the evolution of popular music, this book promises that you'll never hear “Blackbird”—and the Beatles—the same way again.
The Beatles and Humour offers innovative takes on the serious art of Beatle fun, an instrument of social, political, and economic critique. Chapters also situate the band alongside British and non-British predecessors and collaborators, such as Billy Preston and Yoko Ono, uncovering diverse components and unexpected effects of the Beatles' output.