"The Irish are the blacks of Europe."2 This proclamation, delivered with glee by a character bent on making it big as a rock promoter, provides the plot rationale for the 1991 film The Commitments. The movie tells the fictional story of some working-class Irish kids who attempt to escape the squalor of the Dublin slums by forming a band, one that specializes in recreating the Memphis soul sound of Stax and Atlantic Records circa the mid-1960s. My concern here is not with the movie per se, which has its charms, nor simply with the character's assertion; rather, I am interested in the pop culture mythology which enables such a remark, in such a context, to sound meaningful to a mass audience.
The line is clearly a metaphor: the Irish are not literally blacks; but figuratively speaking, they are a people with a long history of political oppression and struggle. And, pop lore tells us, they also have a distinguished tradition of music and poetry, a history of assuaging their pain with song; all of which makes the Irish analogous to African Americans, with their history of enslavement and racial oppression on the one hand and cultural breakthroughs like jazz and blues on the other.
But in a literal sense, the statement glosses over all sorts of important differences, historical and political. Taken as anything other than a facile metaphor, the remark is not only false, but patronizing--an insult to African Americans, their history and culture, and probably "the Irish" as well. But no matter. In mainstream rock discourse, the remark is likely to be read as hip and insightful. At any rate, it would almost certainly go unchallenged, and this is because in rock terms it states a truth. However, the "truth" involved here is of a special kind. It's a mythic truth, deriving its significance from a larger cultural discourse about the primitive that is quite old, quite powerful and, I hasten to add, quite problematic. In the framework of rock primitivism, "the Irish are the blacks of Europe" is an apt observation. Both blacks and the Irish are Rousseauian soul brothers; so says the myth3.
This primitivist myth shapes, in many ways, the way we think about rock. But in the world of rock, this fact--as well as the conditioned, limited nature of a "truth" like the one above-- goes largely unnoticed.
This myth of the primitive has roots in high European traditions, notably Rousseau's notion of the noble savage, Romantic nationalist ideas about folk culture, and existentialist conceptions of authenticity and the genuine self4. This intellectual background, while not overtly articulated within rock, is nonetheless the frame which makes much of our thinking about rock possible. The mythic dynamic plays out in many ways. These include an endless search for primitive authenticity. Depending on the moment, rock finds its noble savages among American blacks; poor Southern whites; the visionary or the insane; hippie tribalists; eastern mystics; Jamaican Rastafarians; disaffected British working-class kids; junkies from Seattle; musicians from a monolithic third world; and--no qualifiers necessary, it would seem--Australians, as well as anyone or anything Irish. The source changes--about every three weeks--but the search for the elusive, authentically primitive continues.
Of course the search and the discourse that enables it come out of an extremely civilized context, one that is largely Euro-American, industrialized, educated and cosmopolitan. This is a context where the complexities and contradictions of a late capitalist, postmodern culture have in fact rendered concepts like authenticity or the primitive highly ambiguous if not completely meaningless5.
Next page: Be Sure to Be "On the Edge"
