Maureen Mahon has written an eloquent ethnography that adds to a limited but growing rebuttal of monolithic and essentialist representations of people of African descent, in general, and of Black cultural production, in particular (capitalization of Black here follows the lead of Nikki Giovanni [Racism 101, William Morrow, 1994]). Right to Rock focuses on the Black Rock Coalition (BRC), founded in 1985 as a network of African American musicians “sick and tired of being sick and tired” (p. 14; an apt aphorism from Civil Rights leader, Fannie Lou Hamer) from the frustration of racial segregation within the music industry. In fact, it is currently one of the few ethnographies that offer professors a text to include in syllabi that departs from routine social science stereotypes that “highlight the distressed-poor, the drug-addled, the violent, the highly sexed, the long-suffering, the religiously devout, the good-time partyers, and, occasionally thrown in for variety, the middle-class professional” (p. 8).

Anchored by an analysis of aesthetics, racial authenticity, and racial identity, Mahon carefully foregrounds the middle-class values of the “post-liberated generation” who came of age during the Black Power and the anti-Vietnam War movements while listening to the soundtracks of an eclectic mix of protest music and rock as well as blues, soul, and jazz. This is a generation raised by ambitious parents who emphasized education and the acquisition of cultural capital, a prerequisite for upward mobility in a country that still judges people by the color of their skin. Not surprisingly, many of the founding members of the BRC belong to the first wave of Black students who integrated white private and elite public schools yet often lived in predominantly Black neighborhoods. The strength and frustration of this experience, which resonates with my own, was confronting the persistent challenge of both white and Black stereotypes of authentic blackness—a paradigm promoted by insidious racialization that equates the middle class with whiteness and social deviance with blackness.

Mahon incisively identifies the dialectic of miscegenation and segregation in the music industry, a topic succinctly addressed by Kobena Mercer in his seminal article, “Black Hair/Style Politics” (New Formations, 1987:33–54), which Mahon cites in her bibliography. The political economy of apartheid in music and fashion, performance and style, has historically been marked by a sequence of innovation, imitation, and appropriation. As Mahon makes clear, the choice of language—the politics of naming—“Black Rock” was a strategic gesture that deliberately underlines the paradox of essentialism. “By the time BRC was founded in 1985, the white appropriation of rock was so complete that it was counterintuitive to imagine blacks playing rock at all. The interplay of miscegenation, segregation and appropriation had so muted rock’s blackness that black musicians had to insist that they had the right to rock” (p. 148). Black artists (in this case, musicians, but similar preconceptions register across the performing and visual arts as well as in the media, business, academy, and everyday life) are in an incessant struggle against cultural gatekeepers who dictate racial and aesthetic categories, determining genres and access to resources, including opportunity and promotion. Unfortunately, as Mahon’s interviewees note, gatekeepers are not only white: Sometimes the keys to Black prisons are held by other Blacks in an industry comfortable with neat racial categories and still lacking Blacks in top decision-making positions. Not surprisingly, Spike Lee, a member of this generation, and his film, Bamboozled (New Line, 2000), come easily to mind. In this general context, strategic essentialism remains an indispensable tool for asserting Black cultural identities as inherently diverse because they are shaped by the common experience of racism and corollary double-consciousness eloquently elaborated by W. E. B. Du Bois at the end of the 19th century.

Mahon concludes her ethnography with a chapter on Jimi Hendrix, the catalyst for her project and the key symbol for BRC members. Hendrix was “simultaneously locked into and locked out of certain images and practices,” “a consequence of the music industry’s political economy and assumptions about black authenticity [which shaped] the ways black and white audiences and critics responded to him” (p. 235). But the reclamation of Hendrix as a Black rocker (p. 232) is a uniquely U.S. American phenomenon, given the reality that respect for the artistic freedom of Black musicians as musicians is taken for granted in the international arena. This is particularly the case in the United Kingdom, where white musicians have always acknowledged their debt to their African American predecessors without relying on racial stereotype and prescriptive racialized genres (at least, and until, hip hop and the deliberate commodification of blackness).

Right to Rock is a timely and excellent choice for use in classes in cultural anthropology and cultural studies, American studies, and music. It is also a valuable resource for professors and students interested in an interdisciplinary approach that integrates theory into a rich ethnography with an approach that elevates the discussion of the relationship between race, gender, and class and their mutual impact on aesthetic representations and cultural productions.