UC Santa Cruz

283 Pages·2017·1.09 MB·English

UC Santa Cruz
UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Title
All that Is Solid Melts into Sound: Music, Interculturality and the (Trans)Formation of the Self
in Desegregation Era Los Angeles
Permalink
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/06x0h2gv
Author
Willett, Darren James
Publication Date
2017

Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation
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University of California
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
SANTA CRUZ

ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS INTO SOUND:
MUSIC, INTERCULTURALITY AND THE (TRANS)FORMATION OF THE
SELF IN DESEGREGATION ERA LOS ANGELES

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction
of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

in

SOCIOLOGY

by

Darren James Willett

September 2017

The Dissertation of Darren James Willett is
approved:

___________________________________
Professor Eric Porter, Ph.D., chair

___________________________________
Professor Herman Gray, Ph.D.

___________________________________
Professor Julie Bettie, Ph.D.

_______________________________
Tyrus Miller
Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies
Copyright © by

Darren James Willett

2017
Table of Contents

1. Abstract……………………………………………………………...iv

2. Acknowledgements………………………………………………….vi

3. Preface………………………………………………………………..1

4. Introduction…………………………………………………………..6

5. Chapter I – So Long Jim Crow: Desegregation of the Los
Angeles Unified School District and the (Trans)Formation
of the Self………...............................................................................50

6. Chapter II – “Let’s Take It to the People; Let’s Take It to the
Stage”: Mapping Intercultural Bands and Scenes from the
Schoolyard to the Stage in Desegregation Era Los Angeles……....103

7. Chapter III – “Oh, He Can Play? Well Who Gives a
Fuck What He Is?”: Subversive Colorblindness as a Counter
to White Supremacy……………………………………………….141

8. Chapter IV – “If Ever I Would Stop Thinking About Music
and Politics”: The Politics, Culture and Economy of
Intercultural Music in Desegregation Era Los Angeles…………...180

9. Conclusion………………………………………………………...244

10. References………………………………………………………...258

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Abstract

All that Is Solid Melts into Sound: Music, Interculturality and the (Trans)Formation of
the Self in Desegregation Era Los Angeles

Darren James Willett

This dissertation takes a social psychological approach to critical race and cultural studies
as it makes use of in-depth interviews and archival data to draw relationships between the
personal accounts of musicians who were inducted into the Los Angeles Unified School
District’s desegregation effort and the broader sociohistorical context of desegregation
within which these accounts were experienced. Specifically, this project explores how
youths who attended desegregated schools in the 1980s and 1990s used music to navigate
new forms of intercultural social interactions. At times, this meant employing racialized
genres to reaffirm intra-communal solidarity and/or subvert the coupling of such genres
with racialized bodies, while at others, youths engaged a cross-cultural politics to explore
new identities, thus expanding upon existing notions of self, community and cultural
belonging. In this sense, music became a site wherein categories of sameness and
difference were both erected and obscured. A primary focus of this dissertation is to
explore how new forms of social interactions made possible during this era prompted
unique (trans)formations of the self among youths who attended desegregated schools,
and how these youths took these (trans)formations, and their music, from the schoolyard
to the stage as they cultivated intercultural musical scenes that coevolved with the
ideological, political and economic currents of the time. In so doing, these musical
scenes engaged a cross-cultural politics that began to unsettle the institutions and
ideologies of racial segregation and white supremacy, and helped to actively construct the
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new possibilities, and communities, that emerged during desegregation era Los Angeles.
An overarching concern of the dissertation, however, is how this transformative potential
has since been repackaged by politicians, policy makers, and both public and private
institutions within the city to manufacture the façade of a post-racial American
metropolis in a city that continues to be fraught with segregation and racial inequality.
As such, contemporary Los Angeles harbors a contradictory and perplexed engagement
with multiculturalism that has left racial politics within the city teetering between hope
and despair.

v
Acknowledgements

Quite literally, it takes a village to produce a dissertation, and I wish to take a
moment here to express deep gratitude to my village of advisors, mentors,
interviewees, friends, and family members who, in various ways, offered me the
support necessary to make this dissertation possible.
First and foremost, I wish to thank the chair of my dissertation committee,
Professor Eric Porter, for his generosity, his insights, and his willingness to oversee
my work. His discussions with me concerning music and interculturality helped me
hone my focus on the bands and scenes explored herein, and guided me as I placed
them within a broader historical and sociological lineage of intercultural music from
Los Angeles. Additionally, his assertion that the ways in which musicians speak
about their work has gone largely underexplored encouraged me to push my
interviewees’ recounts against theories developed by scholars who write about them,
and to level my gaze at the active role musicians play in the construction of those
possibilities that parameterize the social world – a focus that laid the groundwork for
the theoretical and analytical framework herein. Moreover, his close readings of draft
upon draft of each chapter offered innumerable critical insights that allowed me to
confront the unique limitations and potentials within my own perspective, and
afforded me the opportunity to mature intellectually in ways I had not previously
imagined. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, he coached me on how to take on
the immense workload of teaching, research and writing a dissertation all while
raising two children.
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I also wish to thank the other members of my dissertation committee, Herman
Gray and Julie Bettie, both of whom inspired me to level my gaze at the workings of
power within popular culture, and, in so doing, influenced my work in unique and
specific ways. Herman Gray pushed me to consider the ways being born into
desegregation era Los Angeles had caused me to take multiculturalism for granted.
This suggestion moved me away from the reductive coupling of multiculturalism with
disingenuousness, and allowed me to realize that within the shift in racial politics that
defined desegregation era Los Angeles was something more complex and thus worthy
of study. He also encouraged me to think beyond the simplistic perception of popular
culture as a mere representation running parallel to the social world, which allowed
me to better hear the ways in which my interviewees and their music helped to
construct the new possibilities and communities that emerged during desegregation
era Los Angeles. Moreover, Herman Gray’s suggestion that the music industry was
more fragile than I had come to believe softened me enough to interrogate the
multifaceted relationship between political economy and intercultural musical scenes,
a relationship upon which I had soured as a professional musician in Los Angeles.
Julie Bettie’s emphasis on popular culture as a site that both reifies and destabilizes
systems of power and oppression have had an obvious impact on my own research.
Moreover, her keen use of interview data and ethnographic practices in her own work
provided a model of research excellence toward which I aspired. Additionally, her
suggestion that the most important sociological findings emerge from the exceptions,
not the rules, allowed me to focus on the emancipatory potentials of the cultural work
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performed by those who defy conventional modes of expression. Without both of
their encouragements, I fear I would have simply become subsumed by the
overwhelming resilience of systems of oppression.
I also feel an exceptional gratitude for Dr. Wendy Martyna who served as my
teaching mentor during my doctoral studies, and helped me cultivate a unique
combination of intellectual expectation and emotional compassion. I particularly
wish to thank her for introducing me to Social Psychology, and helping me
understand that my lifelong commitments to social justice could be furthered by
conducting research anchored within this field. The theoretical dispositions of Social
Psychology allowed me use interview data to do the work of the sociologist – to
connect personal experiences with broader sociohistorical phenomena – and drove the
methodological and analytical bases for this dissertation.
I have also been able to make meaningful connections with great thinkers
outside of my home institution. Dr. Rickey Vincent was one of the first people to
provide me with the theoretical tools that would become central to this dissertation as
he helped me hone my focus as an undergraduate instructor at UC Berkeley. His
insights pushed me to more thoroughly interrogate the relationship between US racial
politics and the production and consumption of musical forms, and the ways in which
I, personally, was positioned and implicated within these interrogations.
Additionally, Professor Jocelyne Guilbault’s work on Trinidad’s Carnival musics and
the construction of Trinidadian national identity inspired me to formulate the concept
of “(trans)formation.” The discussions she generously engaged with me provided
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affirmation that this was indeed a productive lens through which to conceptualize
identity formation, and afforded me the confidence to make this concept a framing
device for this dissertation. Her work also forced me to sit with the uncomfortable
notion that neoliberalism could actually function as a catalyst for grass roots musical
production, a premise that was counterintuitive as I had always coupled neoliberalism
with the inevitable outcome of increased social inequality. I also wish to thank
Matthew Markovoich who offered me countless hours of musical discussions over the
last decade or so. Most specifically, he helped me apply the biological theory of
“coevolution” to sociological research, thus bridging two fields that have historically
been ideologically opposed due to the overly simplistic “Nature vs. Nurture” binary.
Of course, I owe an insurmountable debt of gratitude to my wife, Melanie
Willett, for enduring the frequently uncertain and always demanding obligations of
graduate study. She stuck with me even when it seemed there was no end in sight,
and consistently strategized ways to help me achieve every milestone on route to my
doctoral degree. Moreover, her growth as an intersectional feminist and an activist
has been a continuous source of inspiration, while her incredible gift with
photography has shown me how, in many ways, imagery can perform the work of the
sociologist long after the word has done its do. And to my parents, Sue and Greg
Willett, I owe the deepest gratitude for giving me life and love throughout the
sometimes tumultuous, but always endearing, life-long journey that culminates in the
pages that follow. They have both been a continuous source of compassion,
understanding, inspiration and intellectual growth. Without their guidance and
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