“This is where the received history of popular music begins to crack open.”
At long last, F.O.Z. Jody Rosen has followed up on his ace 2008 Pop Conference presentation and given the world the lowdown and dirty on “the first rock star” (I’d prefer “pop star” myself), vaudeville diva (and anti-diva!) Eva Tanguay. Go read it now. It’s a lengthyish piece - and one of the most significant works of music writing you’ll read this year - so I’ll try not to add too much verbiage here, except to [concision fail! - ed.] make a couple of pedantic points and a couple broader ones. Which do you want first?
1. I’d quibble with Jody’s cherrypicked list of Tanguay’s spiritual heirs and heiresses - a hell, yes! on Johnny Rotten; this is like a missing, rebalancing chapter of Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces: Punk, you’ve met your Euro Dada, now meet your (Red Hot) Mama, who of course came yapping straight out of vaudeville and New Yawk. But to be fair, when Jody mentions Lena Lovich and (especially) Bjork, I think one has to say that they are more animated by the ghosts of European cabaret (and music-hall in Lovich’s case) than by turn-of-the-century American showbiz. On the other hand, presumably because it doesn’t boost the “rock star” thesis, Jody doesn’t mention the likes of Bette Midler, who gets her shot of Tanguay passed directly mouth-to-mouth from Sophie Tucker.
2. Speaking of Tucker, besides the recorded legacy, I wonder if in part the reason she’s better remembered than Tanguay in the public imagination is that she had an ethnic community with a vested interest in preserving and promoting her memory. Tanguay was a French-Canadian expat whose act reminded nobody of hearth and home. (And thus too her heart-wrenching end-of-life.) (To digress from my digression, I’ve heard tell that she may have been a relative of Therese Tanguay - better known today as the mother of Celine Dion. Fun, at least for me, though Celine could never be called an “I-Don’t-Care Girl” - more like the “I-Care-So-Very-Very-Much Girl.”)
3. Most shocking though is that somehow Jody managed to get through that entire piece without saying the word “Madonna.” [Later: Mea culpa! There is one mention of Madonna. I tried to double-check but missed it because I didn't know my browser's text search was case-specific.] Although he did say “Lady Gaga,” so maybe Madonna is just automatically implied? (By the way, my current working Gaga thesis: She is to Madonna what Bowie was to Mick Jagger, i.e., the art-school version.) Also m.i.a. - not so much M.I.A., but Lil Kim, Missy Elliott, Kathleen Hanna (”Suck My Left One” = “I Don’t Care” in 1991ese).
4. Wanted, the secret history of “madcap.”
5. Jody passes pretty fast over the fact that Tanguay’s signature number emerged “in the musical comedy The Sambo Girl. Playing the lead ‘brownface’ role …” Combine that with “her rumored romance with black vaudeville star George Walker,” in whose case vaudeville is at least partly a euphemism for minstrelsy, and one begins to wonder about the minstrel influence on what she did, and indeed whether there are any female minstrel characters who might have served as a template for her persona, which otherwise seems to bloom surprisingly full-grown into life. Of course, that’s just how stars do seem, almost by definition, but the genealogy is always more complicated. The continuities and/or breaks with 19th-century minstrelsy-centric pop culture (if we can call it that: see next point) are an important part of any account of early-20th-century U.S. pop culture, particularly if you’re going to make a case for the ragtime era as Rock’n'Roll Mark I. Not that Jody isn’t aware of all that, but again, it seemed underplayed.
6. That said it’s beginning to seem like the claim for “first pop/rock star” can keep being backdated and backdated, so long as anyone is intrepid enough to dig. (Or simply imagine it, the way Sophia Coppola did with Marie Antoinette, for example.) My sense of when mass culture began seems to jibe roughly with Jody’s, and we share a supposition that mass culture is a necessary precondition of the category “pop star.” But a plausible counterproposal could be that the pop/rock spirit is inherent to civilization (in part because it is the anti-civilization impulse) and that every culture’s had performers who embody it - to twist a proverb, it’s Elvises all the way down. Discuss.
