Rocking the Closet

How Little Richard, Johnnie Ray, Liberace, and Johnny Mathis Queered Pop Music

Vincent L Stephens (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

248 Seiten

2019
University of Illinois Press (Verlag)
978-0-252-08463-8 (ISBN)

Artikel merken

The all-embracing, "whaddya got?" nature of rebellion in Fifties America included pop music's unlikely challenge to entrenched notions of masculinity. Within that upheaval, four prominent artists dared to behave in ways that let the public assume-but not see-their queerness. That these artists cultivated ambiguous sexual personas often reflected an understandable fear, but also a struggle to fulfill personal and professional expectations. Vincent L. Stephens confronts notions of the closet-both coming out and staying in-by analyzing the careers of Liberace, Johnny Mathis, Johnnie Ray, and Little Richard. Appealing to audiences hungry for novelty and exoticism, the four pop icons used performance and queering techniques that ran the gamut. Liberace's flamboyance shared a spectrum with Mathis's intimate sensitivity while Ray's overwrought displays as "Mr. Emotion" seemed worlds apart from Little Richard's raise-the-roof joyousness. As Stephens shows, the quartet not only thrived in an era of gray flannel manhood, they pioneered the ways generations of later musicians would consciously adopt sexual mystery as an appealing and proven route to success.

Vincent L. Stephens is the director of the Popel Shaw Center for Race & Ethnicity and a contributing faculty member in music at Dickinson College. He is a coeditor of Post Racial America? An Interdisciplinary Study.

Erscheinungsdatum	17.10.2019
Reihe/Serie	New Perspectives on Gender in Music
Zusatzinfo	16 black & white photographs
Verlagsort	Baltimore
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	399 g
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Musik ► Pop / Rock
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften
ISBN-10	0-252-08463-2 / 0252084632
ISBN-13	978-0-252-08463-8 / 9780252084638
Zustand	Neuware