By Justin Hogg |

“Those crazy kids what will they do? They’re not a bit like me and you, with that crypto-punky psychobilly beat. They took your sacred rock ‘n’ roll, they stripped it down and they left a hole, then they filled it up with anger from the street. Hey hey hey hey, mutant beat freaks.” — Cleaners From Venus, “Summer in a Small Town”

A prelude

I was playing basketball the other day inside my local recreation center’s gym when I noticed I was being watched from the bleachers by an old white man. As I sank jumper after jumper I ducked inside for a lay-up. I made that too, but the decrepit onlooker chose to scowl at me and said in a scratchy voice, “You shouldn’t shoot like that. Look at him,” pointing to a white kid on the other side of the court. “That’s the way you should shoot.” I didn’t respond. Later, I thought of all the things that I should have said. Oh, so there’s only one way to shoot a basketball right? What does it matter how you shoot, as long as it goes in? For that man, my shooting didn’t align with the idealized form taught in how-to basketball VHS tapes sold to white men trying to be Oscar Robertson. There is no authentic way to shoot a basketball; there is a framework, but the execution depends on the physical dynamics of it leaving your hands, the repetition of that form, its near-perfection, the result: swish. When you shoot a basketball, you are engaging with that framework, with the forms that you have watched on television in NBA games, in the moves of street kids and on courts around the world. My shot is unique to me, but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Context and interpretation are essential to performance. I like to think of cover songs in a similar way.

What’s Behind A Cover?

In 1977, in his New Musical Express piece entitled “The Clash,” Lester Bangs wrote, “The point is that, like Richard Hell says, rock ‘n’ roll is an arena in which you recreate yourself, and all this blathering about authenticity is just a bunch of crap. The Clash are authentic because their music carries such brutal conviction, not because they’re Noble Savages.” [1] Bangs refers to rock ‘n’ roll as an “arena,” establishing the figures of performer and audience, of producer and consumer, of product and reception. The notion of an arena suggests an expansive and performative platform in which we consume music, the product never separable from the audience. Central to Bangs’ point in the above passage is the idea of music as a source of self-recreation, a means to invent an ideal self different from the one outside of the “arena.” Also central in the passage is music’s resistance to the notions of authenticity, and its rejection of fixed, one dimensional meanings. Bangs proposes instead that the reason that The Clash’s music is true, and “authentic,” is because of its “brutal conviction.”

However, we should challenge Bangs’ use of the term “authentic,” as a means to draw attention to the word’s historical and epistemological stranglehold on the world of art. He turns the whip against the master. In other words, The Clash’s “brutal conviction” does not serve as a marker of their indisputable authenticity, their perfect alignment with the words they preach and the lives they lead, with their music as an establishment and center of “class struggle,” “anti-establishment,” and “aesthetics.” Instead, this “brutal conviction” conjures the physical and sonic qualities of their sound and the way it produces real and tangible changes in people, culture and society.

Music resists authenticity. No music can be traced to a singular origin. Instead, a piece of music is an a priori interaction and engagement with a palimpsestual history of cultural material phenomena that came before it. Walter Benjamin, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, writes:

In the case of the art object, a most sensitive nucleus – namely, its authenticity – is interfered with whereas no natural object is vulnerable on that score. The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. [2]

Benjamin’s reference to  a “sensitive nucleus,” that conveys not authenticity, but history, helps us to think more carefully about the significance of  cover songs. Here sensitivity is closely aligned with properties of transformation.

Adapting Benjamin’s passage to a more contemporary imagining, we can perhaps think of the functions of cover songs in terms of a biological cell. Imagine, perhaps, the nucleus of a cell where the long strands of DNA are contained. We say contained, but we do not wish to imply off-limits. The cell wall’s doors are open to changes, primarily mutations and viruses, which alter the code of the DNA and change what that cell is doing (“doing”, not “does”). Benjamin uses the term “interfered” in relation to this “sensitive nucleus”, but this implies that a cell or the DNA inside of it was created to do just one thing, that to interfere with it is altering its perceived natural agenda.

Benjamin underscores the inevitability and political stakes of refusing authenticity in modern cultural production, distinguishing this modernity from previous forms of auratic (authentic) art: to pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura is the mark of a perception whose “sense of the universal equality of things” has increased to such a degree that it extracts from a unique object by means of reproduction… The adjustment of reality to the masses and of the masses to reality is a process of unlimited scope, as much for thinking as for perception.

In this possible productive relation between the masses and non-authentic cultural production, Benjamin saw the possibility of new forms of collectivity, rebellion, and social organization.

Both Lester Bangs and Walter Benjamin approach the art object as unstable — constantly being defined and re-defined, teetering back and forth between past and future. A song loses any possibility of “authenticity” or completion the second it is consumed by a listener — when it becomes an object of reception. The act of listening to a song always holds the potential of reproducing and transforming it. A song has a “sensitive nucleus” in the sense that its walls are always broken apart, always in ruins, always moving towards new interpretations and sounds to collide with, to get shaken up by. Cover songs are not just new takes, not simply modernizations of old cultural material, but are necessary dips into the continuum of music. They are adaptations, engagements, and more importantly, re-codings of latent cultural products and materials.

What is at stake in this realization is the seizure and expropriation of cultural material at the hands of the non-represented, that same material which is stained and filthy, which is steeped and elevated in and on the erasure of the most oppressed (women, people of color, queer, and trans people). Songs, no matter how popular or revered, can be covered and dissected by anyone. The following annotated playlist will focus primarily on those same oppressed peoples’ handlings of these popular and mainstream cultural products.

I will now point to a few cover songs by means of a short playlist. These songs will serve as examples of the unfinished, collective, and fluid properties of music, and the ways in which these adaptations re-code previously thought “completed” songs.

1. I Heard It Through The Grapevine – The Slits

The year was 1979, both before and after the death of punk. The UK charts were dominated by Art Garfunkel, Dr Hook (beats me), and Gloria Gayner. Punk was around there somewhere, snickering with snotty noses in the background. With their youngest member only fourteen years old, The Slits were already seasoned punk veterans, forming in 1976, associated with such heralded white men like Johnny Rotten and Joe Strummer. By 1979, The Slits had incited thousands of women to take up an axe or sticks and form their own bands, proving that they could do it just as well (and better) than men. This was obviously necessary, as, up until that point, songs like “Typical Girls” just were not conceivable in the static, Thatcherist, and mundane bourgeois British art world.

Combining pulsating rhythms and a throbbing bassline with singer Ari Up’s husky vocals, “I Heard It Through The Grapevine” by The Slits evolved into a dancey disco, punky reggae jam for the ages. Originally a Motown song, the figure of the “grapevine” could point to a system of information for American slaves on the plantation. According to Booker T. Washington’s chapter, A Slave Among Slaves from his autobiography, the grapevine was a telegraph system where black slaves received information about battles of The Civil War and their potential freedom before even whites got them, usually from a postman listening in on the whites of the slave house’s conversations. [3] Therefore we cannot ignore the racial dimension of access to information (or misinformation) inherent in the lyrics of the song. Nor can we ignore the players in the history of this song: Motown, the center of black soul in the ‘60s, Marvin Gaye, one of the most famous and tragic black soul singers in American music.

We point to the context of this figure of the grapevine especially when considering the sole difference in the lyrics, which happens only once as they change the eponymous line to “I heard it through the bassline.” One would not go so far as to suggest the change here to be an erasure of black history, at least not explicitly, especially since they only change it one time. So then, what can we say about the change from “grapevine” to “bassline”? It is at once a radical and ephemeral change, so that both meanings of the song can sustain: upholding the underground black history of the “grapevine” while invoking women’s experience of having their voices and thoughts drowned by the bass of male performers. Now women have the bass in hand, now women are making sounds, still marginalized, and still under appreciated in that arena of rock, but there in force.

Changes occur on a sonic level as well, giving the cover a more paranoid and anxious sound than Gaye’s version. This paranoia is built throughout the song with the disjointed guitar chords scattered and sprinkled throughout like anxious turns of a head at the perceived sound of footsteps down a city street. It is especially evident towards the end in the creeping strings that precede Ari incanting “Just about to lose my mind” over and over again in rhythm with the song’s repetitive bassline and heightened bongos invoking the unraveling of the speaker’s mental state.

This cover is an example of how a seemingly mild reworking of a song can actually produce radical changes and reflect emerging cultural and political struggles while retaining their historical resonance.  

2. Tumour – Lizzy Mercier Descloux

It was 1979, in that radical (or bogus) period of 6 months or so in NYC where the foundations for the movement known as No Wave were sucked up with a needle from the cotton and spread around like a disease. Freaks like Glenn Branca, James Chance, and Lydia Lunch were destroying guitars, getting their asses kicked by fans, and probably not eating so well. Another freak from France, Lizzy Mercier Descloux flocked to NYC as well with her partner Michel Esteban, who would soon establish the fantastic ZE Records, which specialized in mutant disco and worldbeat.

Although the song was originally sung by Little Willie John, I would like to instead point to a much a more popular version of the song by Peggy Lee for reference. One becomes immediately aware while listening to Lizzy’s adaptation of “Fever,” that she is playing with Lee’s version, which features a swinging tempo beginning with the big bass drums and snaps, then slowly unfolding into that patented up and down sliding bassline and high hat combo embedded in the DNA of early jazz. This is fused with the DNA of no wave, whose characteristically paranoid guitar tones jag into the main melody. Lizzy, whose first language is French, performs all of the songs on “Press Color” in English, producing an estrangement effect with Lizzy’s French accent thickening the songs. This throws into question the assumptions at the heart of Lee’s version, which upholds the ideology that women are incapable of life without a romantic male object.  

Secondly, and most glaringly, is the change of the main subject matter of the song “Fever” to “Tumour,” which is replaced at every instance. Love, being the main theme of the song, evolves into a disease with this change, whose presence inhibits the woman and speaker in the song from functioning: “I get a tumour that’s so hard to bear” and “Ooh I think I’m getting a tumour.” This suggests that love is terminal, changing the entire dynamic and content of the previous versions which before were only concerned with presenting the woman as a powerless subject, who experiences sudden “hot flashes” or fevers when a man is close by. Appearing merely absurd at first, the change from “fever” to “tumour” is subtle and critical of sexist norms. Through this change, Lizzy challenges and decenters ideologies of romantic love in popular music.

Furthermore, Lizzy displaces the subjects of the song by mixing them, at some points keeping the lyrics tied to the first person subject (I, me): “When you kiss me, tumour when you hold me tight,” but other times displacing it to a male, third person subject (him): “Give him a tumour.” These switches create a further disorientation and also subtly unsettles the original song’s heteronormativity (wait, who is the one getting the tumour here, who is the lovesick one?)

3. Out In The Streets – God Is My Co-Pilot

God Is My Co-Pilot formed in 1991 in New York City around the time of riot grrrl, grunge, and other questionable movements. They describe their sound as a “co-optation of rock”  continuing the history of groups in punk since the late ‘70s who were fed up with simply saying “fuck everything,” and fed up with the tired, stale narratives of popular music, i.e. relations between men and women, male angst, etc.

Another group who does the work of unsettling and disrupting the heteronormative narratives of doo-wop/love songs, here, God is My Co-Pilot reverse gender positions in the classic Shangri La’s song. But this does more than reverse binaristic roles. By changing the gender pronoun and the subject of the song, the band also dismantles narratives which reinforce stereotypes of women as the bearers of civilization, passivity and morality while at the same time criticizing women’s exclusion from popular music. The reversal critiques civility by assuming the “she” is agential rather than the object of desire, a role usually limited to men. These are the stakes of the lyrics: “Her heart is out in the streets” and “She don’t do the wild things that she did before.” This empowerment, though, is complex, not a mere masculinisation of the subject. Having a woman as the subject and speaker places women in both the position of power and vulnerability in the song.

“Out In The Streets” is not just a simple song about a love object, it is an anxious song about the lack of passion between the singer and the subject; the subject is not totally there and would rather be out with his boys. It is a mature song of letting go and setting free youth, which always seems to win over love, especially seen in the lines “I wish I didn’t care, I wish I’d never met him / They’re waitin’ downstairs, I know I’ve got to set him free” in the Shangri La’s version. These stakes change however when the subject is “she,” when “she” would rather be wearing her dirty old rag boots, would rather be combing her hair in the style of a Greaser, when she would rather be doing the wild things again instead of remaining tied to some love obsessed subject. Women are given the autonomy here not just to desire, but to not desire, which sounds simple enough, but historically has not been represented as something women possess in popular music.

The music compliments the anxieties of the lyrics as well. In The Shangri La’s version, the music that accompanies “But he’s not the same, it’s something in his kissing” is a more timid and consistent background. In that version, yearning strings accompany Mary Weiss’ voice, the song coming to a crescendo at the line: “He grew up . . .”  In this adaptation, guitar, vocals, and drums all explode into a furious 20 second burst of tension and unease. The two versions of this song are in dialogue, evoking a sense of the evolution and potential for new codes to mesh with already established (but not completed) ones. God Is My Co-Pilot at first seems to ridicule the doo-wop code of the song by opening their adaptation in an almost jazzy and comical way, like the start of a television episode, but this light tone gives way to reveal the adolescent punk experience of anxiety and subversion.

4. Angel Baby – Jun Togawa

Jun Togawa began her music career singing in the highly manufactured, exploited, and commodified Japanese idol singer tradition. Fortunately, somewhere along the road, her repressed inner freak came out. She moved underground, turning to the new wave, schizo-punk outfits of such groups as Guernica, and Yapoos. From there she went on to make such songs as Tamahime-sama, which is an ode to menstruation, Radar Man, a cyberpunk statement on information and identity, along with plenty of other frightening disturbances of conventional Japanese pop and popular music.

The listener can already hear the demented and twisted nature of Togawa’s adaptation of the Rosie and The Originals’ classic 1961 doo-wop single in the first eight notes of the song. Everything is presented in the song in such a way that makes an overt mockery of doo-wop and its pristineness, its clean sound and production, its feminized and tender vocal scope. Togawa destroys the ruby red hot rod, teenage sweetheart, milkshake date, lover’s lane kissing late on a school night all in a little over four minutes. The content of that ‘original’ version, is disassembled here.

In Brecht and Method, Fredric Jameson explains Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, or, his concept of estrangement, which is the way in which the audience in a play was disallowed the ability to completely identify with the characters on stage, and rather, through effects and other techniques, distanced from the actors. As he writes:

. . . the whole political message of content of the V-effect itself- namely, to reveal what has been taken to be eternal or natural – the reified act, with its unifying name and concept – as merely historical, as a kind of institution which has come into being owing to the historical and collective actions of people and their societies, and which therefore now stands revealed as changeable. What history has solidified into an illusion of stability and substantiality can now be dissolved again, and reconstructed, replaced, improved, ‘umfunktioniert’. The process of aesthetic autonomization, breaking the action up into smaller parts, thus has symbolic as well as epistemological meaning: it shows what the act ‘really’ is, no doubt, but the very activity of breaking it up and ‘analyzing it is itself a joyous process, a kind of creative play, in which new acts are formed together out of pieces of the old, in which the whole reified surface of a period seemingly beyond history and beyond change now submits to a first ludic un-building, before arriving at a real social and revolutionary collective reconstruction. [4]

Like Benjamin, Jameson engages with art objects as partial, changeable, and “merely historical.” To affirm that objects are historical is to affirm that they are the products and work of the “collective actions of people and their societies,” that they are inherently “changeable.” This is further evidence of the collective properties of music, which owes its existence equally to the listener as well as the musician. Furthermore, this passage suggests that “un-building,” reconstruction, replacement, and dissolvement are necessary tools in creating new art objects and exploring the old. Finally, breaking down, disbanding, and separating is a process that is pleasurable, that is fun. This demonstrates an even further rejection of the authenticity and monotony sometimes attributed to music, especially rock ‘n’ roll. We must hold on to Jameson’s use of “ludic” and “creative play,” especially considering Jun Togawa’s adaptation of “Angel Baby,” which resists reification and stagnancy.

Turning to the song, we can first point to Togawa’s exaggerated vocal sounds and fluctuating timbre. The dynamics and textures of the vocals are so over the top that when Togawa blurts out “No one loves you like I do” she makes palpable an aesthetic of estrangement, foregrounding the construction of romantic dependence as a patriarchal trope. This critical lens is further strengthened by the “Ooh’s” that Togawa sings before the sax solo that showcase that she can actually sing quite well, and is trying to sing horribly. This suggests a parody and a disruption of the more modulated music that accompanies fifties-era white suburban love,  evoked by films such as Back to The Future, Grease, and the like.

The unproblematized belief in love reflected in the more earnest version of “Angel Baby” is interrogated by a bass that sounds almost flattened out, a guitar that sounds as though it is drunk and completely unconcerned with the environment around it, and a thoroughly raunchy saxophone. These instrumental sections reflect teenage American love as such through a dark, near sinister lens. They do the similar work of Togawa’s voice, an instrument itself, in unsettling and doing away with the regimented instrumental codes of fifties-era doo-wop by being so overtly out of tune and against the grain.

The US itself is implicitly challenged by the song’s engagements with Japanese culture and language as Togawa sings some of the lyrics in Japanese at one point and is heard to say “suki” in her exaggerated agony towards the end. This insertion creates a further distance from Americanized love and culture by refusing to adhere to the original version’s language.

Togawa perhaps, more than any artist examined thus far, seems to be most concerned with blowing up the trope of romantic love, the systematized landscape of pop music, the rules of what is acceptable and what is not. We know this by the many projects and songs she has created. Yet still, this requires some engagement with history, even if it is one highly estranged from the reference, even if Togawa has broken up the parts into such tiny pieces that the audience now recognizes something different altogether.

5. Lola – The Raincoats

One of the many bands inspired by The Slits, The Raincoats formed in London in 1977, though, like the former, did not release their debut album until 1979. Their sound was unique, blending unkempt guitar and drum playing with a Velvets-like violin on many songs such as “Fairytale In The Supermarket” and the slow building “The Void.” Greil Marcus, in his book entitled, In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-1992 writes on The Raincoats:

But as The Raincoats stand back from the tradition they also open it up. There’s something wonderfully anonymous about these women and their music: as four women appearing as nothing but themselves, they demystify each other. The very idea of roles is done away with . . . They seize the prosaic and fling it back with the intensity of a terrible quarrel. [5]

The privilege of being able to just be “anonymous,” to engage with the “prosaic” to “demystify” each other on stage, the same stage which has historically been open to men to reinvent themselves and create new ideas, but for women to be ridiculed and treated as a “novelty,” this is what The Raincoats exude for Marcus. They do away with those all too familiar roles: “Girls with guitars, sex bombs, dominatrixes, female punks,” and are, in the words of Marcus, “nothing but themselves.” But most importantly perhaps, in this “seizure” of the prosaic which has for so long not been afforded to them, they “fling it back” at their oppressors, perhaps to say, “We don’t want your consolations, we just want to play music.”

But The Raincoats were aware of the oppressive nature of rock ‘n’ roll as well. In the same book, they are quoted by Marcus, saying, “The basic theme in rock’n’roll is what goes on between men and women . . . Rock’n’roll is based on black music. And it’s based in the exclusion of women and the ghettoization of blacks. Which is why we want to put a bit of distance between what we do and the rock’n’roll tradition.”[5] We have engaged in this before. Every song that we have examined thus far has been a relation, or love interaction between a man and a woman, the act of covering those songs displacing this theme in subtle and powerful ways. Rock ‘n’ roll, according to The Raincoats, at once is all about women (in an objective way of course), but excluded them for so long (and still does) from participating in creating new narratives. So, at once, The Raincoats are engaging with history and tradition, but moving past it as well.

Probably my favorite cover song (and one of my favorite songs) ever, The Raincoats’ cover of the popular Kinks song refuses to adapt the original lyrics, tapping into deep cultural recesses of transformative potential.

“Lola” is a song about a male subject who meets a woman at a club, a woman who he is at first not sure is a woman: “In a dark brown voice she said Lola,” “Why she walked like a woman and talked like a man,” but never misgenders her and eventually falls for her. It is also the story of male adolescent experience, and expected maturation: “Well I left home just a week before,” as well as expected norms of men, “I’m not the world’s most physical/passionate/masculine man.” That Lola is a transgender woman often seems to be submerged into the altogether singalong nature of the song and often ignored by popular culture- many narratives of trans people are constantly up against this form of erasure. Trans people are almost never represented in popular culture, and when they are it is often in a demonizing way. Though not always perfect, “Lola” is a song about a trans woman. Although the song can still be said to be about the relations between men and women, we must not ignore that Lola is trans. And as such, we must acknowledge that the experiences that she and the male subject experience, though presented as strange at first, are eventually treated as they should be, as libidinality.

The Raincoats covered “Lola” because it is a good song. As Mary Birch, a member of the band noted in an interview, “You can have relationships with women or men. And ‘Lola’ spoke to all that. It was an amusing, radical, liberating song.” [6] They didn’t need to make changes to the lyrics because they were four women recording what they wanted to, which is in itself radical (especially within the male-dominated arena of rock music). But women have never fully possessed that ostensible right. If we look at a few of the most proficient writers in American music in the last 50 years, the likes of Carole King and Laura Nyro, who wrote many popular songs, we see that there is a continued process of covering music. But for what aim? Pop music on major labels (Columbia, Atlantic), within the consciousness of mainstream American listeners, especially throughout the ‘60s in soul and pop records have been so canonized and standardized, that it was fairly expected and encouraged by labels and producers of artists to cover them. By which I mean to suggest that many of the most popular songs in the American canon (songs like King’s (You Make Me Feel) Like a Natural Woman, King’s “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?”) were historically written and versionized not for the sake of being covered, but because they served as recognizable markers for American audiences and monetary safeguards for record labels.

Who would object to Laura Nyro covering Carole King? For listeners, it fit two criteria: a song they historically knew and liked (thanks to Aretha Franklin), and an artist they enjoyed — Laura Nyro. Who would not buy that record? This in no way detracts from the performative aspects of those versions, but points to the inherently reproducible nature of pop music, in which women have not had the freedom to cover any song they wanted to because it was not “acceptable” or within the label’s designated boundaries and targeted audiences. We have not used the word yet, but capitalism, as seen here, proves to be the largest inhibitor of the collective properties of cover songs, by upholding the standard of what is expected of women in the music industry to produce.

Did The Raincoats, a band that was only known by Peel listeners and punksters in London around ‘79 really think covering The Kinks would sell their own brand? The unexpectedness and weight behind covering a song like “Lola” by a band like The Kinks (one of Britain’s finest according to many) destroys any talk of songs “out of bounds” for women to cover, but more importantly affirms the right to cultural material by anyone, or any group, and the chance at liberation for women from the male owned, record label established “pool” of songs to cover.

If rock ‘n’ roll is based on the marginalization of women, then The Raincoats’ version of Lola just by way of existing works towards upsetting that historical reality. The Raincoats’ overtly amateur adaptation is neither a bid for notoriety nor mass marketability. Instead, the song comes off as a private pleasure, like singing in the shower, as if they are not aware of the audience, as if they are simply singing for fun. This no-man’s-land of musical production serves as an estrangement of slick professionalism, a historical stratum where a plurality of histories are revealed as raw and dissonant.

Music exists on a continuum. This is a claim that is inherently historical but built on a movement, kept alive by constant changes. When a song comes into being, it is not defined by some teleological ending. Rather, songs should be fucked with, remixed, covered, sampled, whistled, hummed, tapped with a pencil, revolving on a merry-go-round inside of your head. Cover songs are not just a way of engaging with cultural material but a way of thinking and rethinking the world.

I was in a band for a minute. It was three of us — me on bass, and my two friends on guitar and drums. We covered “Psychotic Reaction” by The Count Five, one because we didn’t have any songs of our own, and two because it is a really amazing fucking song. We imitated the verse as best we could, the freak out sections, and it was different every time we played it. We didn’t hope to perfect it, to hit every note right — we played it over and over again because it was fun, because it was liberating, and when we played it, it was undeniably us.

So forget that guy at my recreation center, he can eat it. I couldn’t perfect my basketball shot even if I wanted to. Even the best shooters miss. Repetition doesn’t mean perfection, but it always means change.

Author notes:

1. Freak is a term of endearment. If you aren’t a freak, I don’t wanna be near you.

2. Many thanks to Madeline Lane-McKinley, Johanna Isaacson, and Daniella D’Acquisto, without whom this piece would not be what it is.

 

Works Cited

[1] Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, 227

[2] Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

[3] Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery, an Autobiography

[4] Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method, 47

[5] Greil Marcus, In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-1992, 114

[6] Greg Kot, “Raincoats to finally make Chicago debut”, Chicago Tribune, 14 September 2011