Coming of Age: Teaching and Learning Popular Music in Academia

Cover Songs

Cover songs are ubiquitous in popular music, whether performed as tribute, theft, or rejection. As rereadings of cultural texts, they are already intertextual musically and lyrically. The act of “covering” may be thought of as queer—a “temporal drag” act (Freeman 2000). Elizabeth Freeman’s concept of temporal drag refers specifically to how “the lesbian” functions as “the big drag” in queer theory, pulling—in a way that, as Sue-Ellen Case observed in 1997, “wasn’t funny anymore” (210)—hip queer politics back to a disavowed 1970s second-wave feminist past theorized in terms of “essentialized bodies, normative visions of women’s sexuality, and single-issue identity politics” (Freeman 2000, 728). Rather than conceiving the past as an obstacle to so-called progressive ways of theorizing and acting, temporal drag productively invokes, in the “movement time of collective political life” (729), a past that is not quite gone in a present that is not quite here. Covering is queer when the performer does not simply resing the original or blend into it but instead enacts a “cross-historical” practice that involves “inhabiting [the earlier] persona or body or voice . . . while self-consciously registering the performance” (Halberstam 2007, 53). This has the effect of mobilizing the cover in an iterative “complex structure of queer reproduction” (52)—what I theorize here as haunting[2] of and by intertextual apparitions.

Judged on how well they used their voices to cover so-called canonic American popular songs, American Idol contestants relied—many might say overrelied—on vocal improvisation or “melismatic variation” to make their covers unique without deviating too far from the original or standard version. Vocal improvisation signals virtuosity outside textuality, and similar to men singing in falsetto, is associated with gendered African American singing practices. Both practices, individually as well as when taken together, operate intertextually as “a vocal, and thus embodied, symbol of blackness” (Meizel 2011, 63), making audible the racialization, genderization and sexualization of American popular music, particularly in terms of tensions associated with them.

The Roar of the Greasepaint, the Smell of the Crowd

Written in British music hall style, the 1964 class-based allegorical musical The Roar of the Greasepaint, the Smell of the Crowd[3] features two main characters, privileged “Sir” and downtrodden “Cocky.” Together they continuously play “The Game” of life. Sir always wins and keeps changing the rules to ensure his victory. “The Negro,” even more abject than Cocky, enters the game late and unexpectedly wins, singing “Feeling Good” as an expression of “emancipation” from how badly Cocky had treated him. Apparently inspired by The Negro’s success, Cocky presses his challenge of Sir until the two forge an alliance based on mutual interdependence.

Greasepaint’s score remarkably produced six songs that became standards, notably “Feeling Good” and “Who Can I Turn To?” (Marshall 2016).[4] The show quickly flopped in England, however, in August 1964, which was mostly attributed to miscasting Norman Wisdom (because he was not Anthony Newley) as Cocky. Casting West Indian performer Cy Grant[5] as The Negro also might have been a problem, given that it was only a year after the West Indian community in Bristol, England—inspired by nonviolent civil rights activism in the United States[6]—led a bus boycott that forced the local Transport and General Workers Union to hire people of color (Kelly 2013). In addition, England’s economic decline during the 1960s might have kept audiences away, or at least made them unwilling to examine class-based inequity that benefited them. Regardless, US producer David Merrick saw potential in Greasepaint as a struggle between individuals and agreed to take it to Broadway—on the condition that popular musical theatre performer Anthony Newley play Cocky and well-known crooner Tony Bennett record “Who Can I Turn To?” for immediate release in the United States.[7] With African American singer Gilbert Price cast as The Negro, Merrick also took the unusual step of recording the Broadway cast album early, releasing it two months before the show’s May 16 opening. Intended to build audience interest during Greasepaint’s financially successful three-month US national tour, the album landed in stores and on radio[8] in the midst of widespread racial turmoil inspired by the US civil rights movement and just four days after what would come to be known in the United States as “Bloody Sunday.”

During the morning of March 7, 1965, six hundred peaceful demonstrators set out to march from Selma to Montgomery, the Alabama state capital, to assert their long-denied voting rights. While crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, they were brutally attacked by Alabama state troopers using clubs, tear gas, and horses. Shocking news footage of the attack broadcast the same night on national television sparked outrage across the country. Within days, President Lyndon Johnson sent voting rights legislation to Congress, and on March 21, protected by a federal court order and hundreds of federalized troops of the Alabama National Guard, more than three thousand marchers departed on the four-day journey initially led by Martin Luther King Jr. Several prominent African American singers performed along the way, including Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, and Nina Simone.[9] Her cover of “Feeling Good,” recorded in January, would be released in June.

Nina Simone

Contra to Thomas Jones (writing as A. Loudermilk 2013), I would suggest that first there was racism. Then there was Eunice Waymon, born 1933 in Tryon, North Carolina, of mixed indigenous, African, and white ancestry.[13] She played gospel from the day she climbed onto the bench of her family’s pedal organ—just before her third birthday—and played the hymn “God Be With You ’til We Meet Again” completely through, without mistakes. Then there was Eunice Waymon’s experience of racism in relationship to her piano playing. She was eleven years old when she refused to begin playing a public concert for community members (African American and white) who were funding her private classical piano lessons until her parents were returned to the front-row seats they had vacated for a white family. A decade later, she auditioned at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and was denied admission. Then there was “Nina Simone.”

Preparing virtually every day of her life to fulfill her dream of becoming “the first black classical pianist,” Eunice Waymon created the stage name “Nina Simone” so her mother, a devout Methodist minister for whom young Eunice had played church services and revival meetings,[14] would not know that she was performing in a bar in Atlantic City to finance piano lessons with Curtis professor Vladimir Sokhaloff. He confirmed that she should have been admitted and encouraged her to audition again. Hearing later from “white people who knew” that Curtis turned her down because she was a “very poor unknown black girl,” Simone still wondered if she had played well enough because, she observes, people never admit to racism (Simone and Cleary [1991] 2003, 42). “So you feel the shame, humiliation and anger at being just another victim of prejudice and at the same time there’s the nagging worry that maybe it isn’t that at all, maybe it’s because you’re just no good” (42–43). Within the next ten years, Simone became a rich, well-known African American artist performing a mix of mostly popular music styles—until 1963, when members of the Ku Klux Klan threw dynamite into the Birmingham, Alabama, Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing adolescent girls Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins. And then there was Nina Simone: “I suddenly realized what it was to be black in America in 1963, but it wasn’t an intellectual connection of the type Lorraine [Hansberry] had been repeating to me over and over—it came as a rush of fury, hatred and determination. In church language, the Truth entered into me and I ‘came through.’ . . . [F]or the next seven years I was driven by civil rights and the hope of black revolution. . . . My music was dedicated to a purpose more important than classical music’s pursuit of excellence; it was dedicated to the fight for freedom and the historical destiny of my people” (89, 91). Everything about performing music changed for Simone that day, including her relationship with popular music audiences who adored her but as she later observes were “too easily pleased, and [only] interested in . . . the delivery of the lyrics” (91). About eighteen months after the bombing, she recorded “Feeling Good.”

Adam Lambert

American Idol quickly established a reputation for meanness toward contestants, despite its marketing as family entertainment. Host Ryan Seacrest’s and judge Simon Cowell’s recurring homophobic onscreen exchanges challenging each other’s heterosexuality certainly contributed to the impression that Idol “reserved . . . a special sort of meanness” for contestants who presented on “the queer end of the spectrum” (Votta 2016). While Idol purportedly avoided exploiting sexuality “for its audience potential” (Meizel 2012), it nonetheless emerged in the first season.[17] Even Lambert, who was widely regarded as having been “basically out” during season 8, waited until after the season ended to confirm his being gay in a June 2009 Rolling Stone cover story. It would be five years after Lambert’s runner-up finish before the first openly “LGBT contestant,” lesbian MK Nobilette, competed into the Top 10 during season 13 in 2014—when a straight white cisgender man won. Overall, cisgender straight white men won nine of Idol’s fifteen seasons, including seasons 5, 7 through 11, and 13 through 15, demonstrating the show’s inability to move beyond a regressive past of its own making that isolated it from progressive social and musical scenes, ultimately rendering it irrelevant (Votta 2016).

Unable to create a compelling backstory about Lambert’s Southern California hometown or the fact that he was Jewish, the show constructed a narrative about him as a glam rocker (Meizel 2012). Not only was it plausible, given his background performing in musicals, it was also expeditious. To the extent that signifiers of glam rock, such as “flamboyant poses and aggressive sexuality” are often associated with and stereotypical of gay men, Idol producers might have hoped audiences would conflate glam with gay, enabling the show to “exploit [Lambert’s] gayness without naming it” (Draper 2012, 207).[18] Indeed, show producer Simon Fuller took up the glam narrative directly only after the season was over. Undermining that narrative, however, is that the vast majority of glam rockers were heterosexual white men who “posed” ambiguously in a variety of ways. All the glam rockers Fuller names—Bolan, who fathered a son; Bowie, who in 1983 repudiated his (false) 1970s claim of homosexuality; and even Mercury, widely understood now as gay, but who concealed that he was HIV positive and later died of AIDS—maintained long-standing relationships with women. Moreover, none of these performers, or other glam rockers in the 1970s and ’80s, contributed politically or personally to queer causes. Auditioning for Idol first with Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” and later with Cher’s “Believe,” Lambert took up the glam rock persona enthusiastically even as he intensified its conventions and interrupted its narratives.[19]

For the Top 5 competition week, “Rat Pack Standards,” Lambert was required to sing a song made famous by a group of American actors and singers known in the 1950s and ’60s as the “rat pack.” Instead of rat-pack member Sammy Davis Jr.’s version of “Feeling Good,” however, Lambert covered the popular—arguably glam—version recorded in 2001 by the English progressive hard (space) rock band Muse. While Muse’s version shares some affinity with Simone’s standard, it is mechanistic (Matthew Bellamy sings the second verse through a megaphone while moving robotically) and densely scored, representing a naïvely hopeful futuristic vision where people might begin a new life (MuseWiki 2014).

Intertextual Strategies

Forced to abandon her classical music aspirations, Simone directed her intertextual strategies toward a future black revolution situated in relationship to gender. She performed across and mixed musical genres, including classical, gospel, folk, popular, blues, jazz, cabaret, and show tunes, engaging this “combinatory textual approach” to transgress and conjoin styles compulsively and continuously (Gaines 2013). Accomplished “in a variety of musical aesthetics, genres, and traditions, black and white,” Simone claimed to prefer no particular style, creating concoctions that were simultaneously surprising and musically brilliant (Heard 2012, 1060). Indeed, Simone’s musical choices so thoroughly resisted genre and style classification that marketing her recordings and reviewing her performances was nearly impossible.

In her remarkable 1962 live studio amalgam of the “existential love song” (Gaines 2013) “For All We Know”[23]—composed in 1934 by Tin Pan Alley, songwriter J. Fred Coots, and lyricist Sam M. Lewis and recorded by African American singers such as Dinah Washington, Abbey Lincoln, and Billie Holliday[24]—Simone plays a Bach-like invention while singing the lyrics slowly, out of time and melody, without affect. Infused by guitarist Al Schackman’s equally remarkable improvised guitar counterpoint, this performance—even more so than the 1960 recorded version (without Schackman) on the album Nina Simone and Her Friends—is unquestionably one of the most poignant and profoundly artistic examples of her combinatorial gifts. She wears a sleeveless flower-print dress and a tiny tiara in straight hair, appearing youthful yet composed and wise. The interplay of piano and guitar carries all the emotion, her voice enveloped as part of the music’s texture: “For all we know, this may only be a dream.” Certainly the most famous of her shocking juxtapositions, however, is the jaunty show tune piano accompaniment she created for her wildly provocative and antagonistic civil rights protest song “Mississippi Goddam.”

In the aftermath of the September 1963 “bombing of the little girls in Alabama and the [June 1963] murder of Medgar Evers . . . shot to death on the steps of his [Jackson, Mississippi] home,” Simone, in a self-described murderous rage, composed in just one hour the astounding “Mississippi Goddam” (Simone and Cleary [1991] 2003, 89, 88).[25] This stunningly redefined 1960s freedom song, completely unlike anything performed by other activists such as Fannie Lou Hamer or the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Freedom Singers, “teem[s] with a penetrating rage and sadness” even as it manages to invoke humor (Heard 2012, 1062).[26] Although most obviously associated with the piano’s parody of show tunes supporting “darkly candid lyrics” (Brooks 2011, 187)—“Oh but this whole country is full of lies / You’re all gonna die, and die like flies!”—delivered with a “Vaudevillian . . . quick and witty pitter-patter” (Gaines 2013, 253), “the actual poetics of the tune reveals deeply comic structures which play with understatement, parody, and the sharp incongruities of quotidian experiences of American life” that Simone knew firsthand only too well (Heard 2012, 1062).

She was renowned for mesmerizingly brilliant and typically unpredictable live performances during which she changed or interpolated lyrics and rearranged or mispronounced words, inventing new stresses and variations while improvising introductions, “bridges, codas, and reprises” (Gaines 2013). Underscoring this, Danielle Heard (2012) argues that her music and performances are resonant with free jazz but “even more ‘far out’ than the free jazz cats [in that] her unique theater of invisibility distinguishes itself from any one artistic movement” (1060).[27] In the end, however, Simone’s virtuosic pianism challenged, but could not completely dislodge, the assumed masculinity of the African American jazz soloist that Simone articulated (Feldstein 2005; Monson 1995). While it might be accurate that both “jazz and masculinity—lose their shape as a result of Simone’s . . . intertextual strategy” (Gaines 2013, 264), “free jazz cats” such as Dizzy Gillespie were characterized as “unorthodox geniuses,” while Simone—(dis)reputed to be temperamental, rude, and arrogant—“was far more likely to be depicted as ‘a witch’ than as an artist with high standards” (Feldstein 2005, 1359).

Singing with a usually rough-edged but always uniquely expressive voice that “seems to trigger grief, in the same way that certain sounds do—a fog horn, light rain on an empty lake” (Dobie 1997, 232), she “dar[ed] audiences to see and hear ‘America’ differently and on a different frequency” (Brooks 2011, 182). Indeed, the ways Simone used her voice, manipulating its distinctively fluctuating timbre, itself defying categorization, particularly in its lowest register, elides gender as well as sexuality.[28] Simone describes her voice as a “third layer, complementing the other two layers, right and left hands” of her piano (Simone and Cleary [1991] 2003, 51) in a form of intertextuality that Malik Gaines (2013) characterizes as transvocal: “Singer of diverse materials and the virtuoso soloist . . . speak[ing] complementary languages” in ways that were invariably controversial (262). The intertextual strategy that would make clear her critique talks back—not only to uncomprehending audiences, reviewers, and critics but also for a faltering future revolution.

“Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” was composed for Simone and released in 1964 on her first album with Phillips, Broadway, Blues, Ballads. An effect of songwriter Horace Ott’s working through a marital argument, Simone was immediately “intrigued” when Ott pitched the song to her, perhaps “transmigrating” it to beatings she regularly endured from husband and manager Andy Stroud (Cohodas 2010). The recorded version is overorchestrated with lush strings, woodwinds, percussion, and the Malcolm Dodds singers, all of which nonetheless combine to “highlight the singular edge in [Simone’s] voice every time she cut through the swooning violins” as she finds “her way to the heart of the song, raw but completely without melodrama” (152, 153)—which, of course, was true of everything she sang.

Simone performed “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” live in London for the 1968 British television special Sound of Soul.[29] Wearing an African-like tunic and matching kerchief covering her hair, Simone’s performance voices a metadialogue of her critique as continuity—not a plea for reconciliation but an imperative to the studio and viewing audiences and a challenge for an agonizingly vanishing black revolution. Of the lyrics, she sings only the first verse and hook:

The band vamps as she continues to play and sing, freely improvising the melody and rhythm:

Signaling the final chord, she looks up and lifts her hands from the keyboard, turns away from the band, and looks down. Her face is fully visible to the camera, her mouth slightly open as if in midsentence. The band abruptly stops, and the studio is instantly silent. Surprised, the audience responds with scattered applause that starts to build. Simone turns quickly back to the keyboard, cutting off the applause as she vamps the introduction to the next song, assuring, “Thank you very much. I love you too.”

By contrast, Lambert’s intertextual strategies on American Idol do not combine musical styles but interrupt and re-sound them toward materializing queer subjectivities in the present. With his heartbreaking performance of the Bee Gees’ “If I Can’t Have You,”[30] he interrupts an up-tempo disco tune and re-sounds it as a starkly personal ballad. Dressed conservatively in a gray suit and dark tie over a white shirt, he never leaves his spot on the stage, leaning slightly as he sings, persistently standing up to disco-associated homophobia. Moving seamlessly from a fully embodied high tenor voice into falsetto and back again, his delivery—unyielding in its intensity, emotion, and intimacy—refutes so-called disco diva vocal stereotypes with subtle rubatos and restrained melismas. His despair reads in the context of gay bashing (“no chance for me,” “my life would end,” “am I strong enough to see it through”), as he omits the second prechorus lyric, “to dreams that never will come true,” and produces imperatives of queer desire, without which (“I don’t want nobody”) there is no desire.

Similarly, Lambert interrupts Steppenwolf’s ponderously serious rock anthem “Born to Be Wild,”[31] synonymous with hard rock and masculinist biker culture, and re-sounds it as a wild gay-boy play-full romp. Performed at a frenetic (by comparison) tempo, Lambert, wearing tennis shoes, skips downstage to an introduction haunted by disco, as it highlights drums instead of electric guitar. The delayed entrance of guitars and overdetermined backbeat produce a ridiculously exuberant and campy rock performance that queers the original by affectionately overplaying it without ever letting it go. Lambert’s camp rock persona juxtaposes glam guyliner with biker fingerless gloves and “tak[es] the world” in a queer “love embrace.” The specter of disco appears again when he interpellates homophobia associated with both the music genre[32] and the place where it was played[33] by changing “never wanna die” in the lyrics of “Born to Be Wild” to “never gonna die” from the lyrics of “Play That Funky Music” (which he covered earlier in the season). Deciding to “disco down,” the “boogie singer” is exhorted to “lay down the boogie and play that funky music till you die.” In this context, the firing “guns” of “Born to Be Wild” read more political than phallic,[34] rendering queer the rockers born to be wild.

Apparitional “Feeling Good”

Simone’s “Feeling Good” is everywhere yet nowhere. It appears—dismembered and disembodied—as the opening soundtrack to the trailer for the documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? (2015), directed by Liz Garbus, only to disappear, silent in this film aspiring to answer its title question first posed by Maya Angelou (1970) to the vividly opaque Nina Simone.[35] Never released as a single and a song Simone almost certainly never performed live, “Feeling Good” echoes endlessly—“her voice vibrates, a rich, deep thrumming under the cracked surface, . . . a motor running, running” unseen, but never unheard (Dobie 1997, 232). Perhaps “Feeling Good” is too amorphous for the exquisite excavations Simone enacted in her relentlessly improvisatory live performances. Perhaps it is too intimate, conjuring the phantom future black revolution that she dreamed but never realized with her beloved friend, African American playwright, activist, and lesbian Lorraine Hansberry, who died of cancer at thirty-four within days of Simone recording “Feeling Good.” It would be four years later in 1969, and just months after her interpellative “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” that she composed—with help on the lyrics from her musical director, Weldon Irvine—“To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” inspired by and dedicated to Hansberry, about whom Simone comments, “I really think that she gave it to me.”[36] An “anthem of black pride” (Feldstein, 1995), it was released as a single and became one of her biggest hits, reaching the top ten on the R&B charts.

“Feeling Good” haunts Simone’s performance of “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” in a 1969 concert with her band in a gymnasium at Martin Luther King Jr.’s alma mater, Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. Two members of the band sing the lyrics with her. During the second verse, she simultaneously summons Lorraine and interpellates Nina (3:01):

The band vamps in an improvisatory section immediately after the final line, and Simone exclaims, “Oh! I’m feelin’ good now.” Continuing to play during the vamp, she muses, “Yes, yes, yes, yes” and then calls Langston Hughes and Billie Holliday, adding, “Now, of course, Lorraine is gone.” Gathering herself, she intones, “Enough, enough, enough, Nina. I feel so good!” and sways, dancing at the piano with her upper body in the rhythm, perhaps, of black revolution materializing—some forty years hence. She and the band sing one last verse:

Simone jumps up to ecstatic applause, and the band continues playing as she turns and rapidly walks away from the piano, her hands up in the performative gesture of “Don’t shoot,” now associated with Black Lives Matter.

Haunted by the phantasm of his on-air performance of failed heterosexuality, Lambert’s studio version of “Feeling Good,” with its references to both disco music and queerness, is not a tribute to Muse’s popular version but an anticover of both the music and message. It immediately disrupts the impersonal sophistication of Muse’s progressive rock by starting with keyboard bass holding D. The song’s dominant pitch begs the ensuing G minor Liberace-like flourish, followed by the keyboard triplets of the intro emphatically stomping beats 1 and 3. Further, Lambert’s studio version replaces Muse’s discrete fade at the end, with guitar holding pitches G and D, decaying in an excruciatingly slow wah-wah vibrato. Perhaps the most overt reference to disco, however, is Lambert’s complex vocal improvisation during the coda, featuring not only his versatile falsetto but the striking beauty and expressivity of his voice across its entire range.

Heard as false and artificial, falsetto signified 1970s disco and all that allegedly was wrong with it—“excessive, synthetic, overproduced, ornamental” (François 1995, 443). In its hauntingly intimate immateriality, however, falsetto functions as both “the voice of exception, crisis, and interruption, if not intervention [and] a rhetorical deployment of difference, a staging of an otherness imposed from without by oppressive . . . gender-based structures” (François 1995, 445). Traversing an exceptionally wide range, Lambert intensifies Simone’s lyric in his solo, repeating, “I’m feelin’, I’m feelin’, I’m feelin’” on an ascending sequence that begins on D above middle C and ends in falsetto an octave higher. Gliding from there up to F, he seamlessly descends through his head and middle voices, resting on “good,” and then continues his intricate improvisation untexted. Lambert moves all the way down into his chest voice, holding precariously onto D below middle C, more than two octaves below his highest pitch. Singing now in the depths of Simone’s haunting voice—the voice triggering grief—Lambert’s fragile and rarely heard huskily embodied low tenor voice, interpellating Simone, materializes queer bodies. Singing one last “I’m feelin’,” cut off by an audibly aspirated “hah,” he finishes quietly with a short melisma on “good,” holding not the tonic pitch but B♭, the blues minor third—a tenuous, temporary possibility for just this moment.

After-word

In the end, “Feeling Good” was pivotal to the plot of the now “famously problematic musical” (Dorsey 2016) that critics panned in 1965[37] for taking on big questions in a musical comedy form wholly inadequate to the task. Closing in early December after a modestly successful run of 231 performances and 6 Tony nominations, Greasepaint has never been revived on Broadway. It is, however, sporadically staged in community theatre productions, two of which improbably played at virtually the same moment in May–June 2016. The Rose Compass Theater (Annapolis, Maryland) version, accompanied only by piano, mostly delivers Bricusse and Newley’s original concept with two exceptions: a young man is cast as Sir’s protégé, “The Kid,” instead of the “abrasive, androgynous young woman” (Marshall 2016) specified in the script,[38] and The Negro is renamed “The Foreigner.” Reviewer Jack Marshall (2016) finds the former change inexplicable and the latter attributable to “timidity.”

By contrast, the Norma Terris Theatre (Chester, Connecticut) version is—with Bricusse’s blessing[39]—completely reimagined, including “new orchestrations” performed by just six instrumentalists (Arnott 2016). It is set in a postapocalyptic dystopia in which the cast, now reduced to four characters (Sir, Cocky, The Kid/The Girl, and The Negro—renamed “The Stranger”) play the game—not of life but of survival (Dorsey 2016). What is at stake here is food.[40] The Stranger’s physical appearance is racially and sexually ambiguous in an effort to honor what director Don Stephenson describes as the show’s original “brave” intent during the 1960s civil rights movement to “giv[e] voice to a disenfranchised, voiceless group” (quoted in Dorsey 2016). Portrayed by Gregory Treco, a self-described “light-skinned African American man” (Moore 2015), The Stranger is tall, ample, and imposing, wearing blondish straight long hair pulled back in an explicitly feminine manner and vivid makeup highlighted with splotches of blue, white, and red; a bit of glitter; and bright-red lipstick. The strange-ness this produces is heightened by The Stranger’s costuming: a long slit-sleeve cloak over layers of clothing and scarves. Moving about the stage with increasing energy, turning with arms spread wide, emphasizing shoulders in readily identifiable drag queen gestures, The Stranger sings with an unmistakable (male) tenor voice. In this context of mixed gender/sexuality signifiers, The Stranger is meant to present as trans. Indeed, Stephenson refers to the North Carolina bathroom law targeting trans people (Dorsey 2016), implying equivalence between transgender rights now and African American civil rights then that is impossible in a politics of representation where ambiguity stands in for lived actuality.

Inasmuch as this purposefully deracialized/ungendered performance silences—which is to say, overcomes—Grant’s and Simone’s historically explicit racialized/gendered performances, Treco’s cover is not temporal drag, queer, or even trans. With its signifiers evacuated of meaning, The Stranger’s performance presents instead as closeted covering. Further, the production’s refusal to confront entrenched and enduring historical racial oppression for action toward future black revolution delegitimates The Stranger’s attempt to take up Lambert’s action against coercive and compulsory gender/sexuality norms within a present iterated catachresis. Misunderstanding Simone’s revolutionary call, albeit with intentions claimed to be good, The Stranger floats decontextualized, cast adrift without a past and no chance to (really) win, signifying no future in an existential void of a neoliberal forever.

Notes

1. “Catachrestic acts of speech . . . fail to refer or refer in the wrong way” (Butler 1993, 217).

2. Freeman (2000) observes that “the theoretical work of ‘queer performativity’ sometimes (though not always) undermines not just the essentialized body that haunts lesbian and gay identity politics, but political history—the expending of actual physical energy in less spectacular or theatrical forms of activist labor done in response to historically specific crises” (728–29; emphasis added).

3. Bricusse and Newley (1964), licensing rights owned by Tams-Witmark Music Library Inc., http://www.tamswitmark.com/shows/roar-of-greasepaint-smell-of-crowd/.

4. The other four songs are “On a Wonderful Day like Today,” “Where Would You Be Without Me?,” “The Joker,” and “Nothing Can Stop Me Now.”

5. Grant also appeared in the 1964 British documentary Freedom Road: Songs of Negro Protest, directed by Robert Fleming and Mike McKenzie, singing “Trouble” and “Hallelujah, I’m a-Travelling”; the soundtrack was released in 1964 as Freedom Road: Songs of Negro Protest, Fontana L5208, LP.

6. The West Indian activists were specifically inspired by the 1955 Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott and Martin Luther King Jr.’s insistence on nonviolence (Kelly 2013).

7. It charted ten weeks on the Billboard Top 100 during late fall 1964.

8. It charted thirty-four weeks on the Billboard 200, beginning April 10, 1965, and peaking at fifty-four on July 31.

9. See “Nina Simone: Mississippi Goddam,” YouTube video, 1:10, posted by “Nina Simone,” February 6, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eaxFES2YXA, for an excerpt of her singing “Mississippi Goddam” during the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march, accompanied by guitarist Al Schackman. She is incongruously dressed in a sweater-vest over a white blouse and plaid skirt.

10. Responding directly to the nation’s tortured and tumultuous mood, Price’s Greasepaint stage performances of “Feeling Good” were described as “electrifying.”

11. For the Broadway cast recording, see “16 Feeling Good: The Roar of the Greasepaint, the Smell of the Crowd,” YouTube video, posted by “PuissantAlgernon,” October 6, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pulEa0cfNcw.

12. In June 2013, the US Supreme Court struck down key provisions of this act, enabling Alabama, eight other states, and numerous other counties and municipalities to enact and enforce punitive changes to their election laws without prior federal approval.

13. My biographical discussion is based on Simone’s impressionistic autobiography, I Put a Spell on You: The Autobiography of Nina Simone, coauthored by Stephen Cleary and first published in 1991.

14. Simone insists that she learned to improvise by playing gospel music, which taught her “how to shape music in response to an audience and then how to shape the mood of the audience in response to my music” (Simone and Cleary 2003/1991, 19).

15. For a recording from the album, see “Nina Simone Feeling Good,” YouTube video, posted by “Cancano Cancano,” October 20, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5Y11hwjMNs.

16. The bass line, piano triplets, and gestures from this improvisation define subsequent covers.

17. Idol allegedly forced gay first-season contestant Jim Verraros to delete his online journal, in which he was out, because his sexuality would provide him “an unfair advantage. This was Idol before social media, where they could tightly control the media leaked out about contestants. Any story outside the Idol narrative was verboten” (Votta 2016).

18. This assertion is underscored by singer Ryan Cassata’s experience with American Idol. Cassata, “who just happens to be transgender,” claimed in a YouTube video open letter that Idol casting directors, after rejecting him for season fourteen because he wasn’t “contemporary enough” and “being transgender wasn’t such a hot issue in the media like it is now,” reached out to him to audition for season fifteen in an effort to “boost their ratings.” See “American Idol: Turn Down 4 What?,” YouTube video, posted by “Ryan Cassata,” July 20, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOWFjLd-kf8.

19. See Gould (2017) for a more extensive and detailed Deleuzian analysis of twelve of Lambert’s performances on American Idol.

20. For Lambert’s on-air American Idol performance of “Feeling Good,” see “Adam Lambert Feeling Good Performance HQ,” YouTube video, posted by “mrslilianaadamjonas’s channel,” January 15, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5Y11hwjMNs.

21. See “Muse—Feeling Good (Official Music Video),” YouTube video, posted by “Across The Museiverse,” December 1, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOEZMjuoIEY.

22. Daphne Brooks (2011) similarly argues that as an “intervention in rock masculinist narratives,” Simone’s 1984 cover of “The Alabama Song” “interrupts the hedonistic boys-are-back-in-town versions of the song and instead choreographs a guerilla action that re-sounds, re-centers, that surrogates black female voices buried at the bottom of the bottom of the rock and roll archive” (193).

23. For an excerpt of the studio-recorded version broadcast August 13, 1961, on the CBS show Camera Three, see “For all we know—Live!,” YouTube video, posted by “berta berta,” September 3, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6proYaAfwtM. For information about the recording session, see “The Nina Simone Database,” http://boscarol.com/ninasimone/pages/php/show_session.php?id=nyc61A.

24. “The lyric’s suggestion that ‘tomorrow may never come,’ resonates with the tragic story of Holliday, who innovated an original African American woman’s voice, but who was physically defeated by the circumstances of which she was an object,” notes Gaines (2013, 262), connecting Simone’s performance to Billie Holliday’s 1958 version recorded on Lady in Satin, the last album released before Holliday’s death.

25. With “her propulsive [Carnegie Hall] performance, Simone brings her listeners close(r) to the voice and obstinacy coursing through her song; she delivers the sonic equivalent of AfricanAmericans’ [sic] utter discontent living under quotidian Jim Crow subjugation—dodging and countenancing hound dogs, imprisonment, and police brutality. At the same time, it is precisely this musical testimony of a visceral open wound that Simone seeks to expose, to articulate, to sing into contestation here” (Brooks 2011, 184). See “Nina Simone: Mississippi Goddam (Live in New York/Mono),” YouTube video, posted by “Gordon Paul II,” December 15, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scGVEwaUsdg.

26. Simone’s parodic adaptation of Alex Comfort’s “Go Limp” is an example of her ironic use of distinctly bawdy humor (Feldstein 2005). For a compelling discussion of “an economy of laughter” and Simone’s uses of comic figures of speech in “Mississippi Goddam,” see Heard (2012). For a short musical analysis of “Mississippi Goddam,” see Kernodle (2008).

27. For an insightful discussion of Simone’s “invisibility” in subsequent accounts of civil rights music and activism of the 1960s, see Feldstein (2005).

28. This is vividly demonstrated in a 1968 live performance in which she sings the folk song “Black Is the Colour of My True Love’s Hair” as a duet with guitarist Emile Lattimer. Her voice, husky and raw, scrapes the bottom reaches of her range and—but for its timbre—is virtually indistinguishable from his. For an extended discussion of this performance, see Gaines (2013) and “Nina Simone: Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair,” YouTube video, posted by “lukeslark,” March 15, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWmCbEbMmeU.

29. Smiling slightly while vamping the immediately recognizable introduction, Simone introduces “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” by intoning, “We’re doing the requests now. We’re doing the things that we think will please you the most, at least for the next four minutes.” Furious that the Animals’ cover, released just a few months after her original in 1964, enjoyed so much airplay that it came to be mistaken as the original, she ironically adds, “As you know, the Animals had a hit with this tune. In England.” See “Nina Simone: Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” dailymotion video, posted by “Nina Simone,” n.d., https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x13ul6o_nina-simone-don-t-let-me-be-misunderstood_music.

30. For Lambert’s on-air American Idol performance, see “Adam Lambert If I Can’t Have You Performance,” YouTube video, posted by “mrslilianaadamjonas’s channel,” September 27, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UZ8I_jk88k.

31. For Lambert’s on-air American Idol performance, see “Adam Lambert: Born to Be Wild (HQ),” YouTube video, posted by “Club Lambert,” May 23, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYlNoCynlSU.

32. Homophobia associated with disco music was perhaps most evident in the “Disco Demolition Night,” staged in 1979 at Comiskey Park, the Chicago White Sox baseball stadium, where thousands of disco records were literally blown up during the break between a doubleheader while tens of thousands of baseball fans cheered and chanted, “Discos sucks!”

33. Homophobia associated with discos is demonstrated in the June 2016 mass killing of revelers at the Orlando, Florida, nightclub Pulse.

34. As performed in the soundtrack of the movie Easy Rider, the “Born to Be Wild” lyric is “Fire all of your guns at once and / explode into space.” See “Steppenwolf: Born to Be Wild,” YouTube video, posted by “Max Shkiv,” August 8, 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMbATaj7Il8.

35. In her poetic meditation about and with Simone, Angelou (1970) suggests that Simone’s answer about “what happened” was her prodigious talent for the piano, lessons and practicing that isolated her from her family and other children, as well as performances that separated her from her only true love, a young Cherokee man back in Tryon.

36. For a video of the interview in which Simone expresses this (preceding her performance of “To Be Young, Gifted and Black”), see “Nina Simone: To Be Young, Gifted and Black,” YouTube video, 1:52, posted by “Nina Simone,” February 21, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hdVFiANBTk.

37. For a collection of review reprints, see David Suskin (1997).

38. In a musical that features a homosocial pairing of two white, cisgender, straight men as the lead couple, scripting The Kid as a woman may have been simply a pragmatic decision to add a second woman soloist to the cast. That the woman is “androgynous” may be read as Bricusse and Newley self-consciously registering gender inequities on- and offstage.

39. Newley died in 1999.

40. For excerpts of this performance, see “Highlights from Goodspeed’s The Roar of the Greasepaint, the Smell of the Crowd,” YouTube video, 1:10, posted by “Goodspeed Musicals,” June 6, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ7kCnT9_pY.

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