Reading rock & roll, in biographies, memoirs, and cultural histories, even in the transcripts of your average rock-doc or biopic, audiences cannot escape one word in particular, the capital of rock and roll adjectives: “Primitive.” The word is invoked repeatedly to describe the roots, sounds, and aesthetics of rock & roll. If it isn’t invoked by name, the descriptor is there in substitute form—primal, wild, youthful, childlike, uninhibited, ecstatic, brutal, sexual, passionate, “played with abandon.”
“Primitive rock & roll” usually speaks to the unvarnished minimalism of a genre that has been taken up over and again by youthful amateurs, to powerful effect—what some critics of the 1970s considered the lost essence of 1950s rock & roll, rediscovered in punk. Primitivism is what Jack White was driving at when he described Meg White’s drumming as that of “a little caveman.” It’s what Iggy Pop was after when he said that in the glue-sniffing Stooge brothers, “I found primitive man.” Primitivism is the sacrificial “Wild Man of Borneo” immolating his guitar onstage, Jimi Hendrix. Primitive is the word Al Kooper used to describe the sound he innovated with electric Dylan. The name of Mick Jagger’s sophomore solo album, and his description for the sound of “Sympathy for the Devil.”
“Primitive” was often used to describe the sound and ceremony of the Pentecostal Church—the cradle of rock & roll. It’s what Robert Johnson supposedly found down highway 61, and everybody else found in Robert Johnson. Esu Elegbara—the African trickster, god’s messenger, the devil’s muse. What skulks the crossroads, invisibly. The source. An essence.
A sublime myth.
Primitivism—the idealization of the “uncivilized,” or what were once called primitive cultures (anthropologists now use the euphemism “small-scale” cultures to refer to the same thing)—is always a mythical construct, to some extent. An imaginary idea of someone else. Arguably, American popular music—especially the genres associated with rock & roll, is most comprehensively understood as a form of primitivism.
The way we talk about the music, the way critics write about it, and the way we seek to understand it, is certainly primitivist. In the artists and music, audiences are looking for raw power, primal emotion, exoticism, youth, uninhibited sex, and release. In the music’s sociology and history, critics are looking for fundamentals, primary behavioral patterns, and origins.
Musicologists and amateur record collectors alike know the pleasant tug of historical impulse that beckons us backwards in our search for influences—the allure of origins. Chasing a popular song through various artists, back to the hallowed “original version,” is a sort of primitivist undertaking—seeking the source.
Many have chased the source of rock & roll to a dead end in Clarksdale, Mississippi, at the intersection of highways 49 and 61, down to the mythical Crossroads, and found a cul-de-sac. Undeterred, steadfast folklorists have pursued the crossroads motif further, across the Atlantic, into West African folklore and diaspora religion, and found Robert Johnson’s devil hiding among the pantheon of Orisha spirits. More myth, more cul-de-sac.
But there is a kernel of truth to every good myth. If nothing else, among-the-ghosts-of-chattel-slavery is a pretty good place to look for the devil in the legend of Robert Johnson. The lyrics of Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads” describe a young black man in the 1920s, trying to flag a ride in Jim Crow Mississippi, before the sun goes down—the threat of being discovered alone after dark in the Southern United States. The devil that haunts that song, may be white. The meanest devil, anyway. The one who gave Johnson his legendary musical ability may have African origins.
From a critical perspective, the Crossroads legend turns out to be a suitable allegory for rock & roll origins after all: for the intersection of two-or-three cultures (African, European, and Indigenous), for the specter of death and terror, and the persistence of occulted African folklore in imagery of the South.
From its inception, US popular music has idealized and demonized Africa (and until very recently neglected its Native American roots), and that’s about as concise a definition of American primitivism as one can give—the glorification and/or demonization of Africans, and Indians.
However, there’s more to it than that.
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People began to throw around the word “primitive” a lot in the early-twentieth century, after what was widely-regarded as the utter collapse of Western civilization. In the wake of World War I, artists and intellectuals turned away from the Eurocentric ideals that had failed them, and towards something else.
The movers and shakers of the Harlem or “New Negro” Renaissance—the black arts-and-letters movement—had particular reason to look for something else, in Africa. A new historical consciousness, derived from a new conception of the past. Anything older and better than the Western civilization that had failed them; anything supposedly untouched by that same civilization. Africa: that was the source, like Langston Hughes’ rivers, “ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins.”
That was the idea anyway. Picasso found something in Africa too, tribal masks and cubism.
And a million “white” people found something else in the nightclubs of Harlem: the people who were looking for something else in Africa—“black” people.
I put “white” and “black” in quotations following the example of jazz and literary critic Albert Murray—Count Basie’s biographer—that:
American culture, even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite. It is, regardless of all the hysterical protestations of those who would have it otherwise, incontestably mulatto. Indeed, for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences, the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world as they resemble each other.
—The Omni-Americans (1970)
The racial and musical mingling in Harlem is a testament to Albert Murray’s insight.
Before Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance, the Polish-born novelist Joseph Conrad also went looking for something else, ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins, at the source of the Congo. He found bestiality and savagery—Conrad’s Africa.
This is the dark side of primitivism, most easily recognizable in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and its cinematic offspring, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, the basic story arcs of which can be described as “going native”—a European-American released from the constraints of civilization becomes an uninhibited, sociopathic Wild Man, claims to see things clearly, and becomes a god.
Apocalypse Now was set during the heyday of rock & roll, as the United States was re-evaluating itself in relation to Southeast Asia during the Vietnam war, and Heart of Darkness was conceived just before the birth of blues and jazz, when Europe was colonizing Africa and plundering the Belgian Congo in the late-nineteenth century.
Despite justifiable claims that Conrad was bestializing Africans in his prose, at its heart the darkness in that novel was Conrad’s own: the savagery was European. The same goes for America in Vietnam and Cambodia. Primitivism is a projection, a means of critical, if often misguided, self-assessment. Regardless of the artist’s intention, which may or may not be critically noble, a work of primitivism is a commentary on the artist’s society.
Amazingly, the basic story arc of Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now occurs four centuries earlier, in Latin American literature, in what is supposedly nonfiction. The Spanish conquistador Cabeza de Vaca wrote an account of his eight-year sojourn, with three other shipwreck survivors, along the Gulf Coast, through the Southwest United States and northern Mexico, in which the natives eventually came to regard him as a healer, holy man, and so-called white messiah figure, in the vein of Conrad’s Colonel Kurtz. Because de Vaca was received favorably by one group of indigenous Americans (another, he says, enslaved him), and because he was initially mistaken for a native himself and mistreated by the Spanish slave hunters who finally discovered him on the outskirts of Mexico City, Cabeza de Vaca turned his memoir into an invective against Spain’s mistreatment of Native Americans. Another critical, if also misguided, self-assessment of one culture through the eyes of another. A white messiah narrative like Conrad’s or Francis Ford Coppola’s, set among “the Indians” in the sixteenth century. The crucial difference being that, according to Cabeza de Vaca, his narrative is strictly autobiographical (though it contains some self-mythologizing and embroidering with Catholic spiritual imagery, to say the least).
Primitivism is a mixed bag, illustrated by the difference between Conrad’s and Langston Hughes’ Africa (for Hughes, and other “New Negro” primitivists, a source of cultural history and identity). It involves the alternate, if not simultaneous, glorification-and-demonization of primitive culture.
Sometimes, a “Golden Age” civilization like classical Athens (the poster child for Western advancement), paradoxically finds itself under the primitivist’s microscope (as it did in renaissance Europe). But the primitivist mode of thinking is always a turning away and a turning back, from one’s own culture and towards another, representative of the past.
The impulse to turn to the past for understanding, or to turn to people who supposedly embody that past because they’re considered to still be living in it, is as old as civilization. The Golden Age exists across cultures in comparative mythology, from Biblical Eden to the Dream Time of aboriginal Australia to the pre-Olympian origins of ancient Greece. Golden Age thinking shares the same basic sentiment of primitivism—that there is something meaningful, real, or sexy to be gained by stepping away from one culture and towards an imaginary conception of another.
Exoticism. It’s How Stella Got Her Groove Back. She went to Jamaica.
Aside from exoticism, primitivism is simple alterity, Otherness. The Greco-Roman “barbarian” outside the gates is a familiar primitive construct. Someone outside. The Roman historian Tacitus considered the Germanic tribes on the perimeter of his empire to be primitive barbarians, who in many ways, he considered morally superior to his own decadent culture. This, as we have seen with Conrad, Coppola and Cabeza de Vaca—employing an outsider to launch a critique of your own civilization—is a common maneuver in primitivist thinking. Another form of projection and self-critique.
This was the essential pose adopted by French thinkers in and after the Age of Discovery. The first writer to call himself an “essayist,” Michel de Montaigne, favorably compared Brazilian cannibals to his own tumultuous society in France, riven by the Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century. Two centuries later, Rousseau extolled the virtues of the “Noble Savage,” the New-World exception to Rousseau’s claim that “man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains.” To him the natives of America, supposedly unfettered by civilization, were “free.”
More than anyone perhaps, Rousseau, a Frenchman, taught America to treasure its wild frontier and, ambivalently, its natural “Indians.”
Among America’s archetypal primitives, so-called Indians and Africans, the Native American appears, as Iron Eyes Cody, with an imaginary tear in his eye, in anti-litter ad campaigns from the 1970s, and media coverage of “water rights” pipeline protests in the twenty-first century, to remind Us where we’ve gone astray from Nature.
Iron Eyes Cody, better known as the “Crying Indian” from the Keep America Beautiful ad campaign, was actually Italian-American. One of many so-called “Pretendians,” he imitated the persona of a Native American onscreen and in real life. The ad was a cynical attempt to piggyback on the counterculture’s embrace of indigenous culture as more authentic and natural than commercial America— sponsored by major beverage and packaging corporations, the very source of highway litter, companies strongly opposed to environmental regulation.
We owe the romantic concept of the “noble savage,” as I said, to French Enlightenment philosophe like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who upheld the New World as a natural Eden redeemed, its indigenous inhabitants unfallen Adams and Eves.
Constance Rourke, one of the first critics to consider American history through the artifacts of popular culture, came to the conclusion that American character itself is primitive. In American Humor: A Study of the National Character (1931), she recognized three comic archetypes in popular culture since the nation’s founding. They’re all “primitive,” in her words, and they’re all tricksters: the Yankee, the backwoodsman or Native American, and the Negro minstrel.
These mythical figures partook of the primitive; and for a people whose life was still unformed, a searching out of primitive concepts was an inevitable and stirring pursuit, uncovering common purposes and directions.
In other words, according to Rourke, America formed its nascent identity through primitive archetypes.
Long after the indigenous American threat to European settlement was physically displaced through genocide and forced relocation, after the image of hostile Indians was symbolically displaced by the image of the noble savage, the image of Africans in America remained both threatening and comical. It wasn’t until after the Civil War, when segregation laws had effectively neutralized the perceived threat of an enormous population of mistreated “African” Americans, that the US imagination could begin to conceive of a primitivist image of Afro-Americans in a more flattering light. This was (is) an ongoing process; while hints of positive imaginary Africans appear as far back as the eighteenth century, African-American primitivism emerges most noticeably at the height of the modernist era, during the Harlem Renaissance, when black and white Americans alike, as well as Europeans, turned away from European culture and towards the idea of an “African” one.
This, where I began with Joseph Conrad and Langston Hughes, is the apex of primitivism, the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The primitivism that dare speak its name—artists and intellectuals who self-consciously called themselves “primitivists.” The age of modernism, jazz, and the invention of the blues. The height of British, and the dawn of United States, imperialism. Not by coincidence, the age when anthropology and psychoanalysis were just coming into their own. Freud was an avid primitivist, and endowed us with the idea of the subconscious as a bed of repressed primitive impulses—the primal id, the inner child, Jung’s “shadow.” The Other Side.
Primitivism, as I said, is an ambivalent outlook. The alternate denunciation and idealization of “the primitive”—whether it’s Freud’s subconscious, Conrad’s heart of darkness, Langston Hughes’ Nubian rivers, African zionism, Rousseau’s noble savage, Jim Morrison’s Indian, Ken Kesey’s “Chief,” a blind Southern bluesman, or the nubile contours of a jazz goddess’ body—it’s a conflicted and contradictory worldview to uphold. Civilization is ‘good.’ Exalting the uncivilized over the civilized is an inherently subversive maneuver; it upsets the traditional order of things. In the prevailing conception of progress in ‘Western civilization,’ it’s like saying bad is good. Why do it?
Well, as Michael Jackson knew, sometimes it’s fun to say bad means good.
And as I mentioned, primitivism can be a form of social protest when civilization is deemed to have gone astray. And claiming to prefer the primitive to the civilized can be subversive and contradictory for the sake of being those things. No doubt this is one reason for all the primitive posturing in rock & roll, and the pervasive use of the words describing it.
But these are all pitfalls I would rather avoid.
The primitivist impulse to turn to the past, or to its peoples, shares something with the historical impulse. The appeal in this impulse, particularly in ethnography and anthropology, is the attractive notion that there is something that connects us, something we all share under the veneer of our respective cultures, fundamental human qualities. This is what motivates historians, anthropologists, and ethnologists (the good ones, anyway) to turn to primitive social roles, primitive social structures, and primitive magic—in the so-called West or “global North” as much as anywhere else—for some insight into the baffling modern cultural practices that are derived from these ancient ones. There is insight to be gained from the past, that is the basic premise of history. And the allure of historical insight is that it can beget Satisfaction—Mick Jagger’s white whale. This is one part of what I meant by “the source.” Origins, and fundamentals. And the satisfaction that comes with understanding.
But origins are mostly illusions, and even Axl Rose knows that you can Use Your Illusion. Very often, mythical origins become symbolic fantasies that people manipulate to control the present, and not necessarily for the better. The Nazis concocted ancient Aryan origins, and Mussolini named his fasces after Roman ones; North America is in a current fit of pique over hers—1619 or 1776. History can be a misleading confusion of illusory symbols, a tantalizing nostalgia for things that never were. And yet, there is real explanatory power in myth, and history, and the eternal repetition of symbols. So let us meet these head-on, while also giving them a wide berth. With the words of Peter Tosh in mind, let us approach these symbols like we would a stepping razor, cautiously.