Backup Singers, Celebrity Culture, and Civil Rights: Racializing Space and Spatializing Race in 20 Feet from Stardom

This essay explores Morgan Neville's 2013 documentary 20 Feet from Stardom, which, despite the filmmaker's honorable intentions, reproduces the asymmetrical power relations that it sets out to challenge. The film spotlights previously marginalized members of rock music ensembles; namely, backup singers such as Merry Clayton, Lisa Fischer, and Darlene Love, whose overlapping careers span a roughly sixty-year period (1950s–2010s). But in attempting to resituate these and other vocalists as figures of nearly peerless artistry and historical consequence, demonstrating in the process how racist ideologies were staged for millions of music fans over the past half-century, 20 Feet from Stardom frequently asks these women to take a backseat to the more famous men who tell their stories. Talking-head interviews featuring rock stars such as Mick Jagger and Bruce Springsteen are woven into the film's narrative, their voices overlaying archival television footage and newly recorded studio performances in which backup vocalists are allowed to take center stage, if only momentarily. The "front/back" rhetoric of racial oppression and separation specific to postwar America is thus presented to concertgoers as a "natural" way of spatializing race—of spatially distributing people of different ethnicities whose connection to the civil rights movement has perhaps been obscured by their professional commitments.