Taking It to the Bridge: Music as Performance

Got to Get Over the Hump: The Politics of Glamin the Work of Labelle and Parliament

155 Margaret F. Savilonis Got to Get Over the Hump The Politics of Glam in the Work of Labelle and Parliament In “The Foundations of Glitter Rock,” Van M. Cagle cites the “primary themes of flamboyance, style and image construction, polymorphous sexuality, and multimedia montage as performance art” as key elements of the genre, typically associated with David Bowie, Roxy Music, and other white, male, primarily British artists from the early 1970s.1 Glam, according to Philip Auslander, opened “a safe cultural space in which to experiment with versions of masculinity that clearly flouted social norms.”2 Yet for Black American artists of the same period, the female trio Labelle (Nona Hendryx, Sarah Dash, and Patti LaBelle) and the band Parliament, led by George Clinton, the adoption and adaptation of the visual, if not the musical, style of glam offered a way to challenge conventional representations of not only gender and sexuality but also race. Evolving from standard pop girl group (The Bluebelles) and doo-wop band (The Parliaments ) in the 1960s into boundary-stretching rock-funk bands by the mid-1970s, Labelle and Parliament shifted their performance personae in radical ways, blending the flamboyant performance traditions present in the work of other African-American musicians such as Sun Ra, Sly and the Family Stone, and the Commodores with the overt construction of multiple personae facilitated by the conventions of glam. Glam was a vehicle for reinvention, as both acts shed their established mainstream pop identities in dramatic, theatrical fashion, favoring an otherworldly outer space aesthetic that contrasted sharply with the chiffon dresses and neat suits that they had sported throughout the 1960s in their incarnations as The Bluebelles and The Parliaments. According to cultural theorist bell hooks, “Racist thinking perpetuates 156 • taking it to the bridge the fantasy that the Other who is subjugated, who is subhuman, lacks the ability to comprehend, to understand, to see the working of the powerful .”3 The adoption of the persona of an alien being from another planet, imbued with greater insight than humans, creates an Other who is capable of revealing new truths and presenting new possibilities. Labelle and Parliament , by exaggerating difference in fantastic ways through musical performance , constructed themselves as challengers to established authority and radically reconfigured their status as Others. Both bands worked with costume designers such as Larry LeGaspi, who also designed for KISS, to create their performance costumes and to design the sets and special effects for their live performances. Though not solely responsible for the creation of their “look,” for as Hendryx states, “We didn’t ask them [Larry LeGaspi and Richard Erker] to make us look like the way we did, it just evolved out of our relationship with them,” the performers are responsible for the construction of the image, which depends upon the ways in which they embody it in live performance and other media representations.4 As Simon Frith suggests, “performance is an ‘emergent structure’; it comes into being only as it is being performed.”5 The exaggerated performance of identity generates potential for political efficacy through various elements of musical performance, from lyrics and arrangements to the futuristic/ spacefolk personae of both bands. The Politics of Sameness: Girl Groups/Boy Groups of the 1960s In the 1960s, Nona Hendryx, Sarah Dash, Patti LaBelle, and Cindy Birdsong comprised a traditional “girl group” called the Bluebelles. They recorded songs such as “I Sold My Heart to the Junkman” and “Down the Aisle” that, according to Charlotte Greig, tread “a line between the ultraconventional and the bizarrely avant-garde” as a result of Patti LaBelle’s “vocal acrobatics.”6 Despite Greig’s characterization of the Bluebelles’ performance style as “avant-garde,” their repertoire was standard and resembled that of many other groups. According to Nona Hendryx, “The managers pretty much chose the material. We did very standard material . . . we would rework the standard songs into gospel renditions or more soulful renditions. And then we would do our songs about teenage angst, our hearts being broken—you know the stuff!”7 It was not until the 1970s, when the group transformed into Labelle, sans Cindy Birdsong (who had left to join the Supremes), that their songs would be as challenging lyrically as they were vocally. Similarly, the physical appearance of the Bluebelles was standard, akin Got to Get Over the Hump • 157 to the look of groups such as the Shirelles, the Chiffons, and...