Black Soundtracks, White Subjects: The Decontextualization of Black Music in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema

Arguing that soundtracks of pre-existing music in cinema are not examples of music consumption, but of resignification, this thesis investigates the use of black music in popular films to define white protagonists.Referring to films such as The Great Gatsby (Baz Luhrman, 2013), La La Land (Damien Chazelle, 2016), Whiplash (Damien Chazelle, 2014), and Baby Driver (Edgar Wright, 2017), the thesis draws from the field of black musical scholarship to reveal how the complex history of modern black music informs the construction of filmic characters.The critical literature on film music grounds the thesis' analysis of how music functions within particular films.In dialogue also with works that discuss the cultural production of whiteness, my project hopes to disclose the ways in which otherwise "neutral" white protagonists are granted access to the "culture" of black musical traditions in order to render their subjectivity more attractive, authoritative, or authentic.the term "black music" not as an all-encompassing essentialist definition, but as one that denotes the ways in which the American Hollywood culture industry identifies and commodifies music rooted in the black lived experience (primarily in North America).To deploy the term "black lived experience" is another delicate turn; by using it I mean to discuss the ways in which it is impossible to simplify or essentialize the vast number of black lives and the differences that they face but are united in their lived experience of subjectivity.Frantz Fanon sums this experience up as one of profound responsibility: I was responsible at once for my I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for my ancestors.I subjected myself to an objective examination, I discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics; and I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetichism, racial defects, slaveships, and above all else, above all: "Sho' good eatin'."Onthat day, completely dislocated, unable to be abroad with the other, the white man, who unmercifully imprisoned me, I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object.(84-85)Fanon's experience of himself as an object, rooted in the history of white oppression, "discovers his blackness" in such a way that renders his experience of the world as fundamentally different from that of the white people who force him into this encounter with himself.This familiar cultural practice is rooted in the white cooptation of jazz in cinema that had informed studio-era Hollywood and continues to leave its mark all the way up through the present, when black lived experiences and the music produced from them are repurposed in popular cinema to refer to white experiences.Current cinema

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