Jon Marc Smith

This article explores the historical context, inspirations, and legacy of Paul McCartney's 1968 White Album song, “Blackbird.” We discover heretofore unexplored connections to the 1926 pop standard, “Bye Bye Blackbird,” as well as the potential for the Beatles' song to house a civil rights message, the nest McCartney tries to build for “Blackbird” in this century. To appreciate the song's availability for civil rights solidarity, we consider Billy Preston, whose cover aligns “Blackbird” with African American culture during the decades in which McCartney was not telling his “Blackbird” legend. Preston's gospel-infused cover, along with his own bird imagery in “Will It Go Round in Circles,” point toward the theme of flight-as-liberation in African American arts. This bird-theme is also exemplified by the folk ballad “Grey Goose,” famously performed and recorded by Lead Belly, a formative influence on the so-called British Invasion rockers. These connections reveal a thematic and political depth to “Blackbird,” illustrating the song's indebtedness to African American music and other arts.

A rhetorical analysis of Paul McCartney's Romantic expressions of racial solidarity shines a critical light on the evolution of post-racial attitudes in America from the 1980s to today. His songs, videos, and live performances are reflections of how many in the US have fooled themselves into think­ing that racial equality has been achieved.

This chapter begins by exploring McCartney's duet with Stevie Wonder, "Ebony and Ivory" (1982). Released the following year, "Say, Say, Say" (1983), McCartney's collaboration with Michael Jackson, does not specifically reference racial harmony, but the video nonetheless projects a utopian vision of a historical post-racial America.

Solidifying McCartney's penchant for idealistic visions of racial solidarity is his live performance of "Blackbird"; the 2002 story he tells about the song's origins continues to evolve to this day, tracking alongside current events associated with race and reflecting Americans' attitudes back to the audience.

Nevertheless, McCartney's more recent statements and collaborations with popular Black artists Kanye West and Rihanna offer opportunities for the former Beatle to deconstruct his own idealistic post-racial discourse, revealing a progressive and redemptive shift in McCartney's rhetoric.

Bruce Springsteen's film noir-informed innovations on Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978) betray his effort to confront hard truths about powerlessness in working-class American culture. These are the same dark themes available in filmmaker David Lynch's contemporaneous 1970s output and that which followed in subsequent decades. Beginning with Springsteen's Darkness and Lynch's Eraserhead (1977) and continuing with examples from subsequent films and television, we reveal an ongoing dialogue between musician and filmmaker. This dialogue demonstrates Springsteen's prescience on Darkness because Lynch's post-1970s oeuvre continues treading the same terrain as that late 70s Springsteen album. Springsteen and Lynch both invoke film noir's fallen-man formula to critique institutional constraints in the late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century US, especially those related to the family and capitalist economic forces. Attention to the fallen-man formula reveals Springsteen's and Lynch's similar invocation of film noir as they explore the hard truths and moral consequences of institutional powerlessness on individuals.

In this chapter, we argue that Ella is a "make-do" girl, a discursive construction of girlhood that defies the "can-do"/ "at-risk" binary. The essay is organized around iconic tropes that the 2015 Cinderella borrows from Disney's 1950 animation: the introduction of orphaned Ella con­nected to nature and animals; the stepmother's villainy and stepsisters' absurdity; meeting the prince; the transformation before the ball; and the revelation of the slipper leading to the wedding. Isolating these moments reveals new storylines informed by motifs associated with the maternal melodrama and the family melo­drama, additions that construct Cinderella as a make-do girl. Although the 2015 Cinderella may appear to invoke Disney's animated film for the sake of homage and non-ironic nostalgia, the film also alludes to earlier folk-fairy tales. Even when the new Disney film replicates the original animation's narrative beats or iconic imagery, it transforms them in ways that critique postfeminist expressions of neo­liberalism through the expression of make-do girlhood. This representation sug­gests consumerist girl-power princess culture is unsuited to the demands of con­temporary economic, political, and social realities, which require an other-oriented disposition that accepts the necessity of less-than-ideal work and acknowledges the futility of trying to control outcomes.