Scherzo: ID Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing

Abstract

Melodies, harmonies, and rhythms of the big band swing era permeate No -No Boy, a book that struggles with American identity in ways that continue to confound critical analyses. As a means of extending American identity, this reading of the novel involves two crucial moves. First, it credits Okada with a shrewd analysis of the popular music that reigned during the big band era. A less subtle author might have made a more overtly political statement with references to less popular African American musicians who were later regarded as more important players of swing music. Such an author might also have brought in bebop innovators such as Charlie Parker, an alto saxophonist often credited with a politically revolutionary stance appropriate to his musical innovations. Okada focuses instead on the music that consistently appeared on the Billboard Top-40 charts. Most white people in the United States listened to these chart-toppers, and the Japanese Americans who hoped for a place among that perceived mainstream emulated this cultural consumption. Thus, when Okada forges tentative links between Japanese and African Americans, his musical choices create an important social commentary. The second move takes the music and the people who listen to it out of the narrow confines of America as a country and brings them into the broader context of the American continent. As swing, with all of its various meanings, travels on imperial wings, audiences in many countries hear, and sometimes identify with, musicians from different—or unclear—ethnicities. This continues into the twenty-first century as rock stars and rappers, by far the best-selling musicians, perform in stadiums around the globe. For the Nikkei, seeking an ambiguously formulated “American” identity following the shattering domestic experiences of the Second World War, listening choices determined from amidst the black and white interplay of swing represent more than personal fancies; they are also fraught with national motives implicitly conveyed through promotional gambits such as celebrity interviews, in which famous people reaffirm the validity of other popular figures, and the very existence of Top-40 charts. Individual choices thus become markers of potential solidarity with other ethnic groups—white, black, or beyond—within a nation or internationally, as when the adjectival Japanese American changes from denoting a group in the United States into an American Nikkei culture that includes Brazil, Canada, and Peru.