In describing the action on the television screen -- and in registering
its effects -- Jarman captures the media's early uncertainty about how to
represent and market pop and rock, especially when the musicians were black. It's
clear, for instance, that "The parade m.c." who "talks up their
hits/and their new houses" is addressing a predominantly white audience. His
talk suggests not only a need to explain The Supremes' appearance on the show
(they have hits!), but a desire to erase racial and class differences.
Hinting
that these black women from the heart of a large, troubled city share the same
values as their white suburban viewers, the m.c. observes that their new houses
are "outside of Detroit." Meanwhile, as the poem's adolescent speaker
listens to the m.c.'s comments, "old Ball clicks his tongue." It's not
difficult to imagine Mr. Ball is nervous about the possibility that newly
affluent blacks will be moving into his neighborhood.
One of Jarman's most powerful techniques is to conjoin images that complicate
or contradict one another. Images of "simple sweetness," for instance
("boys,/ wiping sugar and salt from their mouths"), are juxtaposed with
images of loss and ruin. Less dramatically, images of nature from the speaker's
boyhood on the Pacific seashore --
Mornings we paddled out, the waves
would be little more than embellishments:
lathework and spun glass,
gray-green with cold, but flawless.
-- are bracketed by images of The Supremes from television and the movies . Except
for Diana Ross, The Supremes are an anonymous (Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard
are "the two/who sang with her"), synchronized ("their hands
raised/toward us palm out"), singing machine, dressed for the audience's
fantasies ("Gloved up to their elbows," "in long matching
gowns") and approval.
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