Attending the incremental expansion of the American empire into vaster swathes of Asia was the emergence of a genre of songs about sailors’ oriental love affairs, war brides, and the feminine mystique of the East and of the islands of the Pacific. Hawaiian music captured Americans’ imaginations in the interwar period thanks to artists like Bing Crosby and Harry Owens. Polynesia by no means monopolized such ocean-spanning infatuations, however. Bill Cox and Cliff Hobbs recorded a noteworthy example with their original version of the popular “Filipino Baby” in 1937. With US mastery of the Pacific firmly established after the Second World War, Cowboy Copas, Ernest Tubb, and T. Texas Tyler each released their own versions of the song in 1945-1946, and Canadian Hank Snow followed up with the sequel “My Filipino Rose”, also recorded by Tubb, in 1949. Hank Locklin included “Filipino Baby” on his 1957 album Foreign Love, which also references Pacific romances in the songs “Blue Grass Skirt” and “Geisha Girl”. That same year saw the release of the miscegenation-celebrating Marlon Brando movie Sayonara, featuring a title theme written by Irving Berlin and another tune, “Sayonara (The Japanese Farewell Song)” by Freddy Morgan, sung by Miyoshi Umeki, with other versions of the Berlin theme being recorded by Eddie Fisher and Gordon MacRae.

Cowboy Copas introduced a “New Filipino Baby” in 1961, and in 1963 Robert E. Lee and His Travellers got listeners up-to-date with “Son of the Filipino Baby”, relating that the American sailor and his Filipino bride are now living together in Kentucky and that their teenage mixed-race son is serving in the US Navy. Prolific songwriter Cindy Walker’s wistful “China Doll” received interpretations by the Ames Brothers, George Hamilton IV, Roy Drusky, and Tex Ritter in 1959, 1962, 1965, and 1968, respectively. Ricky Nelson’s 1961 hit “Travelin’ Man”, meanwhile, features both a “Polynesian baby” and a “China doll down in old Hong Kong”, and Buck Owens, in a further development of the genre, acknowledges the appeal of both Japanese women and imported electronic goods in 1972’s “Made in Japan”, written by Bob and Faye Morris. A document of the globalizing world economy, this song introduces an element of cuckoldry, with foreign products competing in the stateside market as “the girl made in Japan” is sadly “promised to another man”.

Snow’s “My Filipino Rose”, which he rerecorded in 1963, introduces the theme of the white man’s perfidy and the tragedy of his self-centered exploitation of oriental innocence, but most of the Asian inamorata songs of the fifties and sixties are not-very-thoughtful appreciations of foreign women as curiosities and dainty objects of American men’s fetishization, with miniaturizing and possessive words like “doll”, “pet”, and “treasure” and evocations of purity and refined femininity prevailing. The “Filipino Baby”, though “dark-faced” and therefore implicitly less civilized than the “China Doll”, nevertheless evinces a similarly unspoiled quality in her devotion. The Hawaiian love song subgenre, by contrast, as would be complemented by the culture of lounge exotica and the emergence of the surfing craze of the sixties, is more a matter of languorous physicality, vitalism, and barbaric sensuality, with listeners’ attention directed to scantily clad women’s tropically tan skin and swaying hips, as evidenced by Tommy Durden’s “Hula Boogie” (1950), Jane Russell’s “Keep Your Eyes on the Hands” (1956), Buddy Knox’s “Hula Love” (1957), Elvis Presley’s “Rock-a-Hula Baby” (1961), and the 1915 oldie “On the Beach at Waikiki”, revived by artists ranging from Bing Crosby to Burl Ives and Hank Snow over the decades. Ives even recorded an entire set of Hawaiian-themed songs like the oft-covered “Little Brown Gal” for his 1965 album On the Beach at Waikiki, and Snow produced a similar effort with 1967’s Snow in Hawaii.

The outwardly expansive and lusty American gaze of the forties, fifties, and sixties can be contrasted with Britain and its pop-cultural relationship with its former possession India. Cuckolded by the precipitous collapse of its empire in the wake of the Second World War, Britain’s lot was less the sexual conquest of the American and more the introspection attending imported sitars and reverse cultural colonization. It was not the Subcontinental equivalent of a “Rock-a-Hula Baby” but “Sexy Sadie” – Maharishi Mahesh Yogi – who beckoned to the dispossessed Englishman with eastern mysticism, transcendental meditation, and rejection of earthly pursuits. In a parallel development, Ravi Shankar’s music in the Indian classical tradition became trendy during these years. George Harrison took a particular shining to the East both philosophically and musically, and he and Brian Jones would help to popularize the sitar to western audiences, with innumerable psychedelic imitators jumping on the magical mystery bandwagon.

The British Invasion of the sixties did constitute a late conquest of sorts for Britain’s shriveling empire, but one of its exports to the US was the infection of European self-doubt, new forms of xenophilia, and a strain of ethnomasochism, with Mike Love of the Beach Boys, for example, readily following the Beatles into the haze of the ashram. “We got a genuine Indian guru,” as Dr. Hook would put it unseriously in 1972, “who’s teaching us a better way” – but the outlandish rocker experience is ultimately “all designed to blow our minds”. One of the principal lessons of the Age of Aquarius was that western man is no longer in a position to dictate terms and truth to the rest of the world and instead stands to learn from the bizarre traditions of exotic cultures. John Lennon took an Asian lover in Yoko Ono, who, however, was hardly Hank Locklin’s “Geisha Girl” or Ernest Tubb’s “Filipino Baby” – submissive foreign women as the spoils of war – but the unsmilingly feminist and anti-racist revenge of the non-white world. Illustrative of the increasingly dominant theme of Asia as a source of wisdom and instruction for Europeans is Deep Purple’s 1973 single “Woman from Tokyo”, contrasting the blindness of the white man in his “neon gloom” with a Japanese woman, embodying “a whole new tradition”, who “makes me see”.

Pete Townshend, like the Beatles, sought the ministry of a “genuine Indian guru” in Meher Baba, who served as partial inspiration for the Who’s “Baba O’Riley” and other material that ended up on 1971’s Who’s Next, which had its genesis in a much more ambitious project. Under Baba’s influence, and also inspired by Sufi musician Inayat Khan, Townshend planned an interactive rock opera to be called Lifehouse, with a plot concerning a “neo-fascist Big Brother government” and “the emergence of an ancient guru figure who recalls rock music and how through its power people could reach a state of spiritual release.” At a disastrous rehearsal attended by “freaks and thirteen-year-old skinheads”, Townshend lost his temper with a leftist heckler. “True to form, Townshend beat the unwelcome anarchist senseless, only afterward facing the disheartening truth,” biographer Geoffrey Giuliano writes in Behind Blue Eyes: The Life of Pete Townshend:

“I thought, ‘Fuck it, I’m only fooling myself.’ It was a dream that was only fiction. It’s never going to come true.

“It was a disaster. The self-control required to prevent my total nervous disintegration was absolutely unbelievable.” Admitting he had actually lost touch with reality, the experience led to a nervous breakdown […]

The song “Behind Blue Eyes” was to have been sung by Lifehouse’s villain, Jumbo, but also lends itself to an autobiographical interpretation, Townshend himself having both blue eyes and villainous moments [1]. Implicitly specific to European psychology, “Behind Blue Eyes” began as a prayer Townshend wrote after throwing a groupie out of a hotel room: “Baba – when my fist clenches … crack it open.” The evening, moreover, was marked by racial strife, with biographer Mark Wilkerson quoting Townshend:

“[…] later that night in the same hotel, I was awakened by a small group of White Panthers who had come to violently avenge Abbie Hoffman, whom I threw off stage at Woodstock. I came very, very close to getting my head cracked open when I lost my temper with them [they were quite small people], then a giant emerged from the shadows in the hallway. He was big, black, hated me and he called me chicken shit. Such is life that I ran for it.” [2]

Geoffrey Giuliano adds another layer of meaning to the song:

Townshend also shared a recent revelation about the perennial Who classic, “Behind Blue Eyes”, which he called “the closest thing to a love song I ever wrote for the band.” One night on the 1996 tour in Vienna, in a country that recently elected a right-wing president, he discovered the song could now be applied to “the sadness and badness of the war that’s going on on our continent.” He referred to Serbia and Kosovo, as well as the rise of neo-fascism. “I suddenly realized the song is a social document of great significance, about us as a [European] people.” [3]

Jumbo, whose soliloquy was to have occasioned “Behind Blue Eyes” in the context of Lifehouse, is thus both Townshend and the blue-eyed Hitler. Having defeated fascism in the Second World War, western man for his trouble has come to embody it in spite of himself, with “Behind Blue Eyes” expressing the struggle between the Nietzschean will-to-power dormant in European men – the swallowing of something “evil” – and the stifling ethnomasochism mandated by the postwar order.

Synthesizing the genres of spiritually discombobulated racial self-loathing and preoccupation with the oriental feminine mystique, 1977’s “China Girl” – written by American Iggy Pop and Englishman David Bowie and first featured on Pop’s album The Idiot – represents the culmination of these ideas in Anglo-American popular music. The song’s protagonist, a megalomaniacal white man with “visions of swastikas” in his head and “plans for everyone”, is in love with an Asian woman whose tranquilizing effect on him when she tells him, “just you shut your mouth”, recalls Townshend’s “bad man”, who has ambitious “dreams” and whose “love is vengeance that’s never free” and consequently requests of Baba, “If I swallow anything evil / Put your finger down my throat”. “China Girl” alludes to Sayonara in name-dropping Marlon Brando, and the titular lover, as in the Asian infatuation songs of the mid-twentieth century, is characterized as pure and innocent – in this instance, in juxtaposition with the depraved protagonist and his fellow Europeans “who want to rule the world”. Tortured by feelings of inadequacy, he despairs that their relationship may destroy her innate qualities: “I’ll give you television / I’ll give you eyes of blue,” he tells her, contrasting the universalizing tendency of nihilistic western consumerism with the spirituality of the East. He would presumably hate to see her turned into one of Dr. Hook’s frivolous “blue-eyed groupies”, for example. Bowie released a more upbeat hit take on the song in 1983, also starring in a music video designed as “a ‘very simple, very direct’ statement against racism” [4] – at any rate, a criticism of racism directed against non-whites. The orientalist tendency in country music and particularly as handed off to rock in the seventies, if it started out as a celebration of sexual conquest, ended up as a project of racial confusion, colonial inversion, and demonization of Europeans – themselves reduced to “blue-eyed groupies” of the alien.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Rainer is the author of Drugs, Jungles, and Jingoism.

Endnotes

[1] Giuliano, Geoffrey. Behind Blue Eyes: The Life of Pete Townshend. New York, NY: Cooper Square Press, 2002, pp. 93-96.

[2] Wilkerson, Mark. Who Are You: The Life of Pete Townshend. London: The Omnibus Press, 2009.

[3] Giuliano, Geoffrey. Behind Blue Eyes: The Life of Pete Townshend. New York, NY: Cooper Square Press, 2002, p. 271.

[4] Cossar, Neil. David Bowie: I Was There. Penryn: Red Planet Publishing, 2017, p. 219.