Selective Tradition and Structure of Feeling in the 2008 Presidential Election: A Genealogy of “Yes We Can Can”

I examine Raymond Williams's concepts "structure of feeling" and "selective tradition" in an engagement with the novel technical-musical-cultural politics of the 2008 Barack Obama presidential election campaign. Williams hoped structure of feeling could be used to reveal the existence of pre-emergent, counter-hegemonic cultural forces, forces marginalized through selective tradition. In a genealogy of the Allen Toussaint composition, "Yes We Can Can," which echoed a key campaign slogan and chant, I detail Toussaint's ambiguous role in the gentrification of music and dance that descended from New Orleans's commerce in pleasure. I show that pleasure commerce and struggles against racial segregation were intimately connected. I argue that Toussaint defanged rough subaltern music, but he also promoted a shift in the denotative and connotative uses of language and in the assignments of bodily energy, which Williams held to be evidence of a change in structure of feeling. It is the question of the counter-hegemonic potential of subaltern musical practice that joins Raymond Williams's theoretical concerns and the implication of Allen Toussaint's musical work in cultural politics. My address to the question is suggestive and interrogative rather than declarative and definitive. Barack Obama's 2008 American presidential election and the post-election celebrations were the first to be conducted under the conditions of "web 2.0," whose rapid spread from the mid-2000s is a historic "cultural break" similar in magnitude and consequence to the earlier generalization of print culture. 1 In Stuart Hall's terms, such breaks are moments in which the cultural conditions of political hegemony change. 2 They are underpinned by changes in technological forces, in relations of production and communication. They involve novel forms of popular cultural upsurge and novel attempts by political authorities at provocation, education, and recuperation. The Obama campaign, through clever tactics, new communication technology, and cosmopolitan capitalist trends, 3 incorporated a mix of marginal, potentially oppositional, and residual cultural elements in a successful (if unstable and ultimately fleeting) 1