John Mellencamp’s “Jack and Diane” were meant to be Black
A classic song has a secret race theme
“Little ditty ‘bout Jack and Diane,” as it begins, then tells a story about white kids in the Midwest having lots of sex. The 1982 Pop song is a classic.
But as I look into the sources for John Mellencamp’s “Jack & Diane,” I’m surprised to learn it was meant to be about two Black people in a race drama—and a critique of white America.
When Mellencamp is asked about “Jack & Diane” in interviews, he’s often been dismissive of it.
It seems mystifying. This was the biggest song of his career. He made a fortune from it, and got financial independence for life—and hated it.
“I felt it was too corny, too stupid, too pansy,” he says in 1985.
I think, in context, that means it doesn’t have the bite and punch, the shock and kick, that he had intended.
There’s a feeling that he violated himself—and God?
He saw songwriting as a sacred activity. “My best songs are just given to me from someplace outside myself,” as he puts it, going on to suggest it was God, or some kind of divine force.
But with “Jack & Diane,” the song he wrote wasn’t the one that was ‘given’ to him. It was something else.
All songs are misread, he would say.
As he put it in a 2009 interview on NPR: “People take from songs only what they want to hear.”
Songs always mean something else, he adds. “You kinda got to lift up the veil of a lot of songwriters’ songs to really realize what is being said.”
But it seemed that “Jack & Diane” was a particularly extreme form of this disconnect, so that his fans were sure the song was about something it was not. It was not about them.
He sang it to them, year after year, as they wanted to the story to continue.
“You have no idea how many times I’ve been asked about those people,” Mellencamp says in a 1999 profile. “My response was always the same. It’s a (expletive) song! Jack and Diane are not real. I made those people up.”
I think this means that his white fans were thinking of Jack and Diane as characters who were mirrors of their own lives. They wanted to see Jack and Diane, like them, growing up, becoming adults, having a family.
Mellencamp just wasn’t into it. He seemed even angry at his situation.
But the song just seemed to be about white teenagers having sex—in every way you can.
The lyrics are not ‘dirty’, it seems, in that no overtly sexual words are used, but the imagery is very suggestive.
“Suckin’ on a chili dog outside the Tastee Freez
Diane’s sittin’ on Jackie’s lap, he’s got his hands between her knees
Jackie say, ‘Hey Diane, lets run off behind a shady tree
Dribble off those Bobby Brooks slacks and do what I please’”
The real story of the song goes back to Mellencamp’s own artistic formation.
He grew up wanting to be a ‘rock god’, but also an artist. He admired Bob Dylan, but he really admired Tennessee Williams. Mellencamp often refers to the playwright and his tragic vision of life.
In 2005 Mellencamp was starting to talk more about “Jack & Diane” and mentioned in an interview that it had begun as a kind of musical version of Williams’ 1962 movie Sweet Bird of Youth.
This is a puzzling reference, as the movie, like Williams’ source play, is about a male hustler returning to his hometown in Mississippi and taking up with an aging film star.
Mellencamp’s song had begun with the character of a sexed-up Black teenage girl.
A demo of what became “Jack & Diane” was released on a 2010 box set, and finds Mellencamp telling the story of ‘Jenny’. At age 16 she can’t smoke enough, swear enough, or get enough sex.
As biographer David Masciotra writes in a 2015 book, Mellencamp: American Troubadour, the project went through many phases. ‘Jenny’ became ‘Diane’.
A track called “Jack & Diane (Writing Demo)” on the box set finds the project at this stage. The characters were different:
“Jack used to be a big football star
Diane was debutante backseat of Jackie’s car”
If this is mapping to the plot of Sweet Bird of Youth, the plot might’ve had a sexed-up 16-year-old girl taking up with an aging former football star.
Masciotra writes that at that stage it was about “a young black woman” who was “struggling to protect their love against an onslaught of harassment, mockery and invective in small-town Indiana.”
I’m not seeing how the ‘harassment’ was to be generated if both characters were Black. The football player, ‘Jack’, might’ve been white.
It just didn’t seem to work.
Mellencamp went into a flurry of revisions. he tried re-writing it into a story about a love affair in New Orleans. That too seemed wrong.
His dream of a savage Tennessee Williams-styled race epic went down in flames. Then he gathered together the lines he liked, sexed up the teens, added a few lines about religion, and it became the song it became.
He was going to drop it from his American Fool album when his band pleaded with him to change his mind.
He thought at least the music video could have a Black actress for “Diane.”
On this point, Mellencamp’s story has evolved over time. As he put it in an early T.V. interview:
“On the first writing of ‘Jack & Diane’ it was a biracial relationship, and then I took that out. It was 1981 and I thought ‘this might be a little too much’.”
Changing Diane’s race seemed to be his ideas, but into the 2000s he’d say he was forced by his record label to make the change. He did not blame the label so much, as he told NPR. He blamed America for being “a pretty racist place, particularly in ’81.”
As the years went on, he remembered really putting up a fight for a Black Diane.
He told the Huffington Post that he had wanted “Jack & Diane” to be an anti-racist statement, and did not like his label nixing the idea.
“I said, ‘Well, I don’t really want to [change it]. I mean, that’s the whole point. This is really a song about race relationships and a white girl being with a black guy, and that’s what the song’s about.’ And they said, ‘No, no, no, no.’”
Jack and Diane became white—as Jack seemed to look a lot like John Mellencamp.
To this day he sings the song as the finale of his concerts to mostly white audiences who listen, remembering the thrill of being sixteen.
The song made him a fortune. That bought him a lot of girlfriends. He never much got along with any of them.
Mellencamp’s own sensibility, he’d say, is about how Tennessee Williams put it. In a 2022 interview, he says: “What I’ve discovered at my ancient age is that we are all in solitary confinement inside our own skins, and we don’t really get to know anybody.”
He’s riffing on a line from Williams’ play Orpheus Descending.
The sex dies down as adulthood becomes a joyless wasteland.
That’s about how Mellencamp sees life going in the end. In “Jack & Diane,” the sex goes away, as he’s left singing a bit of a sermon:
“So let it rock, let it roll
Let the Bible Belt come and save my soul
Holdin’ on to sixteen as long as you can”
In making Jack and Diane white Christians, Mellencamp situated himself as a conservative artist. He got a lifelong attachment to an audience that, as it turns out, he didn’t much like.
He gets into many antagonistic scenes with them.
He went viral recently for stopping a concert after a heckler told him to stop telling stories between songs.
They only liked that one about themselves. 🔶
