http://www.metafilter.com/40864/The-Minstrel-Show-20-Why-Postmodern-Minstrelsy-Studies-Matter/ Comments on MetaFilter post The Minstrel Show 2.0: Why Postmodern Minstrelsy Studies Matter Thu, 31 Mar 2005 12:56:22 -0800 Thu, 31 Mar 2005 12:56:22 -0800 en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss 60 http://www.metafilter.com/40864/The-Minstrel-Show-20-Why-Postmodern-Minstrelsy-Studies-Matter <a href="http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu:1852/utc/pretexts/gallery/@ebt-link?root=query(%3Cfigure%3E+with+n=%221%22+inside+%3Ctei.2%3E+with+id=%22MIILLSOA%22);showtoc=false" title="One of the earliest and most successful is the performer pictured here: Thomas Dartmouth 'Daddy' Rice.">Jump Jim Crow</a>, through the hoops of one Robert Christgau's erudition as he surveys the literature extant in <a href="http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/music/minstrel-bel.php" title="What we can know is this: the rise of minstrelsy in the 1840s… constituted a cultural upheaval remarkably similar to the rise of rock and roll in the 1950s. Right--minstrel music was only a part of the minstrel show, which proved the foundation of the entire American entertainment industry. Right--rock and roll was only one in a series of modern musical mongrelizations, from coon song to jazz age to swing era. Nevertheless, both were benchmarks. Minstrelsy transformed blackface from a theatrical to a musical trope. It established that in a Euro-America obsessed with African retentions (the violence of the blood, the puissance of the penis, the docility of the grin), music was the star attraction, especially for the young riffraff who gave American cities their bustle. Like minstrelsy, rock and roll posed not just a racial danger, but a class danger… It made a role model of the unkempt rebel. And by finding simple tunes in the three-chord storehouse of folk modality, it cleared a space for unencumbered beat. Got it? Now ask yourself how much of the rock and roll description can be applied to minstrelsy and vice versa. Most of each for sure."> In Search of Jim Crow: Why Postmodern Minstrelsy Studies Matter</a>, through multiple readings of <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/features/popmusic/raisecain.html" title="Unearthing a wealth of long-buried plays and songs, rethinking materials often deemed too troubling or lowly to handle, and overturning cherished ideas about classics from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Benito Cereno to The Jazz Singer, W. T. Lhamon Jr. sets out a startlingly original history of blackface as a cultural ritual that, for all its racist elements, was ultimately liberating. He shows that early blackface, dating back to the 1830s, put forward an interpretation of blackness as that which endured a commonly felt scorn and often outwitted it.">Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop</a>, <a href="http://www.cambridge.org/uk/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521560748" title="Carnival, charivari, mumming plays, peasant festivals, and even early versions of the Santa Claus myth - all of these forms of entertainment influenced and shaped blackface minstrelsy in the first half of the nineteenth century. In his fascinating study Demons of Disorder, musicologist Dale Cockrell studies issues of race and class by analysing their cultural expressions, and investigates the roots of still remembered songs such as ‘Jim Crow’, ‘Zip Coon’, and ‘Dan Tucker’. Also examined is the character George Washington Dixon, the man most deserving of the title ‘father of blackface minstrelsy’ and surely one of celebrity’s all-time heavyweight eccentrics - a bonafide ‘demon of disorder’.">Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World</a> and and <a href="http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/enam982/eastland.html" title="The current consensus on blackface minstrelsy is probably best summed up by Frederick Douglass's righteous response in the North Star. Blackface imitators, he said, were 'the filthy scum of white society, who stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt tastes of their white fellow citizens,' a denunciation that nicely captures minstrelsy's further commodification of an already enslaved, noncitizen people (October 27, 1848). From our vantage point, the minstrel show indeed seems a transparent racist curiosity, a form of leisure that, in inventing and ridiculing the slow-witted but irrepressible 'plantation darky' and the foppish'northern dandy negro,' conveniently rationalized racial oppression. The culture that embraced it, we assume, was either wholly enchanted by racial travesty, or so benighted, like Melville's Captain Delano, that it took such distortions as authentic. I want to suggest, however, that the audiences involved in early minstrelsy were not universally derisive of African Americans or their culture, and that there was a range of responses to the minstrel show which points to an instability or contradiction inn the form itself. My project is to examine that instability for what it may tell us about the racial politics of culture in the years before the Civil War.">Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class</a>. Consider, too, <a href="http://www.yk.psu.edu/~jmj3/mincycle.htm" title="It has been argued - notably by Eric Lott - that the obsession of white boys for black music--the 'crossover' phenomenon (cooptation at the level of consumption)--is motivated by the lure of transgressive sex: the bliss or jouissance promised by miscegenation… White fantasies and desires not only prey upon, they feed black fantasies and desires. That's why James Brown got blacker and proud as his fan base grew whiter and self-conscious. Their gazes met. White and black identity categories linked up… In fact, this circulation of mutually defining desire--which I call the minstrel cycle--is sufficient to create and sustain racial difference. Its operations make race seem like one of the raw materials from which culture is produced, rather than one byproduct of a complex social machine.">The Minstrel Cycle</a> from <a href="http://www.yk.psu.edu/~jmj3/k_readk.htm" title="It's an old story, this ethnographic tale of identification with the other.">Reading The Commitments</a> and other various and sundry attempts to peek <a href="http://www.upne.com/0-8195-5294-1.html" title="As the blackface minstrel show evolved from its beginnings in the American Revolution to its peak during the late 1800s, its frenetic dances, low-brow humor, and lively music provided more than mere entertainment. Indeed, these imitations and parodies shaped society's perceptions of African Americans-and of women-as well as made their mark on national identity, policymaking decisions, and other entertainment forms such as vaudeville, burlesque, the revue, and, eventually, film, radio, and television. Gathered here are rare primary materials-including firsthand accounts of minstrel shows, minstrelsy guides, jokes, sketches, and sheet music-and the best of contemporary scholarship on minstrelsy.">inside the minstrel mask</a>—all multiple readings reading blackface minstrels from the <a href="http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=793" title="It makes you a nonperson,' says Lee. 'It makes you not human. It's something that denigrates and dehumanizes you. Savion (Glover) and Tommy (Davidson) said they felt that deeply every time they had to put on blackface in the film.' Putting on the mask is the root of the idea that all blacks look alike. Blackface makeup destroyed the differences between blacks and made them the same in the eyes of the minstrel audience. There was no diversity allowed.">pejorative</a> to the <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/foster/sfeature/sf_minstrelsy_6.html" title="Was blackface minstrelsy only about caricaturing blacks? Dale Cockrell: Minstrelsy is one of the hardest things to talk about because minstrelsy is all things to all people, and it's intentionally so. And it's one of the reasons that it's such a popular phenomenon. It need hardly be said that minstrelsy is about racial derision. You can hardly look at the mimicking of African-American manners, mores, maybe music, maybe dance, and see that these people are being cast as somehow less than the people who are portraying them. And that needs always to be forefront in any consideration of this. But at the same time, there's an embrace of that culture that's happening on the stage at the same time. People are having great fun, entertainment. They're embracing a culture that they're seeming to deride at precisely the same time. It's a kind of love and loathing that's happening simultaneously.">explorative</a>, subversive to oppressive, past to future, unfolding tesseractly, if not exactly, with singing, dancing and extraordinary elocutions. Buy your tickets and step within for <a href="http://scoop.diamondgalleries.com/news_images/3061_8177_1.jpg" title="Joseph M. Schenck presents Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse The Meller Drammer is boldly pronounced on this full-color, stone lithographic one-sheet cartoon poster portraying a scene from the black and white film short first distributed by United Artists on March 18, 1933; linenbacked, 41' height by 27' width, custom matted and framed. The scene depicts a reenacted stage-show of Uncle Tom's Cabin, in which Horace Horsecollar attempts to whip Mickey Mouse... and havoc ensues.">The Meller Drammer </a>of Minstrelsy in <a href="http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/15495" title="March 13, 2002 - The Minstrel Show presents us with a strange, fascinating and awful phenomenon. Minstrel shows emerged from preindustrial European traditions of masking and carnival. But in the US they began in the 1830s, with working class white men dressing up as plantation slaves. These men imitated black musical and dance forms, combining savage parody of black Americans with genuine fondness for African American cultural forms. By the Civil War the minstrel show had become world famous and respectable. Late in his life Mark Twain fondly remembered the 'old time nigger show' with its colorful comic darkies and its rousing songs and dances. By the 1840s, the minstrel show had become one of the central events in the culture of the Democratic party.. The image of white men in blackface, miming black song, dance and speech is considered the last word in racist bigotry for some. And yet, standing at the crossroads of race, class and high and low culture, blackface minstrelsy is one fascinating topic in academic circles. It’s history is intertwined with the rise of abolitionism, the works of Mark Twain and the histories of vaudeville, American vernacular music, radio, television, movies, in fact all of what is called popular culture. Details within. posted by y2karl at 1:57 PM PST">The Minstrel Show</a> <strong>2.0</strong>… post:www.metafilter.com,2005:site.40864 Thu, 31 Mar 2005 12:55:09 -0800 y2karl Minstrelsy Blackface Minstrelsy BlackfaceMInstrelsy Folk Music Vaudeville Americana PopularCulture History Race Minstrels http://www.metafilter.com/40864/The-Minstrel-Show-20-Why-Postmodern-Minstrelsy-Studies-Matter#893292 <small>It's hard to grasp this music's reality, as in Winans's underwhelming attempt to re-create it on an album called The Early Minstrel Show--the ensemble precision recalls the neat simulacra of jazz repertory, and you can hear the singers wince whenever they pronounce the word "nigger." But for all we can really know, Winans's band of ethnomusicologists on a spree may have every inflection just right. It's impossible to be sure from this side of the divide that minstrel music opened up--impossible to adjust our ears back to before blue notes, gospel melismas, ragtime, bebop, railroad trains, gramophone records, saxophones, electric guitars, Chick Webb, James Brown, punk, hip hop, the sandpaper musicality of uncounted rough baritones, and the omnipresence of more noise than can be comprehended by a Monday morning or a Saturday night.</small> All the same, here is some background and links to music: Two names worth noting here are <a href="http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/academics/courses/is182/s01/paint167.html" title="Thomas Dartmouth 'Daddy' Rice. Rice, a white actor, was inspired by an elderly Negro in Louisville, Kentucky crooning and dancing to a song that ended with the same chorus: 'Weel about and turn about and do jis so, Eb'ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow.' Rice's imitation of the Negro's song and dance routine was an astounding success that took him from Louisville to Cincinnati to Pittsburgh to Philadelphia and finally to New York City in 1832.">Thomas "Daddy Rice</a> and <a href="http://www.famousamericans.net/georgewashingtondixon/" title="Dixon, George Washington, comic singer, born about 1808; died in New Orleans, La., in March 1861. He first appeared in 1827 as a comedian, in small parts, at the amphitheatre in Albany, N. Y. In 1830, for the first time in that City, he assumed the character of a Negro minstrel, with the accompaniment of the banjo. Thence he went to New York, Philadelphia, and other large cities, singing his famous songs, 'The CoalBlack Rose' and 'Zip Coon,' to admiring throngs. Dixon may justly be termed the pioneer of Negro minstrelsy.">George Washington Dixon</a>, aka <a href="http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/enam358/minstrl1.html" title="Sometime in the late 1820s Thomas D. Rice started dancing in blackface to a song called 'Jim Crow.' When he brought the act to New York City in 1832 it was an incredible success, and the national fad for blackface performance was born. ">Jim Crow</a> and <a href="http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/enam358/minstrl2.html" title="'Zip' (derived from the name Scipio) was supposed to be a northern, urban, dandified black.">Zip Coon </a>respectively, characters who personified the two leading stereotypes of the minstrel stage. It's interesting to note both were commonly referred to as <em>Negro minstrels.</em> Ironies abound in American history. From the University of Virginia's <a href="http://www.iath.virginia.edu/utc/sitemap.html">Uncle Tom's Cabin And American Culture</a>, <a href="http://www.iath.virginia.edu/utc/minstrel/mihp.html">Blackface Minstrelsy 1830-1852</a>, <a href="http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/enam358/minstrlsy.html" title=>A Mini Minstrel Show</a> provide texts, images and <a href="http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/minstrel/misohp.html" title="Pre-1852 Minstrel Songs">a page of playable songs</a>. Notable is <a href="http://www.iath.virginia.edu/utc/minstrel/zipcoonfr.html" title="O ole Zip Coon he is a larned skoler, O ole Zip Coon he is a larned skoler, O ole Zip Coon he is a larned skoler, Sings posum up a gum tree an coony in a holler, possum up a gum tree, coony on a stump, possum up a gum tree, coony on a stump, possum up a gum tree, coony on a stump, Den over dubble trubble, Zip Coon will jump.">Zip Coon</a>--which we also know as <a href="http://www.contemplator.com/america/turkeyis.html" title="As I was a-gwine down the road, With a tired team and a heavy load, I crack'd my whip and the leader sprung, I says day-day to the wagon tongue. Turkey in the straw, turkey in the hay, Roll 'em up and twist 'em up a high tuckahaw - And twist 'em up a tune called Turkey in the Straw.">Turkey In The Straw</a>. <a href="http://www.contemplator.com/america/buffgals.html" title="As I was walking down the street Down the street, down the street, A pretty gal I chance to meet Under the silvery moon. Buffalo gals, won't you come out tonight? Come out tonight, Come out tonight? Buffalo gals, won't you come out tonight, And dance by the light of the moon.">Buffalo Gals</a> is another song of minstrel lineage. <a href="http://mariah.stonemarche.org/livhis/dandyjim.htm" title="I drest myself from top to toe, And down to Dinah I did go, Wid pantaloons strapped down behind, Like Dandy Jim of Caroline, For my ole massa tole me, I'm de best looking nigga in de county oh, I look in de glass, as I found it so, Just as massa tell me, oh.">Dandy Jim of Caroline</a> is not unrelated to LaVern Baker's <a href="http://ntl.matrix.com.br/pfilho/html/lyrics/j/jim_dandy.txt" title="One day, I met a girl named Sue. She was feeling kind of blue. I'm Dandy, the kind of guy Who can't stand to see a little girl cry. Jim Dandy to the rescue! Go, Jim Dandy! Go, Jim Dandy!">Jim Dandy</a>. As for the original <a href="http://www.bluegrassmessengers.com/master/jimcrow3.html" title="Here are 150 sets of lyrics from American Memory Song Sheets">Jump Jim Crow</a>--like Topsy, it grew and grew... And I suppose that <a href="http://www.iath.virginia.edu/utc/minstrel/dantuckerfr.html" title="I come to town de udder night, I hear de noise den saw de fight, De watchman was a runnin roun, Cryin Old Dan Tucker's come to town, So get out de way! Get out de way! Get out de way! Old Dan Tucker, You're too late to come to supper.">Old Dan Tucker</a> deserves mention. It was another song central to the minstrel stage, recycled endlessly as were the melodies of Jump Jim Crow and Zip Coon--with other lyrics, as in G.W. "Zip Coon" Dixon's Mexican War rabble rouser <a href="http://lincoln.lib.niu.edu/Songs/conquer.html" title="Sung by George Washington Dixon, at the tremendous War meeting, in New York.">We'll Conquer All Before Us</a>. <a href="http://www.besmark.com/minstrel.html" title="All Early Victrola Recordings of Blackface Minstrel Music listed below were recorded on 60 minute cassette/CD from a 1918 hand cranked victrola using special equipment to enhance and retain the characteristic victrola sound.">Early Victrola Recordings of Blackface Minstrel Music </a> advertises the CD of the same name and features some Realaudio samples. <a href="http://www.danpartner.com/index.html" title="In my performances of America's popular music from before the Civil War, I entertain and guide my audience into Whitman's sprawling nation.">Dan Partner </a>purports to perform minstrel songs in a form true to type, albeit not in blackface. <a href="http://www.gis.net/~mtf/norm.htm" title="Young audiences enjoy the music and antics while older audiences revel in the nostalgia of a long-remembered, bygone era. ">Norm Conrad's Mini-Minstrels </a> performs minstrelsy of the Jolson type--sans the burnt cork from the looks of it, too. <a href="http://216.239.63.104/search?q=cache:kprPSP2EChUJ:www.geocities.com/sambojohnson/Home.html+%22Ethiopian+Extravaganza%22&hl=en%20target=nw" title="Concieved out of a love of music, the Civil War, and authenticity. I guess we got tired of sitting around a camp fire and watching "Reenactors" plunk away at "traditional" rendetions of period songs on modern instruments. We try very hard to replicate not only the sounds but also the look and feel of a mid 19th century Minstrel performence.">The Allendale Melodians</a>, on the other hand, are Civil War Re-enactors, and claim to be <a href="http://216.239.63.104/search?q=cache:_ydIAdSGBd8J:www.geocities.com/sambojohnson/extravaganza.html+%22Ethiopian+Extravaganza%22&hl=en%20target=nw"><em>the only blackface minstrel troop in America!</em></a> Now there are your niche artists, to be sure. And here is a <a href="http://www.minstrelbanjo.com/Winansindex.html" title="This is a reproduction of the minstrel banjo owned and played by Robert B. Winans on the Rounder Records 'Minstrel Banjo Style.' in 1994.">"no-name" 1850's Minstrel Banjo</a>. comment:www.metafilter.com,2005:site.40864-893292 Thu, 31 Mar 2005 12:56:22 -0800 y2karl http://www.metafilter.com/40864/The-Minstrel-Show-20-Why-Postmodern-Minstrelsy-Studies-Matter#893293 <small>In 1828 or 1829, so the story is told, in free Cincinnati or down the river in slave Louisville, or maybe in Pittsburgh (or was it Baltimore?), an obscure actor named Thomas Dartmouth 'Daddy' Rice came across a crippled black stablehand doing a grotesquely gimpy dance. 'Every time I turn about I jump Jim Crow,' the stablehand would sing, illustrating his words with an almost literally syncopated dance ('syncope': 'a partial or complete temporary suspension of respiration and circulation due to cerebral ischemia'). The effect was comical, all accounts agree; it was also rhythmically compelling or exciting, though how this effect is achieved through a discontinuity in which one half of the body is acrobatic and the other immobilized is apparently too self-evident to be addressed. Rice was so impressed that he bought the black man's clothes and made off with his song and dance. 'Jump Jim Crow' became a major smash--in Gilbert Chase's words, 'the first big international song hit of American popular music.'</small> So begins Christgau, in his survey of the big guns minstrelsy literature. So, to expand, and without further ado, here are <a href="http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2298/is_2_16/ai_53552768/print" title="It is in folk theatricals that Cockrell finds a more significant source of early minstrelsy and makes one of his most original contributions. In such traditions as callithumpian bands, carnival, junkanoo, charivari, and mumming, common folk gathered to simultaneously protest and affirm the character of their communal world. These paradoxical expressions of misrule--with their boisterous mixture of noisemaking, masking, and burlesque--were carried by working-class men into the streets of emerging industrial centers such as New York, Boston, and Lowell in the 1830s. By offering a ritualized theatrical expression of these customs, early minstrel entertainers struck a familiar chord with workers that contributed to the widespread popularity of blackface entertainment">two</a> <a href="http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2005/is_4_32/ai_55084023/print" title="At least two major strands came together to form blackface minstrelsy. One was the presence of blackface on the legitimate stage, notably in Othello, but altogether in some 5000 productions before 1843 by Cockrell's reckoning. The other, more interesting, strand came from the street. This was the tradition of carnival - charivaris, mumming, callithumpian bands - whose raucous carryings-on symbolically challenged the social order. Importantly, Cockrell argues that blackface representations in the street - be they of the 'slave' or the 'dandy' - were less about racism than a means of covertly bonding white working-class males through a volatile mix of exuberance and violence.">reviews</a> of Dale Cockerell's <em>Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World</em>. Here are <a href="http://www.citypages.com/databank/19/908/print4896.asp" title="According to Lhamon, the widespread popularity of minstrelsy was based on the fact that disenfranchised white masses found a kind of class-liberation in the antics of Jim Crow and other assorted blackface characters. And Lhamon expands from this thesis to suggest that the study of blackface performance can help us understand the thought patterns of 19th-century Americans on topics ranging from race to working conditions. Blackface, he reports, is the lone voice of that century's 'lumpen proletariat youth'; that the songs and skits were inaccurate portraits of African American culture is of no consequence.">two</a> <a href="http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2005/is_2_33/ai_58675463/print" title="Lhamon acknowledges that in surface aspects blackface was a manifestation of white bigotry. However, he persuasively argues that it was also liberating. Further, he explores a blackness, sharply different from whiteness, that emphasized meritorious attributes that included healthy resistance and a willingness to rebel against white hegemony. Just as slaves used their indigenous cultural strengths to weather the harshness of 'the peculiar institution,' so blackface performers practiced a form of psychological resistance that increased black self-esteem in the process of outwitting whites.">more</a> of W.T. Lhamon's <em>Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop</em>. As the first notes, <em>the author's grasp of the nuances of modern blackface performance is woefully inadequate</em>--in 1998, this state of the art academic analysis centered on M.C Hammer and Vanilla Ice. But otherwise he knows his onions and the man can <em>write</em>. Consider these two sample chapters from Raising Cain--<a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/features/popmusic/excerpts/raisecaine1.html" title="Indeed, this late in the cycle, it seems most important to notice how blackface performance can work also and simultaneously against racial stereotyping. The way minstrelsy saps racism from within has almost never been mentioned. Its anti-racist dimensions--occasionally abolitionist but usually supplemental to both abolitionist and anti-abolitionist doctrine--are remaining secrets among the phenomena of blackface performance. 'Raising Cain' is about this resistance to racism, for sure, but also about a wider recalcitrance. I want to bring out the broad interracial refusal of middle-class channeling that working men and women of all hues mounted using the corrupt tools bequeathed them by the marketplaces and other locations where they could make spectacles ofthemselves.">Dancing for Eels at Catherine Market</a> and <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/features/popmusic/excerpts/raisecaine2.html" title="This blackface form was a long time coming. It grew out of the way actors copied and adapted the dances of New York markets and plantation frolics. It grew out of the way they proved those gestures in theatres across all regions of the United States and, across the Atlantic, from London to Dublin. It grew out of the way the blackface figure always resisted, or did not easily fit into, other peoples' forms--and so gradually forced a form that gave it room of its own. The Real Bedouin Arabs did not produce that interest in the nineteenth century.">The Blackface Lore Cycle</a>. Here's a review of another book of Lhamon's--<a href="http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2838/is_2_38/ai_n6359573/print" title="In Lhamon's new book, he argues that Daddy Rice, the original creator of the Jim Crow character, was not a white racist. The famous blackface zany had not intended his creation to become the generic name for Southern segregation. Quite the opposite. Daddy Rice's Jim Crow had been a warrior for integration and even miscegenation! The evidence for this amazing reversal can now be found in Lhamon's new volume Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture.">Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture</a>. And speaking of Vanilla Ice, it's interesting to note the stage name of one early blackface minstrel: <a href="http://www.picturehistory.com/find/p/20885/mcms.html" title="Cool White was an actor, singer, and composer, primarily appearing in minstrel shows. He specialized in the caricature of African-American 'dandies.'">Cool White</a>. Oh, and here's a pdf of what became a chapter in Eric Lott's Love and Theft--<a href="http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR2/lott_6.pdf">The Blackening of America: Popular Culture and National Cultures</a> and here is a <a href="http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2220/is_n3_v40/ai_21182139/print" title="Eric Lott's Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class examines the fantasy space of minstrelsy, a popular cultural form that focused white workingmen's conflictual, racialized erotic investments in antebellum America… In unpacking the 'mobile conflictual fusion' of white racial feeling, Lott advances multiple interpretations of minstrelsy texts, seeing complexity, ambiguity, and ambivalence where others have seen univocal expressions of race hatred… One of Lott's most compelling arguments involves his discussion of minstrelsy's misogynous imagery, which he interprets with reference to the reorganization of working-class gender roles in and out of the home during the 1840s.">review</a> of the book entire. Lott, among others, notes that as the minstrel shows evolved, they involved not only racial but sexual cross-dressing as well--scroll down here for an interesting <a href="http://www.cowboysong.com/bib/bibf.html" title="’’Minstrelsy had become mass entertainment in the decade of war against Mexico and the California gold rush. Shows were generally performed by males before largely male audiences. Both in the East and West, the male population was concentrated in factories, boardinghouses, and in construction and mining camps. Frontier settlements had few women, and contemporary accounts tell of men dancing in saloons and hotel dining rooms dressed as women. Given this context, the song quoted above [‘Woodman spare that tree’, ca1850] appears as a permissive reference to homosexuality and masturbation, veiled but not negated by the blackface convention. The point here is not the prevalence of homosexuality, but the tolerance of sexuality in general ...">excerpt</a> of <em>Inside The Minstrel Mask: Readings In Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy</em> quoted on the bibliography page of <a href="http://www.cowboysong.com/bib/bibint.html" title="What I will do is introduce some key works and encourage the reader, from the few lines I have discovered, to seek out the work and make up his or her own mind… We will have to look at many sources, over periods of much change, and try to interpret the evidence without too much misreading or extrapolating from present community structures and spaces. Are wide-open spaces totally different than the streets of New York City? The arts' community of Sante Fe or Taos in the 1930s, or Denver in the early 1900s, can they compare to Boston or New York? Did the trials of Oscar Wilde get coverage in the newspapers of Leadville, Colorado? Did single effete men - or a few couples - find an accepting place in the ranges of the southwest? There may be similarities that will surprise the investigator.">Voices West: Sex in The West Cowboy Related Documents</a>. And here's yet another take on ERic Lott--<a href="http://patriot.net/~crouch/artj/ericlott.html" title="To Lott, these 'blackface' performances show a white male 'fascination' with the color line, a self-conscious desire to assume a black identity temporarily [and finds] this sentiment as natural, not because white Americans somehow lack the earthy, casual virtues they attribute to blacks, but rather because they define certain painful and pleasurable experiences as black in order to maintain an artificially 'respectable' white self-image... White males reacted, like Huck Finn, by seeking opportunities 'to be Negroes together.' ...gestures of nonchalance were consciously copied from black men and became part of every white man's 'equipment for living.' He cited cakewalking, whistling through the teeth, and a rolling, swaying gait as gestures nineteenth-century white men used to express their freedom from Victorian decorum. Early minstrels, like their audiences, were mostly working-class northern white men. The better ones spent months among gangs of black laborers, receiving rigorous instruction in their songs and dances. Lott sees these white 'minstrels' as bohemian artists, not racists.">Why White Boys Sing the Blues: Lott explores "Racial Cross-Dressing</a>. And here's a review of<a href="http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3729/is_199901/ai_n8846408/print" title="Without the benefit of first-hand accounts or visual media, Mahar offers close readings of the surviving sheet music and playbills from minstrelsy to make the claim, 'It is virtually impossible to determine what individual blackface entertainers actually intended by their mimicry ... but it is clear that racial disparagement, however prominently it figured as a humorous device and as a means of social control, was not the only function of the minstrel show'. Questions of class and gender take center stage as Mahar presents an exhaustive account of the burlesque pieces adapted from English and Italian operas. Composers for the minstrel show manipulated the European pieces by simplifying the complex musical arrangements, minimizing character relationships, and introducing American texts and topical references that their audience would easily recognize. Although the material was thematically similar to its European counterparts, Mahar argues that these burlesques played on the insecurity of Americans about their own cultural production and class structure."> Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture</a>. But enough of the literature already! comment:www.metafilter.com,2005:site.40864-893293 Thu, 31 Mar 2005 12:56:55 -0800 y2karl http://www.metafilter.com/40864/The-Minstrel-Show-20-Why-Postmodern-Minstrelsy-Studies-Matter#893294 Now as to the black and white of minstrelsy, in the pejorative contemporary consensual--spock's mention of <a href="http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/39131" title="January 30, 2005 - Blackface : From mainstream entertainment to (nearly?) being considered a hate crime. Do we still have 21st century minstrel shows? Can one 'plainly see similarities between the insulting stereotypes acted out by blackface minstrels like Al Jolson in the 19th and early 20th century and today's actors who play exaggerated, cutesy roles of gay people in the 21st century' ? Here is a larger question: Is humor and ridicule a necessary first step down the path to eventual acceptance? Is that what Spike Lee is saying in Bamboozled or is he saying we haven't progressed as far as we think? posted by spock at 7:09 AM PST (33 comments total) ">blackface</a> deserves mention here--view, let us note first <a href="http://www.plethoreum.org/dunbar/default.asp" title="Paul Laurence Dunbar was the first African-American to gain national eminence as a poet. Born in 1872 in Dayton, Ohio, he was the son of ex-slaves and classmate to Orville Wright of aviation fame. Although he lived to be only 33 years old, Dunbar was prolific, writing short stories, novels, librettos, plays, songs and essays as well as the poetry for which he became well known. He was popular with black and white readers of his day, and his works are celebrated today by scholars and school children alike. His style encompasses two distinct voices -- the standard English of the classical poet and the evocative dialect of the turn-of-the-century black community in America. He was gifted in poetry -- the way that Mark Twain was in prose -- in using dialect to convey character.">Paul Laurence Dunbar's</a> poem <em><a href="http://www.tusculum.edu/faculty/home/tolsen/html/masking.htm" title="We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,--This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,And mouth with myriad subtleties. Why should the world be overwise, In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us, while We wear the mask.">Masking</a></em>. Then, here are, to begin, <a href="http://dl.lib.brown.edu/sheetmusic/afam/minstrelsy.html" title="Minstrelsy emerged in the early 1800’s as the first distinctly American form of popular culture. While its content served to entertain audiences, it also worked to provide a means with which common Americans could learn about and understand the events occurring in their large and constantly evolving country. One of the main topics of interest that minstrelsy took up was race. In his work Blacking Up, Robert Toll argues that the content of minstrel songs worked to reinforce the racial ideology of white superiority—a system where 'whiteness' allowed for full citizenship rights to the American body politic, while 'blackness' and 'yellowness' implied inferiority and exclusion. A thorough examination of minstrel material from the second half of the 19th century, a period which witnessed rising levels of immigration into the U.S. as well as the demise of the formal system of second class citizenship for blacks (slavery), confirms Toll’s claim. The numerous ways in which both black Americans and Asian immigrants were portrayed as inferior to whites, within this material, clearly reveals minstrelsy’s attempts to confirm the ideology of white superiority. ">Minstrelsy and the Construction of Race in America</a>, <a href="http://www.ferris.edu/news/jimcrow/links/comer/" title="The origin of the white world's obsession with black-faced clowns is lost. It is amusing that the first clown in history, a pygmy at a Pharaoh's court, was black, but the connection between him, the black-faced phallophoroi of Athens, and the comic slaves of Plautus is impossible to trace. The word minstrel, from the French menestrel, used as early as the fourteenth century, describes a professional musician. Performances in blackface date from this early period.">Every Time I Turn Around - Rite, Reversal, and the end of blackface minstrelsy</a> and <a href="http://people.ucsc.edu/~dramadon/Amos_and_Andy.htm" title="Through the new technology of radio, Amos 'n' Andy could reach a greater audience than any minstrel show ever had before. Using Negro dialect combined with vaudeville wordplay, the radio show grew into an American tradition lasting over thirty years. Gosden and Correll's first (and only) blackface movie, Check and Double Check, combines the antics of Amos and Andy with a love triangle between a group of upper class white people. The television series carried the first all-black cast across American airwaves back in 1951. However, as the civil rights movement swept through the nation, the negative images of Amos 'n' Andy towards African-Americans proved too insulting for television, although the radio show remained on the air until 1960. The images of Amos 'n' Andy seem too big to ignore. In 1993, E. Max Frye created Amos & Andrew, a movie dealing with racial images the way Amos 'n' Andy never could have before. Although different from the series, Amos & Andrew gives us a reminder that racial prejudices and stereotypes do exist in our more modern society, as well as using themes and ideas which were at the heart of Amos 'n' Andy and the blackface minstrelsy.">Amos 'n' Andy-ism: What it was and what it is</a>. Well, it's easy to condemn blackface stunts when they involve white Southern <a href="http://tolerance.org/news/article_hate.jsp?id=325" title="The photograph depicts two costumed Alpha Tau Omega (ATO) brothers at an Oct. 31 party. One wears blackface and a straw hat as he picks cotton on his hands and knees while police officer holds a gun to his head.">frat </a><a href="http://tolerance.org/news/feature/auburn/index.html" title="In Auburn, Alabama, two all-white fraternities wore blackface and KKK robes to Halloween parties, some even going so far as to simulate a lynching. Both have now been suspended.">boys</a>--but what about a <a href="http://www.keith-miller.com/curatorial/loud/nikki.html" title="The difference in Lee’s work is that she is not merely dressing up, not only playing the part. She is living it. In her various guises she becomes the thing she acts. While this calls out the specifities of each of the cultures depicted it also accentuates the fluidity of Nikki S. Lee’s own sense of who she is and how she identifies herself. The ability to be Korean, a skateboarder, and exotic dancer, Hispanic, a Hip Hopper, highlights the possibility of each of us to be who we are and who we wish to be, not bound by birth, geography or physical attributes.">Korean born artist</a>? Oh, everyone wants a piece of the hip hop--<a href="http://www.gfineartdc.com/Brown_showessay.htm" title="As an extension of the blackface series, a3 pimping and pandering, directly examines the commodification of Black sexuality in contemporary Hip Hop. Brown references 18th century Shunga, the erotic work of the Ukiyo-e. The visual center of this work is the pronounced male genitalia, which visually and metaphorically consumes and dominates the piece. pimping and pandering addresses the unceasing promotion of the pathologies of sex, vice, consumption and conquest in commercial Hip Hop expression. In explaining the origins of these Blackface characters, Brown offers an imaginative narrative. She introduces a series of blind, ravenous, materially-minded creatures that are at the heart of the Blackface images – aptly named W.O.I.M.S – Weapons of Incoherent Mass Spending.">Iona Rozeal Brown</a>, for one. Add to the mix <a href="http://www.eurasiannation.com/generic149.html" title="Hip hop artists have long sprinkled their lyrics with references to shaolin, kung fu and geishas. But despite this apparent fascination with Asian culture, hip hop artists of mixed Asian descent continue to deny their ethnic heritage. Tom Melesky examines this phenomenon.">The Dilemma of Mixed Asians in Hip Hop</a>. To the contrary comes <a href="http://www.liquidscape.com/commentary/housenighiphop.html" title="We have a race war in Hip Hop culture. A race war rooted in certain Black people denying their own contributions, to gain favor with the new global Hip Hop community. It’s creating a multicultural myth. This myth keeps the true multicultural reality from truly maturing to fruition. A few White guys, Latinos or Asians who participated or were open to the beauty of Hip Hop in it’s early stages does not undo who the founders were.">House Nigga Hip Hop: Slaves in the Game</a> Well. one can always peruse <a href="http://www.wiggaz.com/index.htm" title="Your Dad Was Old Skool- Forget New Skool - It's Prep Skool! *image of doffus representing*">Wiggaz.com</a>, where wiggers, yiggers and, no doubt, <a href="http://www.slangcity.com/songs/wanksta.htm" title="You say you a gangster, but you neva pop nothin. They say you a wankster and you need to stop frontin = You say you're a gangster, But you've never shot anyone. You're really a fake gangster and you need to stop pretending">wanksters</a> shop for <a href="http://www.wiggaz.com/shirts.htm" title="wigger wear for hardcore wiggers and white rappers">shirts</a> and suitable <a href="http://www.wiggaz.com/fem.htm" title="Throw Down - This female wigger has been captured while showin her signs. The turned Yankee's cap and stoic expression on this young lady portray the hardened life of being a wigger girlfriend. At Wiggaz.com we often strive to show you the real life casualties of wigger life and this is no exception. While the men are out fiercely battling over their turf, the quiet suffering of the female wigger often goes unnoticed.">gender stereotypification</a>. And here's the <a href="http://www.urbanthinktank.org/whoshatin.cfm" title="Enema's words don't hurt; what pains me is the comatose state we are in, standing by as he uses an art form we have created and cultivated to denigrate other Black people. Unfortunately, he's just following our lead. While he has been crowned the Elvis of Hip Hop, the ultimate wigga with attitude, doing his own version of Al Jolson in Blackface, too many wanna-be-thuggish middle class Negroes from the suburbs are doing the Klan proud trying to turn nigger into a term of endearment and doing very bad impersonations of Ron O'Neal in Superfly, and young women (or should I say bitches?) are allowing themselves to be propped and pimped like common $1.98 street walkers in soft-porn music videos. Uh-huh, it's all about the Benjamin's, even if it means clownin' out and coonin' up to get it, right">black</a> and <a href="http://villagevoice.com/generic/show_print.php?id=30258&page=couch&issue=0148&printcde=MzMzNjQwODA1Nw==&refpage=L211c2ljL2luZGV4LnBocD9pc3N1ZT0wMTQ4JnBhZ2U9Y291Y2gmaWQ9MzAyNTg=" title="This trend is not a new one—see the despicable Eminem, culturally miscegenated sexpot Britney Spears, and sellouts like *NSync and the Backstreet Boys, minstrels who subvert minstrelsy by publicly acknowledging the culture they imitate. The new crop of white Southern rappers, have, unhappily, shown that there is yet room for more nonsense.">white</a> on white rap. Wack on wack, to be sure... A black gay activist posts <a href="http://www.keithboykin.com/arch/000488.html" title="Unlike Spike Lee's film, Knipp's routine is not a case of using a stereotype to educate the public. His website suggests otherwise, as he repeatedly identifies black people as 'Ignunt' and even creates a 'Compendium of Ignunce.' Rather than challenging the ignorance of stereotypes, Knipp uses the stereotypes to show why he thinks blacks are ignorant.">Protests Close Shirley Q. Liquor Drag Minstrel Show</a> about a performance by <a href="http://www.shirleyqliquor.com/">Shirley Q. Liquor</a>--a white drag queen in blackface!--cancelled under pressure in Boston. The Boston Phoenix’s take on the same topic is <a href="http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/news_features/top/features/documents/02484445.htm" title="There is no doubt that Knipp’s act is meant to be provocative — how could it be otherwise? And there is no doubt that the concerns and the questions raised by the protestors are completely valid — racism is certainly present in all aspects of american life, from racial profiling by police to the demeaning roles given non-white performers in Hollywood films and their lack of representation in the mainstream and alternative media. But a strategy that calls for shutting down an already-scheduled show that hardly anyone has seen, rather than engaging in public demonstrations and debate, raises serious questions about freedom of speech. Certainly the actions of the mayor’s gay liaison raise the specter of overt governmental censorship. But it’s also true that the furor and anger over Knipp’s show prove how incapable we are as a culture of dealing forthrightly with issues of race and representation. of course, none of this is new, and the tensions — and complexity — embedded in the meaning of blackface go back a century and a half in American culture...Hey! on page 2, Ted Danson takes a hit but my best friend's little sister gets a pass!">Blackout</a>. And Rupaul's a fan of Shirley Q--what are we to make of that? Further more according to Kelly Kleiman, <a href="http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:diDOXjXONZQJ:lawreview.kentlaw.edu/articles/75-3/AFTERMACROKleiman.pdf+blackface+drag&hl=en%20target=nw" title="Down at the deep dark bottom of the melting pot, where the private is public and the public private, where black is white and white black, where the immoral becomes moral and the moral is anything that makes one feel good (or that one has the power to sustain), the white man’s relish is apt to be the black man’s gall. It is not at all odd that this black-faced figure of white fun is for Negroes a symbol of everything they rejected in the white man’s thinking about race, in themselves and in their own group. Likewise, the drag queen is a symbol of everything women reject in men’s thinking about gender, and the relish of drag by performer and audience alike—is every woman’s gall.">Drag = Blackface</a> (<a href="http://lawreview.kentlaw.edu/articles/75-3/AFTERMACROKleiman.pdf" title="Performance in drag is indistinguishable conceptually from performance in blackface, yet the former is embraced while the latter is shunned. This essay argues that the analogy is powerful enough to justify making drag performance anathema. It outlines the parallel features of the two modes of performance and then rebuts the common defenses of drag performance—that drag subverts genderstereotypes, that it is a matter of private sexual compulsion, that it is a privileged activity of gay men, and that it's just a joke.">PDF</a> here) Another version is <a href="http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/18236" title="Women who dress as men are dressing up, seeking power or privilege. Onstage they're often seeking leading roles (Dame Edith Evans as Hamlet); on the street they're seeking immunity from the routine insults with which women dressed as women daily cope. Men dressing as women are dressing down. Masters making fun of slaves, or at most making fun of themselves, do not equal slaves poking fun at masters. Humor is what masters get in addition to power, and what slaves get instead of it.">Dragging Women Down</a>. Among the catcalls, in the related <a href="http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/discuss/doing_women_wrong/" title="Oh Kelly Kleiman, it seems you do not understand drag at all!!! What's funny and entertaining about drag is the gender bending and cross-dressing, which has amused (and empowered) people for centuries through the critical laughter and inversion of the celebration known as Carnival. In many cultures through out history, dressing up as your social opposite has provided a social release-- it twists bi-polar definitions and in doing so, expresses a rejection of gender/social boundaries, as well as social hierarchies.">Discussion: Doing Women Wrong? </a>, we find this comment:<blockquote><small> Kudos to you, Ms. Kleiman for daring to even go there. I am a Black woman, and I get offended by all of those inside the margins who seek to tell me what I am and how I should be. I imagine I should be bristling at the equation of blackface to drag, but let's face it: I get as annoyed with Al Jolson's bullshit as I do Harvey Fierstein. No portrayal of how I should act is any better than any other.</small></blockquote> <a href="http://www.genders.org/g41/g41_godfrey.html" title="Beginning with films like Is Paris Burning (1990), Bamboozled (2000) and Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999) and then moving to the Halloween incidents over the past several years at Southern universities in which numerous individuals donned blackface, this essay explores the ways in which minstrelsy works as a parody like contemporary drag to both subvert and affirm essentialized notions of race. Ultimately, neither drag nor minstrelsy proves to be entirely subversive or repressive, but a query into this intersection of race and gender performance reveals covert systems of desire and control, pleasure and power that begin to explain the limited successes and failures of both types of parody.">"To Be Real" - Drag, Minstrelsy and Identity in the New Millennium</a> is yet another take on the same topic. Oh, and don't forget the video games: <a href="http://www.arc.org/C_Lines/CLArchive/story5_4_04.html" title="Video games represent a virtual minstrel show along many fronts. Sports games facilitate white bodies to occupy black bodies. They provide a world to play through racialized notions of black athleticism in exaggerated forms. They enable whites to experience dunking and the power of muscles, which, according to dominant mythology, they lack the genetics for. Violent games create a virtual slum, providing middle-class whites the opportunity to engage in behavior that is shunned upon and forbidden within a free, republican Christian society. Many white suburbanites have surface knowledge of blackness, of otherness, through rap music and ghetto films. Video games provide similar exposure, but additionally allowing the occupation of an alternative space. They provide a virtual translocation away from the safety of white suburbia to a place where you can shoot a pimp, plant a bomb, or sleep with a prostitute.">Live in Your World, Play in Ours</a> and <a href="http://www.popmatters.com/multimedia/reviews/n/nfl-street.shtml" title="The convergence of race, masculinity and street is additionally evident with the discourse surrounding taunting and celebration within the game. While encouraging taunting, through bonus points and rewards ('stylin' is what separates the players from the playaz), the game seems to police this practice as well. as you showboat, you run the risk of fumbling or otherwise stumbling in the game -- there are consequences for playing street...NFLstreet thus embodies america's simultaneous love and hate of black urbanness, reflecting dominant desires to both police and become the other.">High-Tech Blackface</a> . And this is apparently the consensus, such as it is, on what blackface means to whom today... comment:www.metafilter.com,2005:site.40864-893294 Thu, 31 Mar 2005 12:58:25 -0800 y2karl http://www.metafilter.com/40864/The-Minstrel-Show-20-Why-Postmodern-Minstrelsy-Studies-Matter#893305 Wow, y2karl. Thanks! There goes MY Thursday night.... comment:www.metafilter.com,2005:site.40864-893305 Thu, 31 Mar 2005 13:21:48 -0800 Floydd http://www.metafilter.com/40864/The-Minstrel-Show-20-Why-Postmodern-Minstrelsy-Studies-Matter#893352 y2karl: Thanks for the post, but isn't this a bit redundant considering a previous excellent minstrel post from you some centuries ago? In any case, I find this all extremely interesting and an important background to the role of race in American popular music. What is also very interesting is the role minstrely played in creating stereotypes of Black American music abroad. In <a href="http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/bkrev/coplan-86.php">South Africa</a> the "colored" ethnic group maintains a <a href="http://www.2camels.com/destination55.php3">tradition </a>of "<a href="http://www.wordtravels.com/Attractions/Countries/South+Africa/Events/Cape+Town+Minstrel+Carnival/">Coon Carnival</a>" in <a href="http://www.africapetours.com/Coon%20Carnival.htm">blackface</a>. I hope you are not seriously going to start a minstrel band, but it definitely sounds like you want to. Can I play tambourine? comment:www.metafilter.com,2005:site.40864-893352 Thu, 31 Mar 2005 13:54:25 -0800 zaelic http://www.metafilter.com/40864/The-Minstrel-Show-20-Why-Postmodern-Minstrelsy-Studies-Matter#893356 awesome, as always, karl. I'm curious: what's your opinion of Where Dead Voices Gather? I loved it, but I'm far from an expert. comment:www.metafilter.com,2005:site.40864-893356 Thu, 31 Mar 2005 13:57:32 -0800 matteo http://www.metafilter.com/40864/The-Minstrel-Show-20-Why-Postmodern-Minstrelsy-Studies-Matter#893381 Shouldn't <a href="http://imdb.com/title/tt0215545/?fr=c2l0ZT1kZnxteD0yMHxsbT01MDB8dHQ9b258ZmI9dXxwbj0wfHE9YmFtYm9vemxlZHxodG1sPTF8bm09b24_;fc=1;ft=21;fm=1">Bamboozled </a>get some mention in all this? comment:www.metafilter.com,2005:site.40864-893381 Thu, 31 Mar 2005 14:12:12 -0800 freebird http://www.metafilter.com/40864/The-Minstrel-Show-20-Why-Postmodern-Minstrelsy-Studies-Matter#893398 Wow, this is excellent stuff, very interesting. I don't know that I agree with it all, but I'm fascinated by the idea of Minstrelry as an epiphenomenon. <small>Let me mention again, y2karl, that I *really* appreciate the overall care in your posts, and especially love the mouseover summaries. It's great to sit here and get teasers and interesting thoughts while lightly browsing the blue at work, so when I'm home I'm ready for serious reading.</small> comment:www.metafilter.com,2005:site.40864-893398 Thu, 31 Mar 2005 14:24:27 -0800 freebird http://www.metafilter.com/40864/The-Minstrel-Show-20-Why-Postmodern-Minstrelsy-Studies-Matter#893413 <small>Ah. I should have known better than to think Bamboozled would have been overlooked, you're all over it Y2K. When you give us this much stuff, you've got to expect we'll miss some things :)</small> comment:www.metafilter.com,2005:site.40864-893413 Thu, 31 Mar 2005 14:34:41 -0800 freebird http://www.metafilter.com/40864/The-Minstrel-Show-20-Why-Postmodern-Minstrelsy-Studies-Matter#893439 Wow....awesome post y2karl. I won't comment until after I've read it ....maybe sometime over the weekend... or the weekend after. It's a pity I have a life to live. comment:www.metafilter.com,2005:site.40864-893439 Thu, 31 Mar 2005 14:52:26 -0800 adamvasco http://www.metafilter.com/40864/The-Minstrel-Show-20-Why-Postmodern-Minstrelsy-Studies-Matter#893511 Excellent. comment:www.metafilter.com,2005:site.40864-893511 Thu, 31 Mar 2005 15:58:40 -0800 3.2.3 http://www.metafilter.com/40864/The-Minstrel-Show-20-Why-Postmodern-Minstrelsy-Studies-Matter#893545 I've always thought Robert Christgau was a total dick. Who but an ass would call themselves "Dean of American Rock Critics" on their web page? And write hundreds of reviews that use big words but don't really talk about music? That said, he's at least somewhat intelligent. So I'll see what he has to say here. comment:www.metafilter.com,2005:site.40864-893545 Thu, 31 Mar 2005 16:48:18 -0800 koeselitz http://www.metafilter.com/40864/The-Minstrel-Show-20-Why-Postmodern-Minstrelsy-Studies-Matter#893581 You don't need no college, you don't need no school -- if you ain't got y2karl, you're an educated fool! In other words, I'm overwhelmed. Many thanks. <small>koeselitz, I know it's hard to believe, but once upon a time Christgau was a worthwhile critic. Sure, he's become a contemptible old fossil, blowing hard as he tries to keep up with what these crazy kids are listening to, but... well, he's still somewhat intelligent, yeah, that's about it. His style has frozen into a pointless parody of itself.</small> comment:www.metafilter.com,2005:site.40864-893581 Thu, 31 Mar 2005 17:33:04 -0800 languagehat http://www.metafilter.com/40864/The-Minstrel-Show-20-Why-Postmodern-Minstrelsy-Studies-Matter#893622 <em>koeselitz, I know it's hard to believe, but once upon a time Christgau was a worthwhile critic</em> Yeah, Chritgaua can be hifalutin compared to Marsh and Bangs but he has his moments of insight and this is one of 'em. Although, I'll always love Lester Bangs' story about being greeted by a naked Chrtgau at the door one night when they worked together. By the way, nice to see ya, lhat. comment:www.metafilter.com,2005:site.40864-893622 Thu, 31 Mar 2005 18:34:29 -0800 jonmc http://www.metafilter.com/40864/The-Minstrel-Show-20-Why-Postmodern-Minstrelsy-Studies-Matter#893673 Is the Harry Fox listed <a href="http://www.besmark.com/minstrel.html">here</a> in anyway related to the <em><a href="http://www.harryfox.com/index.jsp">Harry Fox Agency</a></em>, who are one of the companies who control music royalty rights in the US? Seem like a pretty direct line from the old sheet music pluggers to the royalty collection agents of today. comment:www.metafilter.com,2005:site.40864-893673 Thu, 31 Mar 2005 20:40:57 -0800 bendybendy http://www.metafilter.com/40864/The-Minstrel-Show-20-Why-Postmodern-Minstrelsy-Studies-Matter#893729 wowie, many thanks - another addition to my long collection of bookmarked threads from y2karl. And what languagehat said. comment:www.metafilter.com,2005:site.40864-893729 Thu, 31 Mar 2005 22:23:16 -0800 madamjujujive http://www.metafilter.com/40864/The-Minstrel-Show-20-Why-Postmodern-Minstrelsy-Studies-Matter#894019 This reminds me of Andrew Dice Clay, oddly enough. He and others defended his sexist, racist, a-hole stage persona by saying that it was satire. even if it had been true, I seriously doubt that his audiences understood that. Same goes for minstrelsy, in my book. I recall hearing Chris Rock recently say that he no longer will do his "<a href="http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview/interviewpages/0,6737,499318,00.html">niggers vs. black people</a>" riff. "I’ve never done that joke again, ever, and I probably never will," says Rock. "‘Cause some people that were racist thought they had license to say n-----. So, I’m done with that routine." <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/02/17/60minutes/main674768.shtml">60 minutes</a> comment:www.metafilter.com,2005:site.40864-894019 Fri, 01 Apr 2005 08:06:13 -0800 Cassford