[Sidebar] October 14 - 21, 1999
[Music Reviews]
| clubs by night | club directory | bands in town | concerts | hot links | reviews & features |

New originals

Interpreting blackness

by Josh Kun

311

Newest contender for most vexed audio pop moment of the late 20th century: 311's "Come Original." On heavy rotation on "modern rock" radio, it's a song written as a plea: lead singer Nick Hexum urging over and over again that "all entertainers" must "come original." Hexum is a Wisconsin-born, Nebraska-bred white boy, and when he sings "come original," he sings it in a faux Jamaican patois over stock hip-hop beats. There is no irony in his voice, no sense that he understands his song is asking his fans to follow advice that he himself doesn't follow. No sense that he understands he's offering pop music as a performed lie, one that works so well because everyone is in on it but nobody's talking.

How did we get here? How did we get to the point where a white kid from the Midwest can push versions of black style on rock radio and then legislate originality before his song fades and the new G. Love single kicks in? Don't misunderstand this as protest: I'm not asking for another rehashing of how whites have appropriated black culture. "Come Original" points us elsewhere, to the question of interracial interpretation itself. So let me revise: how did we get to the point where the white listener feels comfortable not only playing black music but interpreting the authenticity of it?

For at least one answer, and a pretty incredible one at that, we rewind to 1845, the year Jon Cruz identifies as the beginning of black-music criticism in his new Culture on the Margins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation (Princeton University Press). It was then that an ex-slave urged a sympathetic white audience to listen closely to what slaves were singing. The ex-slave was Frederick Douglass, the white folks were 19th-century abolitionists on a humanitarian virtue quest, and what they were being told to hear were the slaves' "sorrow songs" and spirituals. Because in Douglass's words, "every song was a testimony against slavery." From that moment on, black music stopped being untranslatable noise to white ears, and black chattel became black people who ought to be freed from bondage. From that moment on, black music became a cultural product loaded with meaning -- available for use not only to blacks but to whites as well. As Cruz writes, ". . . after Douglass . . . black song making could be keyed and examined with interpretive profit for outsiders. Douglass had inaugurated the sociology of black American music."

As you might guess, Cruz doesn't mention the way 311 cash in on this "interpretive profit"; he barely leaves the late 19th century. But his dense, detailed analysis of the early intersection between black musicmaking and white listening sets the stage for a drama that is played out every time a band like 311 urge their fans to "Come original."

Cruz is a sociologist, not a pop-music critic, and Culture on the Margins is full of deft academic theory weaving. It's not a McHistory idea fix. Some people might consider that a drawback, reasoning that books about things as popular as music should be universally readable, blah blah blah. But this strategy allows Cruz to forgo the critic's obligation to stick only to the music, giving him the freedom to deal more with how the music gets heard and consumed -- a rarity in music writing. Which makes Culture on the Margins as much about slave culture as the more general experience of what happens to any of us, across race, across culture, when we listen to music that isn't ours. What drives us to do this? What do we get out of it?

Cruz postulates that the 19th-century abolitionists were drawn to slave music by something he calls "ethnosympathy," a desire to tune into the inner lives of men and women who were supposed not to have any. For some, this meant dealing with actual black folks. For others, it meant that enduring practice of "disengaged engagement" that's very much still with us today -- digging the music as a way of not dealing with the people who make it, contributing to racial change by buying Marc Anthony and Jay-Z records (the "some of my favorite records are by thug lifers" school of consumerist multiculturalism).

Which is, of course, not at all to say that consuming someone else's music hasn't helped culture evolve along a socially progressive curve. That it does so, radically and powerfully at every turn, is precisely Cruz's point. And that this happened first in the 19th century on the prompting of an ex-slave -- way before 311 could even conceive of getting original through blackness -- is what changed the course of American interpretive life.

[Music Footer]
| home page | what's new | search | about the phoenix | feedback |
Copyright © 1999 The Phoenix Media/Communications Group. All rights reserved.