New originals
Interpreting blackness
by Josh Kun
311
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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.