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Minstrelsy or 'Blacking up' - the application of burnt cork grease to a white or black performers face became a staple of American entertainment in the 19th century when our home grown vaudeville circuit turned this crude and mocking form of maskery into a means of making a living wage. Though the cork grease appliqué has faded away, the sight of white performers attempting to replicate Black features still generates among African American spectators a host of responses - from joy to horror to sarcasm to indifference. There seems, for example, to be as many African Americans of the hip-hop persuasion who reject as embrace an Eminem - for some a white rapper will always be an oxymoron, others will like retired basketball star Charles Barkeley find great humor in the irony of living in a time when the best rapper (his words, not mine) is white and the best golfer is Black.

What has changed since the days of Elvis is the degree to which Black American hip-hop producers are in control as arbiters of who and who is not a legitimate white purveyor of hip-hop. In part this is because hip-hop remains as much defined by the representation of Black machismo as black esthetics. The impact of African American music and musical cultures on white British and American notions of masculinity and style plays no small role in accounting for the largely white male and Japanese fandoms of jazz, blues, rock and roll, soul, funk, reggae and now hip-hop. Once the music of marginalized minorities, they have become the theme music of a young, white, middle class, male majority - largely due to demographics investment in the tragic-magical displays of virility exhibited by America's ultimate outsider, the Black male. This attraction became inevitable once popular notions of American manhood began to be defined less by the heroic individualism of a John Wayne and more by the ineffable hipness, coolness, anti-heroic, antiauthoritarian stances of bona fide genius Black musicians like Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus and Thelonious Monk. African American rebel-icons whose existential glare at white bread America now looks to be epitome of what Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Montgomery Clifts, James Dean, Frank Sinatra and Steve McQueen were trying to project in their influential film portrayals of American male discontent.

There is equally a case to be made for the deep impact of African sculpture and dance and jazz on what we call European modernism in art. For some merely bearing witness to these forms of Black expressivity, or even learning to replicate them, would not be satisfying enough of their desire to become intimate with African American experience. The desire to vicariously rebel against European culture from within inside an imaginary black body, took on a philosophical dimension in this century as the conceit inspired the cosmopolitan inventors of Cubism and Dadaism to defy European conventions in the name of going native. To no small degree the African American emphasis on improvisation, performance and cast-off materials could be said to have influenced much of what has occurred in American poetry and fine arts since the second world war. More than I'm allowing for here on these subjects is touched upon by Carl Hancock-Rux and Arthur Jafa in their scintillating deconstructions of modernisms hidden Black face in this collection.

Though the much-maligned 'wigga' figure takes on easy to mimic forms of African American culture (i.e. the songs, the speech, the dress codes and the bad attitude of hip-hop), his more sophisticated brethren have spent most of the last century trying to translate their black/white baggage into remedies for Western culture's spiritual malaise. In popular music since the 60s complicated characters like Bob Dylan, Frank Zappa, Joni Mitchell, Steely Dan, Johnny Rotten and now Eminem have complicated the question of how race-mythology can be creatively exploited. They have also made us understand how influence and appropriation can cut both ways across the racial divide. In a nutshell, these are white artists who found ways to express the complexity of American whiteness inside of Black musical forms. In turn these artists came to appeal to some among the post-Soul generation African Americans who have no problem, as Lester Young, Miles Davis and Charlie Parker did not, in claiming a white artistic ancestor. It is for this reason that Vernon Reid and myself decided a dissection of Steely Dan's nappy roots was required for the Burden.

African American admirers of white artists have historically transcended the picayune boundaries that define the world's race-obsessed ideas about skin and cultural identity, drawing freely from the world's store of artists for models. Ellington loved Debussy and Stravinsky, Jimi Hendrix had a special thing for Bach, Bob Dylan and Handel. As stated above Jean Michel Basquiat had a special fondness for DuBuffet, Rauschenberg, Warhol and Gray's Anatomy Charlie Parker embraced country and western music; Ralph Ellison credited T.S. Eliot with inspiring him to study the craft of writing as assiduously as he already had that of European concert music. Toni Morrison speaks of Marquez, Fuentes and Cortazar as if they were blood relations, and so on. There should be no revelation in this but the sad truth about the dehumanization of Black people that goes in America is that it places blinders on us all to allowing for the complexity of human desire within the divided racial camps. When reading Beth Coleman's marvelous expose of pimp culture as a demoralized attempt to recreate the master-slave dynamic, we are reminded of how distorted one's self-image can become in a morally deformed culture.

During the high period of Black cultural nationalism when Amiri Baraka was out to purge himself of all his past associations with white people and white art movements certain anxiety of influence, anti-intellectualism and counter-supremacy surged up in ways that made white influences nearly a taboo topic. Those days are long behind us but one effect of that movement has been the emergence of a separate but equal America where even middle-class Black people make literature, music, film, television and theatre for other Blacks consumption and rarely socialize outside of a work context with their white counterparts. The increased opportunities for Black ownership and profits from Black entertainment has largely made moot the once vociferous arguments against white profiteering of Black culture as the doors to Black entrepreneurship within corporate America have been swung wide open To the degree that the movements 60s changed anything about race in America they have clearly begun to sweep away the denial of economic opportunity that had kept African American entrepreneurs off the playing fields where big bucks were being made off of Black talent. The advent in hip-hop of multimillionaire Black moguls like Russel Simmons, Andre Harrell, and Sean P. Diddy Combs has largely made the question of white co-optation of Black culture more a joke among younger African Americans than a jibe. They've seen hip-hop topple 'white rock' as the most influential and lucrative form of pop music among middle class youth in America. They've watched with amusement and admiration for the Black production corporations behind the hip-hop-soul flavored songs and dance moves of N'Sync and the Backstreet Boys. Savored the victory in every other nu-metal band on MTV having a rap-singer and a lead guitarist that's ceded his once-exalted sex symbol position to the bands resident 'turntablist'.

Copyright © 2003 by Edited by Greg Tate.

Tags: Society

About the Author

A cultural critic for The Village Voice, GREG TATE is also the author of Flyboy in the Buttermilk and contributes regularly to national publications such as Rolling Stone, VIBE, and the New York Times. In addition, he helped found the Black Rock Coalition, produced two albums on his own label, and composed a libretto that was performed at the Apollo Theater. He lives in New York City.