Because itâs the sound of complete artistic freedom.
This idea that Black music continues to be stolen and watered down to try to fit a white population will appear again and again in my evidence on how this is modern day blackface. You will hear how white artists in current day are trying to emulate a black sound, look, and structured improvisation in the music industry just as they did with blackface at the end of the Civil War.Â
Here are a few quotes to which I think give great context:
âItâs the conflation of pride and chagrin Iâve always felt anytime a white person inhabits blackness with gusto. Itâs: You have to hand it to her. Itâs: Go, white boy. Go, white boy. Go. But itâs also: Here we go again.â
âParticular to black American music is the architecture to create a means by which singers and musicians can be completely free, free in the only way that would have been possible on a plantation: through art, through music â music no one âcomposedâ (because enslaved people were denied literacy), music born of feeling, of play, of exhaustion, of hope. What youâre hearing in black music is a miracle of sound, an experience that can really happen only once â not just melisma, glissandi, the rasp of a sax, breakbeats or sampling but the mood or inspiration from which those moments arise. The attempt to rerecord it seems, if you think about it, like a foolâs errand. Youâre not capturing the arrangement of notes, per se. Youâre catching the spirit.â
âThis is to say that when weâre talking about black music, weâre talking about horns, drums, keyboards and guitars doing the unthinkable together. Weâre also talking about what the borrowers and collaborators donât want to or canât lift â centuries of weight, of atrocity weâve never sufficiently worked through, the blackness you know is beyond theft because itâs too real, too rich, too heavy to steal.â
âBlackness was on the move before my ancestors were legally free to be. It was on the move before my ancestors even knew what they had. It was on the move because white people were moving it. And the white person most frequently identified as its prime mover is Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a New Yorker who performed as T.D. Rice and, in acclaim, was lusted after as âDaddyâ Rice, âthe negro par excellence.â Rice was a minstrel, which by the 1830s, when his stardom was at its most refulgent, meant he painted his face with burned cork to approximate those of the enslaved black people he was imitating. That night, Rice made himself up to look like the old black man â or something like him, because Riceâs get-up most likely concocted skin blacker than any actual black personâs and a gibberish dialect meant to imply black speech. Rice had turned the old manâs melody and hobbled movements into a song-and-dance routine that no white audience had ever experienced before. What they saw caused a permanent sensation. He reportedly won 20 encores.....Across the Ohio River, not an arduous distance from all that adulation, was Boone County, Ky., whose population would have been largely enslaved Africans. As they were being worked, sometimes to death, white people, desperate with anticipation, were paying to see them depicted at play.â
âPerhaps minstrelsyâs popularity could be (generously) read as the urge to escape a reckoning. But a good time predicated upon the presentation of other humans as stupid, docile, dangerous with lust and enamored of their bondage? It was an escape into slaveryâs fun house....Paradoxically, its dehumanizing bent let white audiences feel more human. They could experience loathing as desire, contempt as adoration, repulsion as lust. They could weep for overworked Uncle Ned as surely as they could ignore his lashed back or his body as it swung from a tree.â
âthe insult of being asked to look at the dancing of a real negro.â So Barnum âgreased the little âniggerâsâ face and rubbed it over with a new blacking of burned cork, painted his thick lips vermilion, put on a woolly wig over his tight curled locks and brought him out as âthe champion nigger-dancer of the world.âââ This child might have been William Henry Lane, whose stage name was Juba. And, as Juba, Lane was persuasive enough that Barnum could pass him off as a white person in blackface. He ceased being a real black boy in order to become Barnumâs minstrel Pinocchio.â
âBut these were unhappy innovations. Custom obligated black performers to fulfill an audienceâs expectations, expectations that white performers had established. A black minstrel was impersonating the impersonation of himself. Think, for a moment, about the talent required to pull that off.â
â Loving black culture has never meant loving black people, too. Loving black culture risks loving the life out of it.â
A picture of Thomas Dartmouth Rice
Morris, Wesley. âWhy Is Everyone Always Stealing Black Music?,â August 14, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/music-black-culture-appropriation.html.














