by Samantha Ainsley

 

Introduction and All that Jazz

The lights went down at the Miller Theater, but not a note was played. Then
a voice rose above the muffled sounds of the crowd, followed by another, and then
another: Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, interlaced with words
by Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali. The three men’s tones resonated with the
rhythm of the African djembe beating in the backdrop. Soon, Christian McBride’s
anticipated bass riff joined the refrain. The great speeches faded along with the drum
line, and the jazz took hold, as was permissible since the foundation had been laid:
Jazz is a music, a history, a culture. That is, African-American culture is intrinsic to
jazz.

The music has its roots in post-Reconstruction New Orleans, at a time when
Jim Crow laws lumped Creoles and blacks into one marginalized subgroup. Jazz
evolved as a synthesis of “African-derived rhythmic, tonal, and improvisational
senses” and French-inspired Creole string ensembles (Hall 36). The word “jazz,” in
fact, derives from the Creole jass, a slang term for sex. Granted, Creoles are light-
skinned and hardly black in the usual sense of the word. To that Perry Hall, director
of African American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, adds,
“Creole participation in jazz came directly as a result of the discovery by Creole
musicians of their Blackness” (47). In other words, Creoles began to play jazz after
relocation to and degradation in the United States made them party to the black
experience. Yet when jazz gained mainstream popularity in 1917, its face was
neither black nor Creole. The first jazz record released to the masses was that of the
self-proclaimed “Original Dixieland Jazz Band,” a group of five white musicians
(Hall 38). In the years that followed, a white musician by the name of Paul
Whiteman enjoyed great success performing “symphonic jazz,” a style that tamed
the “primitive rhythms” of original jazz and therein became “more acceptable to
white audiences” (Hall 38). In uprooting jazz from its African-American culture,
Whiteman grossed one million dollars in a single year in the 1920s and was dubbed
the “King of Jazz” (Hall 39).

 

Hail to the Thief (1)

Paul Whiteman’s success arguably lacked merit, but it was hardly unique.
Since Whiteman, white men have perpetually sat atop the thrones of black music.
For example, in the 1930s, Benny Goodman, a white man, became the “King of
Swing” (Hall 31). Decades later, Elvis Presley was crowned the “King of Rock ‘N’
Roll.” In 2003, Rolling Stone declared Justin Timberlake the “King of R&B”
(Kitwana 156). And of course there’s Eminem, who continues to be revered as “the
Elvis of hip-hop” (Kitwana 139). How can a white man be the face of black music?
To answer this question, we must examine the long-standing tradition of mainstream
absorption of black musical forms (Hall 32). Beginning with jazz and leading up to
hip-hop, white America has appropriated black music as its own. When whites
cannot stake claims to black music—as in the case of hip-hop—the nature of the
relationship between mainstream society and African-American culture is simply
exploitative. This essay will examine the ethics of cross-cultural musical
appropriation in an attempt to discover why the Elvises and Eminems are able to
reap the glory of African-American cultural innovation.

 

Gillespie, Gifts-Giving, and Genocide

“You can’t steal a gift. Bird gave the world his music, and if you can hear it
you can have it,” Dizzy Gillespie declared in defense of Phil Woods, a white
saxophonist who had been accused of poaching Charlie “the Bird” Parker’s style
(Lethem 70). Jonathan Lethem, in his essay “The Ecstasy of Influence: A
Plagiarism,” draws inspiration from Gillespie in criticizing copyrights and exploring
the concept of a “gift economy” (65). According to Lethem, works of art exist in
such an economy, which is rooted in the poignancy of the product (65-66). This gift
economy is independent of the market economy in which art and music are
commoditized because “a gift conveys an uncommodifiable surplus of inspiration”
(Lethem 66). No doubt black musical forms—as is true of all art—function in such
an economy both in giving and receiving. To a greater extent, rock ‘n’ roll
connoisseur Theodore Gracyk questions whether there was ever an African-
American musical form “that wasn’t already the result of miscegenation and
hybridization” (86). For example, as noted earlier, the first jazz musicians drew
inspiration from both “the French tradition of military marching bands” and the
European-style string orchestra (Hall 36). As Lethem would argue for any art, the
making of music is a continual process of borrowing and sharing. Thus, Gillespie
and Gracyk are right to say that black artists cannot claim exclusivity to black music.
But what, then, distinguishes the use of black music by white musicians from the
continual borrowing and sharing of musical property upon which black music is
built?

In truth, the gift analogy is oversimplified. You certainly cannot “steal” a gift
if it has been given to you, but you can misuse it. When appropriating black musical
forms, white artists such as Paul Whiteman often reshape and redefine the styles to
“minimize their association with ‘Blackness’” (Hall 32). This type of cultural appropriation is less an exchange of gifts than “a virtual stripping of Black musical
genius and aesthetic innovation” (Hall 33). To Gracyk, the very process of reshaping
is what grants “those engaged in appropriation … some right to claim ownership of
the music they perform” (107). Thus, symphonic jazz can be appreciated
independently of the black musical style from which it is derived, and its creation
gives whites some cultural ownership of jazz. Yet Gracyk fails to recognize the
effect of appropriation on the original musical form, which distinguishes unethical
appropriation from the harmless inspiration that Lethem supports. In the most basic
sense, a gift can be considered “misused” when it is damaged through usage. As is
often the case when mainstream America whitewashes black cultural property and
then claims it as its own, the result is what philosopher Amiri Baraka, one of the
greatest voices of “spoken word” jazz, describes as a “cultural genocide” (quoted in
Gracyk 110).

Gracyk rejects this notion of cultural genocide. According to Gracyk, “the
analogy with genocide hinges on the thesis that, were it not for the nonreciprocal
behavior of the cultural imperialist, the ‘dominated’ culture would not have
changed” (110). Because African-American culture would have evolved
independently of white influence, white America’s reshaping of black musical forms,
he claims, simply gives rise to a “legitimate transformation” (110). Gracyk depicts
this instance of cultural appropriation as natural, yet black musical forms have
tended to evolve unwillingly. New forms emerge in hopes of reestablishing “the
distinctiveness of Black music in a given sociohistorical context” (Hall 32). What is
particularly unnatural is the continual need for African Americans to reassert their
cultural autonomy. For example, when rock music became more closely associated
with Elvis than Chuck Berry, black musicians such as Ray Charles and Sam Cooke
fused rhythm and blues with “gospel-inflected harmonies” to create what became
known in the 1960s as “soul” (Hall 44). Such innovation is less the result of
dynamism than of marginalization. Cultural genocide arises when the art is separated
from the people (Hall 31). The heavily-consumed, appropriated forms are
“ineffective as expressions and affirmations of the unique cultural experiences from
which they arise” (Hall 32). Cultural meanings are thereby often erased (Hall 35), as
happened when whites appropriated soul music—which spoke to black emotion and
struggle during the Civil Rights Movement—and called it “disco” (Hall 45).
When whites appropriate black music, the art is stripped not only of its
cultural identity but also of its ability to function in the gift economy. Although
Lethem agrees that one cannot steal a gift, he argues that one can destroy it: “Where
there is no gift there is no art, [thus] it may be possible to destroy a work of art by
converting it into a pure commodity” (66). When black musical forms are completely
dissociated from their emotional foundation—as in the case of soul’s devolution into
disco—the result is no longer a work of art but a mere commodity, which Lethem
defines by its inability to create a genuine emotional connection (66). However, the
mainstream need not appropriate black music in order to commoditize it. We see this
in the case of hip-hop. Though rap has been reinterpreted by a myriad of races, including whites, it is nevertheless identified with African-American culture—a
culture that is now bought and sold.

Back Yard DJs to NWA: Origins of Hip Hop

Rap in general dates all the way back to the motherland, where tribes
would use call-and-response chants. In the 1930s and 1940s you had Cab Calloway pioneering his style of jazz rhyming. The sixties you had the love style of rapping, with Isaac Hayes, Barry White, and the poetry style of rapping with the Last Poets, the Watts poets and the militant style of rapping with brothers like Malcolm X and Minister
Louis Farrakhan.
–Afrika Bambaata, 1993
(quoted in Perkins 2)

Rap is revolutionary as a black musical form because every path traces its
lineage back to an element of African-American culture. Granted, today there are
countless cultural varieties of hip-hop from Asian to Hispanic rap; still, all of these
styles are indisputably derived from black music. So far, hip-hop has inspired
imitations but it has nevertheless resisted cultural genocide. That is not to say,
however, that it has escaped exploitation.

Hip-hop was born in the South Bronx in the mid 1970s as the product of the
yard culture of West Kingston brought to New York by Jamaican immigrants in the
late ’60s: “Yard DJs brought huge speakers and turntables to the slums, where they
rapped over the simple bass lines of the ska and reggae beats … The DJ ruled during
hip hop’s early days, and it was the DJ who established the foundations for the
lyricist (MC)” (Perkins 6). In the 1980s, black middle-class rappers L.L. Cool J and
the group Run DMC, both from suburban Queens, were representative of the first
wave of hip hop artists to achieve mainstream success (Perkins 15)—that is, until
their minimalist style gave way to controversial “gangsta” rap in the 1990s (Perkins
18). “The gangsta was epitomized by the now defunct group NWA (Niggas with
Attitude), which consisted of the MCs Dr. Dre, Ezy-E, Ice Cube, MC Ren ... and Ice-
T” (Perkins 18). Then came the “message rap” of artists such as Long Island’s Public
Enemy, which was followed by the much less political “booty rap” of groups like 2
Live Crew (Perkins 19-20). Rap’s decades-long transformation exemplifies the
natural cultural dynamics about which Gracyk theorizes. Its cultural autonomy
remained intact at this point. Then, in the late 1990s, a white rapper from Detroit
emerged on the scene and started down the path to becoming hip-hop’s Elvis.

 

The Blue-Eyed Baller

“If I have a cup of coffee that is too strong for me because it is too black, I weaken it by pouring cream into it.”(2)
–Malcolm X, 1963

In 2003, a well-established hip-hop magazine, The Source, acted on a
personal vendetta against the industry’s most successful artist of the time, white
rapper Eminem. In an attempt to derail the rapper’s career, The Source published
lyrics from unreleased tracks by Eminem that featured blatantly racist attacks on
black women: “Girls I like have big butts / no they don’t, ’cause I don’t like that
nigga shit … Black and whites they sometimes mix / But black girls only want your
money / cause they be dumb chicks” (quoted in Kitwana 136). After a public
apology in which Eminem attributed his racist remarks to teenage angst and bitter
resentment toward an African-American ex-girlfriend, Eminem’s success and
popularity were unaffected (Kitwana 141). But The Source’s crusade against the
white rapper did not end there; the magazine’s greatest concern was not that rap’s
most successful artist was racist, but that he was white and that hip-hop rightly
belonged to a black youth subculture (Kitwana 136). Granted, Eminem was not the
first white rapper to enjoy mainstream success. In fact, the first No. 1 hip-hop album
was the all white hip-hop group The Beastie Boys’ 1986 License to Ill (White 201).
Similarly, the first hip-hop single to top the charts was Vanilla Ice’s “Ice, Ice Baby”
in 1991 (Perkins 37). But the most successful white rappers often parodied the genre,
which led some listeners to write them off as “wiggers.” Eminem’s music was
revered as genuine hip-hop, and The Source feared the familiarity of his success.
Countless times, owners of The Source declared that Eminem was on “the fast track
to becoming hip-hop’s Elvis” (Kitwana 136). That is, as had happened with Elvis,
yet another black musical form would be more closely identified with an iconic
white artist than with black artists.

In the early 1950s, Sam Phillips—the Sun Records executive who helped
Elvis rise to stardom—proclaimed, “If I could find a white man who had the Negro
sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars” (quoted in Perkins 38).
Unlike his wannabe predecessors, Eminem can produce rap with that very “Negro
feel.” His lyrics have thematic similarities to some black rap because Eminem grew
up in the marginalized class of impoverished white Americans. Hence, his music
preserves the emotional aspect of the hip-hop gift. Perhaps Eminem’s music
exemplifies hip-hop’s ability to function as a gift economy. After all, whereas Elvis’
stardom catalyzed rock ‘n’ roll to become the predominately white musical form it is
today, Eminem’s success has not given hip-hop a white face. Has the music industry
evolved beyond racial exploitation, or is the mainstream interested in keeping hip-
hop black?

Mr. Ambassador at the Minstrel Show

In late 2002, the New York Times Magazine ran a cover story on hip-hop’s
cultural bandit, Marshall Mathers, a.k.a. Eminem, and titled it “Mr. Ambassador” (Kitwana 160). The astute title was fitting for the rap superstar who had previously
been labeled the “king” of hip-hop, for Eminem is just that: the envoy of white
America to the hip-hop nation. Eminem has attracted many mainstream listeners to
hip-hop essentially because he looks like they do. Before Eminem, true hip-hop—
which excludes the whitewashed works of Vanilla Ice and the Beastie Boys—was
exclusively black and therefore incomprehensible to most white audiences. It does
not follow, however, that Enimem is the white man’s rapper. Quite the contrary:
“although rap is still proportionately more popular among blacks, its primary
audience is white and lives in the suburbs” (Samuels, quoted in Kitwana 82). In
February 2004, Forbes reported that of an estimated 45 million hip-hop consumers
between the ages of 13 and 34, eighty percent are white (Kitwana 82). This begs the
question: Why do white people love hip-hop, that is, hip-hop in its true form?
According to pop journalist Arnold White, “Rap flourished into corporate-
sponsored hip hop because of the symbiosis that held whites enthralled to Blacks and
kept Blacks indentured” (183). White America’s embrace of hip-hop culture is
hardly a move toward racial acceptance and cultural understanding. Rather, it is the
product of “white supremacy (i.e. black kids selling black images of black
criminality and inferiority and white kids buying them to reinforce their superiority)”
(Kitwana 103). Hip-hop perpetuates the American tradition of minstrelsy, except that
rather than whites painting their faces black, black artists have succumbed to
stereotypes of themselves. In the case of hip-hop, white supremacy is enforced not
through imitation but consumption of the “minstrel portrait” of black
“dehumanization” (Baraka 328). In the eyes of the mainstream, hip-hop reinforces
conventions and stereotypes of blackness that foster white power.

Though Eminem may honor hip-hop as a gift, the mainstream renders it a
commodity. A commodity fails to establish an emotional connection between two
people (Lethem 66). Though rap music showcases black suffering, mainstream
America receives it not with compassion but with mockery—white supremacy
prevents an emotional connection. Previous musical generations saw white artists
destroying the gift of black music by failing to recreate its poignancy; the hip-hop
generation sees poignancy destroyed through direct commoditization. In the case of
hip-hop, whites are able to reap the power and profits of black culture not by
marginalizing black ingenuity but by exploiting it. Simply put: whites couldn’t do it
better themselves.

Why Deny the Obvious, Child?(3)

Hip-hop may have broken the appropriative trend between mainstream
America and black music, but it has done little to end the marginalization of African
Americas. It seems that the key issue is not so much the act of appropriation as the
driving force behind it. Incidentally, when discussing mainstream absorption of
black music, few scholars aside from Theodore Gracyk acknowledge its contributions. We cannot deny that “rock would not exist without appropriation” (Gracyk 97), nor can we blame individual artists for acts of appropriation.

Take, for example, Paul Simon’s Graceland, which is often criticized for
Simon’s arguably exploitative use of a group of South African folk singers to
enhance the tone of the album and, ultimately, his own success. The accusation runs:
“Visually and aurally, Simon appears as the white master who exerts a benign rule
over his black subjects” (Mitchell, quoted in Gracyk 91). Yet to suggest that Simon’s
work with the South African choir had imperialistic motives is excessive. In truth, he
was motivated by “a genuine love of South African music” (Gracyk 98); we cannot
criticize him for that. Concomitantly, the South African tribal leader Joseph
Shabalala praised Simon for “the opportunity to disclose [their] music all over the
world” (quoted in Gracyk 105). Though not Simon’s fault, Graceland failed to
inspire interest in South African music. Most people I know who own the album
admit to skipping the only track that features the South African choir almost
exclusively. The only music Graceland successfully promoted was that of Paul
Simon—just as when Keith Richards and Mick Jagger started the Rolling Stones, in
Richards’ words, “to turn other people on to” African-American blues artist Muddy
Waters (quoted in Gracyk 15), they really only turned people on to the Rolling
Stones.

The crime, then, is not the use of black musical gifts but the bigotry that often
leads to their commoditization. The success of Graceland and the Rolling Stones
speaks to whites’ lack of interest in the black experience and their desire not simply
to steal black music, but more basically to de-contextualize it—that is, to avoid
establishing emotional connections. Appreciation of black music goes hand in hand
with appreciation of black people, except in the case of hip-hop through which
blacks have allowed themselves to be dehumanized. That is not to say that non-hip-
hop black musicians enjoy no mainstream success—we know that to be untrue.
Rather, mainstream America tends to depreciate black music, for connecting
emotionally with such works of art might bring about an understanding of black
suffering that would undermine white supremacy. Moreover, the commoditization of
black music continues to foster white power by granting financial success to those
who control the music industry: whites. The power disparity between whites and
blacks in the music industry suggests that music is another tool the mainstream uses
to perpetuate black marginalization. As Amiri Baraka has observed, “The laws once
openly stated blacks inferior. Now it is the relationship these laws uphold that
maintain the de facto oppression” (329). In the shift from de jure to de facto racism,
mainstream America reshaped bigotry in much the same way it did black music—
through the simple process of whitewashing.

 

Note

1. An allusion to Radiohead’s 2003 album.

2. From a speech by Malcolm X entitled “God’s Judgment of White America (The Chickens Come Home to Roost),” delivered on December 4, 1963 in New York City.

3. An allusion to the title of a Paul Simon track from 1990’s Rhythm of the Saints.

WORKS CITED

Baraka, Amiri. The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues. New York: William
Morrow and Company Inc., 1987.

Gracyk, Theodore. I Wanna Be Me: Rock Music and the Politics of Identity.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001.

Hall, Perry A. “African-American Music: Dynamics of Appropriation and
Innovation.” In Borrowed Power: Essays on Cultural Appropriation. Ed.

Bruce Ziff and Pratima V. Rao. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1997: 31-51.
Kitwana, Bakari. Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes,
and the New Reality of Race in America. New York: Basic Civitas Books,
2005.

Lethem, Jonathan. “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism.” Harper’s Magazine.
Feb. 2007: 59-71.

Little, Malcolm (aka Malcolm X). “God’s Judgment of White America (The
Chickens Come Home to Roost).” Speech delivered in New York City on
December 4, 1963. Accessible online at
http://www.blackcommentator.com/42/42_malcolm.html.

Perkins, William E. “The Rap Attack: an Introduction.” In Droppin’ Science:
Critical Essays on Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture. Ed. William E. Perkins.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996: 1-45.

White, Armond. “‘Who Wants to See Ten Niggers Play Basketball?’” In Droppin’
Science: Critical Essays on Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture. Ed. William E.

Perkins. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996: 182-210