Talk:Blackface

Perhaps the greatest horror of Spike Lee's Bamboozled is that he had the courage to make the stylized blackface singing, dancing, and joking very well done and quite entertaining. Ortolan88

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I don't understand about the reversed italics in the caption. It looked to me like there was an extra pair of '' floating around in there, so I just took them out. Maybe you meant that captions should be italic and so therefore the title of the film should be non-italic, thus becoming italic in the context, if you follow me. Anyway, I like having the picture there. I wonder if you could do the same with a picture of Bert Williams. It is unbelievably poignant in our time to see a black man in blackface. Ortolan88

No big deal, but, as far as the italics are concerned, that's exactly what I meant. I've seen it both in books and on other Wikipedia pages, but, as I said, this is nothing to fuss about. -- For me it's rather difficult to get hold of suitable pictures, and I'm always slightly worried about possible copyright violations, even if this is not mentioned in the source. Right now I can only think of one other photo, a still from one of the last scenes of Hitchcock's Young and Innocent. --KF 17:26 Dec 10, 2002 (UTC)

I'll look around a bit and then raise the question about italic captions in Talk:Wikipedia Manual of Style, which is where such things get wrangled out. Thanks. Ortolan88 PS - Just added it there, KF.Ortolan88

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Certainly, white performers have continued to emulate black performers, but without the makeup. Frankie Laine, Johnny Ray, Elvis Presley, Bill Haley and his Comets, Mick Jagger, and many many more emulate a black style, both out of genuine admiration and out of recognition of the performance power of that style. Indeed, allusions to black style are virtually standard for rock and roll.

At what point does this performance style cease to be "black" style, and become simply "rock and roll style", without having to insert a color designation in there? What, exactly, is "black style", anyway? kwertii

Oh, the Pet Shop Boys don't do a lot of it. Black style is what Mick Jagger does, trying to imitate James Brown, young Elvis Presley crouching behind the piano in a Memphis joint in 1952, trying to figure out what the hell Ike Turner was doing, stuff like that. You can't take the black style out of rock and roll. Ortolan88

Sure, if you're talking about those few select early rock singers, but making the blanket statement that all rock and roll is "black style" is saying that rock music is essentially a bunch of white boys trying to be hip. Where's the "black style" (again, whatever that means) in David Bowie or Nirvana? At some point in the 1960s, rock stopped being "black style" and became just "rock style", for both white people and black people.. at this point in time, saying that rock musicians consciously emulate "black style" and "allusions to black style are virtually standard for rock and roll" makes about as much sense as saying that rock and roll is musically just a variant of Spanish classical music, because it uses guitars.

(And I'm still not exactly sure what the term "black style" refers to, other than a euphemism for "poseur white boys".) kwertii

"If you have to ask, you'll never know." Old saying. Ortolan88

Yes, yes. It all sounds like so much exclusionary, pretentious twaddle from over here. There's no such thing as "black style", any more than Mozart and Bach exhibited "white style". Both statements are nonsensical self-aggrandizing pomposity. Why create artificial distinctions (like presuming all members of a given skin tone range magically share some genetically ingrained stylistic sense) where there don't need to be any? I thought that sort of ignorant generalization about people based on superficial physical characteristics was finally dying out in this society.. -kwertii

The fish don't notice the water. I didn't say any of those racist things you attribute to me, but if you think there would be any rock and roll without the contribution of black people and black culture, then you are in error. For my money, it is racist to think otherwise. Ortolan88

I agree with Ortolan. Saying that there are no social commonalities within racial subcultures is just silly -- of course, not all black people are identical, but it's rose-tinted naivete to think no commonalities can be drawn. I also agree with the listed names. Kwertii, the ones you mentioned are significantly later in time -- in the 50s and 60s, rock and rollers were clearly almost all exhibiting a black style because that was what was popular. Tokerboy

I wonder if kwertii is British. He says he speaks "from over here". There's a book, White Boy Singin' the Blues by Michael Bane (DaCapo) that explores the very different understanding of the Americans and British regarding the blues and the black contribution to culture. Put briefly, his thesis is that the Americans know about it and the British don't, having received the blues as an import rather than as an integral part of their culture. I don't think that makes the British racist, and I regret having used that word above, but I do think it shows that they don't understand how the web of popular music was woven in the world. That is, exactly where did those three chords and those two funny notes come from anyway? Not to mention all that strutting. Ortolan88

Rock and roll didn't stop in the 1960s, when people like Elvis and the Beatles were covering black blues songs. There's been lots and lots of rock and roll since then; it's a very broad category, and the article doesn't say "allusions to black style were virtually standard for 1950s and 1960s rock and roll". I can't quite find the "black style" in Radiohead or the Dead Kennedys or Guns 'N Roses or any of the other 50,000,000 rock bands who existed after 1964 and didn't start their careers covering Chuck Berry. I just think the way it's phrased now is waaaay too overbroad and generalized. "from over here" just means "from my perspective," I'm an American.. -kwertii

Radiohead and Dead Kennedys maybe not, but Guns'n'Roses sure, all those power bands that picked up from the Rolling Stones, not to mention a good many grungy acts like Dinosaur Jr. and Teenage Fan Club[?]. Blues-based and black-influenced rock and roll did not stop in the 60s either. It is naive to think that it only a matter of "covering black songs". Three chords, blue notes, sassy style, silly shtik, all trace their origins back to the minstrel shows. It's in a lot of country music too, maybe I should add that. History itself is overbroad. Ortolan88

Anybody that plays any derivative of heavy metal is playing a highly evolved form of the blues. I think the distinction Ortolan is driving at, and the most important one in the development of music, is the idea that "music" doesn't have to be pretty to listen to. Even the rougher sounds of folk and country were polished compared to blues and jazz. Any singer that sings more like John Lennon than the Wilsons is, consciously or not, directly or not, imitating black artists. (On a sidenote, David Bowie sang soul music). All this is really more discussion than this warrants here, though -- white rock singers sounding black is not blackface and is only tangentially related to the topic (I'm not saying it shouldn't be in the article, but I don't think this is so important we should be spending a lot of time on it). Tokerboy

Well, I just added some more, anyway. I do think that it is important to note that although the black makeup is gone, the impulse is still there. I was watching Melissa Ethridge[?] last night, moaning about "the WO-man who stole mah love away from me" in the grand old manner. Ortolan88

Give me a break. Any musician who makes music that uses a blues scale (and incidentally, heavy metal like Metallica or Guns 'n Roses or Yngwie Malmsteen is musically much, much closer to Spanish classical guitar forms than it is to blues), or is not pretty to listen to (e.g. Einsturzende Neubauten, Nine Inch Nails, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen), or uses "sassy" and rebellious, in-your-face stylings that go against the grain of mainstream society (e.g. Dead Kennedys, Nirvana, Ludwig van Beethoven, Green Day) is, consciously or not, imitating "black style"? Geez. You could just as well say that Muddy Waters and Blind Lemon Jefferson were just, consciously or not, imitating the style of Spanish classical guitarists. The link is just as tenuous. In both cases, the mountain of other subsequent differences compared to a relatively small similarity (not to mention that black people do not have a historical monopoly on being "sassy" or making rough music) renders the proposed causal link nonsensical. --kwertii

Subtract the black contribution from world culture and I doubt if even Kate Bush would survive. Ortolan88

The issue isn't technical similarities, it's in styles of dress and speaking -- if a Tuvan throat singer[?] invented a style of throat singing and used black American slang and wore baggy jeans and pimpish suits and started a trend, the same idea would apply even through Tuvan throat singing has nothing whatsoever to do with anything African-American -- I've seen Native Americans playing traditional music, dressed like Kurtis Blow and they were influenced by African-Americans in a way that has nothing to do with blues scales, but a lot to do with diction, fashion, demeanor, slang... My comment about heavy metal was an exaggeration to prove a point -- there's obviously a big difference between Marilyn Manson and Muddy Waters, but there is a connection. It would also be true that there is a musical connection between Manson and Spanish classical guitar, but you'd have to go back pretty far to see it; Marilyn Manson's style is maybe two or three generations removed from the electric blues and white performers who directly imitated black artists -- spanish classical is much further back there. The link is much less tenuous. Tokerboy

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I have been following the above discussion for some time, and have been trying to figure out whether I have anything to contribute when the discussion has managed to stray so far from the article in question (I mean, so far none of this is going in to the article itself), while still being interesting. I would hate to see it confined to the talk page. For what it is worth, it seems to me that there are three distinct issues at hand

First, "diffusion," or the spread of cultural traits. Anthropologists, historians, and geographers, among others, have long recognized that "culture" is not (or not just) a clearly bounded system, it is a melangue of things borrowed, lent, stolen, or shared across boundaries. Thus, Whites have influence Blacks, Blacks have influenced Whites, and you can find motifs from different forms of music all over the place. Some of the above discussion provides a good example of this and there may be a place for it in Ethnomusicology, Culture, or Culture theory. There is nothing controversial about this fact, but it is important to take into account in any history of such phenomena.

Second, sometimes diffusion is politicized, meaning that it occurs across some strcuture of inequality and that the meaning of what has or has not diffused is meaningful, not just as a type of cuisine or music, but as a statement of identity or a mark of exploitation. I think that in the case of music across the racial divide in the US this has sometimes been the case, and other times it has not -- at times Jazz has been celebrated or marginalized as "Black" music; at times it has been celebrated as American music involving a fusion of Black and White and providing a space in which people of different races can creatively work together. This can be a controversial topic, since it is almost impossible to talk "about" it without getting involved/taking some stand. But I think this is an issue worth exploring in articles on Rock and Jazz, among others, if it can be handled in a nuanced way.

Finally, there is the issue of blackface, which initiated this discussion. Although I think the above discussion is very interesting and important enough to merit inclusion in a variety of articles, I do think that in this context the discussion misses an important point. There is something unique about Blackface itself (I like many am both appalled and morbidly curious to figure out why it happened and what it meant) and certainly one part of it involves cultural appropriation (see no. two), and also a strange form of cultural identification (Whites wanting to appear Black, even if in a charicaturish form). Diffusion and appropriation (no. one) occured long before and after Blackface, and I think that to link Blackface as a particular phenomenon with other forms of appropriation and diffusion will muddy the issue and make it harder to understand Blackface in its specificity. I think it is significant that Elvis could sing the Blues without putting on Blackface (and I presume, without wanting to either). What made that possible? In any event, we need to be clear about how Elvis (or Stan Getz or Dave Brubeck) were different from Blackface in order to understand Blackface more fully. Or, conversely (and more to the point of this article), we need to be clear about how Jolsen was different from Elvis; how Blackface is different from Rock and Roll or Jazz. Slrubenstein

Well put, Slrubenstein. The sentences in question are "Certainly, white performers have continued to emulate black performers, but without the makeup. Frankie Laine, Johnny Ray, Elvis Presley, Bill Haley and his Comets, Mick Jagger, and many many more emulate a black style, both out of genuine admiration and out of recognition of the performance power of that style. Indeed, allusions to black style are virtually standard for rock and roll." I think this is true, accurate and relevant, though of course a complex discussion of black influence on popular music would be out of place here. Maybe I'll try and add to Music of the United States -- the issue at hand is whether "allusions" to "black style" are "virtually standard", and I believe it is unquestionably so. Tokerboy

What a great topic! It's really big in folk lore and cultural studies right now too. About a year ago, I was going over an unpublished doctoral dissertation on the subject of Jews and blackface--they were especially prominent in the vaudeville era. The argument was that for second-generation immigrants who felt marginalized by the ghetto-like social structures in which their parents moved, assuming a new identity through blackface was an opportunity to integrate into American society. The performers took the distinctly American identities that they perceived to be as far removed as possible from their own cultural milieu, thereby making the statement that we can fit into the dominant culture as much as they do. At the time, my comment to the author was that if I read her correctly, the performers were not "Whites pretending to be Black," but "Immigrants pretending to be Whites pretending to be Black"--i.e., a double masquerade. I don't have the paper (or the sources) with me anymore, but it is certainly worth looking into for the social background of blackface in the vaudeville era. Danny 00:46 Jan 20, 2003 (UTC)

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Can someone who knows something about it write about the British television show Black and White Minstrels? When I visited England back in the 70s, I saw a show. The men wore blackface. I was shocked. -- Zoe