Sasha on Shadow, Diplo, Eminem & Minstrelsy

those mixes are great though!

(x-post)

can't it be as simple as white people catching on?

If it's appropriation you're worried about, it's not like Diplo is taking food -- purple food, mind you -- off Cam'ron's table. I mean, we're not talking about the marginilization of the kinds of artists that Diplo is accused of stealing from.

You might say that the Beastie Boys are a better example of making money while other, more "legitimate" practitioners were not, but the answer to that is that it doesn't happen anymore the way it did -- the channels are so far stuffed with better things -- call them more "real" if you want -- that the beastie boys are an afterthought at best. We don't exactly have to worry about Kanye opening up for Northern State.

Because Sasha seems to be more concerned about performers and their personae rather than misappropriation and (white) people generally making money off of a historically "black" form, the paper seemed to me to boil down to the suggestion that people are staying outside of or on the margins of the game because "blackface" carries a stigma because of blackness rather than a stigma because of inauthenticity.

In my opinion it's the latter that presents the stigma WAY more than the former. Somebody like eminem is able to transcend the inauthenticity question because, as most people seem to agree, he is (or used to be) really good. Diplo, not so much -- either because he just doesn't have it, or he's too self conscious (as someone suggested above). Note that Paul Anka and everybody else have all set their signs on doing super white-guy versions of INDIE ROCK, where even Pat Boone does not fear to tread, not hip-hop.

Anyway, my point is that this reluctance of "white" performers -- if you agree that it's based on authenticity self-consciousness rather than "blackness" stigma, articulates some degree of progress insofar as it suggests the absence of misappropriation from the "black" people that are generally making the music in question (setting aside the question of whether the industry makes white non-artist people rich and etc. etc.)

Anyway, just saying.

yeah but 130 posts in and i don't think anybody's managed to make a more convincing case for that than SFJ did for the "'blackness' stigma".

compare: the manix 12's on reinforced. the 4hero album

totally different case!! because diplo never made those manix 12's. the equivalent would be if 4hero got famous off djing hardcore records and made noodly techno in the studio right off the bat. for a while, at least, 4hero were making music that reflected the music they were playing in the clubs.

meanwhile, diplo's first outing as a producer features martina topley bird and vybz kartel! couldn't he have found someone a little more ... you know ... gully?

anyway i read SFJ's article the same was as shakey mo, except i don't think suge knight was acting out of cultural nationalism. and negative repercussions from the black community is a red herring, too, since they haven't been anywhere near majority consumers of hip-hop product for a really, really long time.

also i have my own problems with lots of the historic ideas about minstrelsy now prevelant in academia which i think are back-projecting more recent forms of cultural mishmashing back into a v. difft historic period and thus confuse matters quite a bit. but that's a whole nother axe to grind. however it does make sasha's point about trying to establish a continuum and then mark what and how things have changed a more interesting potential solution to this issue. but to talk about that, i think there needs to be more talk about the bigger issues of how things changed so we've got representation as indicating power (among many things) rather than the crude notion of representation AS power.

=

**back-projecting more recent forms of cultural mishmashing back into a v. difft historic period and thus confuse matters**

right...

-- ppp (pp...), May 28th, 2005.

I think the key quote of the Sasha piece here is: "In fact, I am more interested in the idea that Shadow and Diplo are not modern minstrels, and what kind of loss that might represent." I think he's saying that because these guys merely spin black music they like, but don't try to make music like that on their own records or make it a bigger part of identity, it's some kind of cheat or loss. Which is, I think, the most questionable idea of the whole piece.