Category: Gender

  • Girls in Cars

    Aside from the cheerful candy-colored queer eroticism of Janelle Monae’s video for “Pynk,” one of the things that strikes me is the way Monae flips the trope of women in a car into a narrative of black female pride and empowerment. Women in cars are, of course, a well-worn visual feature of many rap music…

  • “Crazy” Blues?

    In the book Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition, Adam Gussow devotes an entire chapter to Mamie Smith’s 1920 blues hit “Crazy Blues.” The song is believed to be the first blues recording ever released, and was entered into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1994. Gussow’s main concern, however, is not…

  • Tracing the Sources

    [Content warning: racist language and imagery.] In the 1940s, the American composer Ruth Crawford Seeger, also a folklorist and musicologist, published a collection of American children’s folksongs she had compiled. One of the numbers in this volume of 43 songs is “Such a Getting Upstairs.” This singer asserts that it is a “going-up-to-bed-song” from Indiana.…

  • Identity and Transformation

    Detail from Synecdoche by Byron Kim, a series of oil paintings that are “portraits” of racial identity. As we all know, Rachel Dolezal was by no means the first white American to take on aspects of African-Americanness in her persona — calling Elvis, is anybody home?. . . But blackness has always been an integral part of…