Category: MUS 113

  • Authenticity (part I)

    The protagonist of Hari Kunzru’s 2017 novel White Tears, a young white recording engineer named Seth, describes days spent listening to music with his college friend, Carter Wallace: We worshipped music like [Lee “Scratch”] Perry’s but we knew we didn’t own it, a fact we tried to ignore as far as possible, masking our disabling…

  • Affrilachia

    A diagram of the major themes of country music. Country music may seem like the whitest of music genres, and has even been called “The White Man’s Blues.” Songs like Merle Haggard’s “I’m a White Boy” certainly advance that narrative. But is that narrative reliable? It’s true that some of the major themes of country…

  • Race, Class, Art, and Consumption

    Trigger/content warnings: N-word in original source. Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Portrait d’une négresse 1800, Musée du Louvre. New Zealand singer Lorde’s 2013 hit “Royals” appeared to be a critique of conspicuous consumption: My friends and I – we’ve cracked the code. We count our dollars on the train to the party. And everyone who knows us knows that we’re fine…

  • Can A White Girl Sing Selena?

    April 16 is a state holiday in Texas: Selena Day. Who was Selena? Selena was, is, and, were I to guess, will remain for eternity the most beloved female of all time in the Latino community. (Second place is the Virgin Mary, if you’re looking for context.) . . . She looked like (a more attractive…

  • 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…

  • Cultural Appropriation or Cross-Cultural Encounter?

    Trigger/content warning: racist language, blackface minstrelsy. Rihanna wearing a Catholic bishop’s mitre at the gala for the Metropolitan Museum show “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.” The lines between cultural appropriation and a more innocent cross-cultural borrowing can be blurry. Are there rules for determining which is which? Is this cultural appropriation? (Watch the…

  • Go Down, Moses

    The first published version of the spiritual “Go Down, Moses,” in 1862, attributed its authorship to “The Contrabands” — escaped slaves who joined the Union Army — who probably sang it as a rallying cry, rather than as a hymn. The song had been known for at least 15 to 20 years prior to its…

  • Sun Ra, Intergalactic Afrofuturist

    Sun Ra (born Herman Blount in Birmingham, Alabama in 1914) was not only a jazz pioneer. He was also a pioneer of all kinds of avant-garde sounds. In the 1950s, when record companies released 45-rpm discs in the hopes of selling them as hit singles, Ra used the 45-rpm technology to record his musical experiments.…

  • Blackface/Yellowface

    We’ve talked a little about the longstanding practice in opera of white singers “blacking up” to play characters of color. This practice has only begun to be thought of as controversial in our own century. For now, the least offensive choices for opera producers are to 1) cast singers whose race/ethnicity matches the race/ethnicity of…

  • Classical Music Can Save Your Life

    It saved this violist’s life during the Great Depression. Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen told the great African-American mezzo-soprano Barbara Conrad in the 1970s that her singing might make the difference between life and death for someone in the audience. Miss Conrad was one of the students who broke the color barrier at the University of…