Culture Vultures: Paint It Black

...44 image that no rabbi or cardinal or even a Congregationalist pastor could hope to match...

...No wonder Jesse Jackson began to wonder whether the guy was even black...

...That's what the inaugural festivities were all about...

...Or does it suggest—how shall we put this—a certain somewhat narrow preoccupation...

...It was an inspired remodeling touch worthy of Martha Stewart: many of us—not least O.J...

...What made Taylor's discomfort so odd was that he was singing his own song, "Shed a Little Light" — an anthem to Martin Luther King...

...I don't know whether they have sweating stevedores on the levees out by L.A...

...He made a small fortune from "In The Baggage Coach Ahead...

...The presidential prayer meeting was held, inevitably, at the African Methodist Episcopal Church, with the Winans gospel family and a happy-clappy sing-along president and the remorselessly ubiquitous Rev...

...Does it really testify to the vitality of "Black English" and its contribution to the broader language...

...Defending the cause of "Black English," Professor Emmons writes: "Among the hundreds of the jazz world's words that have filtered into the American lexicon are 'hip,"cool,"gig,"jiving around,' `get high' and `gimme five.' Black English is in blues and soul, giving America expressive, often sensual, words and phrases like 'hot,"baby,"mojo,"fine,"mess with,"thang' (as in doin' my), 'take it easy,' `slick,"rip-off,"cool out' and 'bad.' Black English is in Negro spirituals (Dat Ole Man River,"Ah Got Shoes...

...The idea that blacks have a uniquely authentic purchase on vernacular culture is preposterous...

...a century on, black culture is making the journey in reverse, with Henry Louis Gates and the college crowd bending over backwards to justify whorehouse music...

...A tougher negotiator than most of his white confreres, Davis was one of the first songwriters—black or white—to demand and get a royalty deal for his songs...

...Watching the inaugural festivities, you'd be forgiven for wondering who'd performed the same retrospective African-Americanization on the broader culture...

...ebonification of the national culture to the tireless efforts of Rev...

...That's the funny thing about diversity: it always seems to lead to homogeneity...

...I've a soft spot for Davis's pop smash of 1896, introduced by "Sweet voiced contralto Imogene Corner, Queen of Descriptive Vocalists"—as white as you can get...

...March 1997 • The American Spectator By the time Patti had bulldozed her way through 'The House I Live In,' that house had been reduced to rubble...

...But others, like Gussie Davis, wrote in the idiom of the day, songs that were indistinguishable from the whitest Victorian parlor ballad...

...Except for Whoopi Goldberg (for whom presidential galas are becoming an even more ridiculous habit than the one she wore in Sister Act 2), pretty well everyone was plugging a single or an album ora Broadway show...

...When I first heard about Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk, it sounded like a parody of black affirmation...

...Farrakhan would put it) "bloodsuckers" who cooked it up because they needed something for a spot in the first act of a Broadway show in 1927...

...Quite the opposite: for our urban elites, vernacular white culture is one of the few things it's acceptable to trash — trailer parks, big hair, Paula Jones...God, how frightful...

...Black culture is Joplin, Cook, Ellington, Armstrong: black people who tend not to shout...

...Lena Horne with Rose45 0 mary Clooney rather than with Janet Jackson...

...Still, the inauguration's predilection was revealing...

...But there was no room for Reba McIntyre, never mind Emmylou Harris and "The Tennessee Waltz...

...The most sweetly endearing moment in the general's autobiography is when he says his favorite music is Andrew Lloyd Webber...

...The show was billed as "An American Journey" — but if you were, say, a North Country Yankee or an Okie from Muskogee or even an Arkansas swamp-dweller from Hot Springs, you'd have been hard put to recognize your America in there...

...This crass travesty earned her the biggest ovation of the night...

...To take the gentlest comparison, look at a culture with which America has never had any sustained contact: India...

...Presumably Aretha and Stevie were too cool to get suckered into it...

...But a piece by another professor, Ron Emmons of Los Angeles City College, in the Los Angeles Times, makes me wonder how many of these academics are that interested in black culture anyway...

...I don't think we need trouble ourselves with whether he'd have recognized Niggaz With Attitude as his "brothers...

...In the early sixties, Nat Cole called his record company, a company he'd helped to make extremely rich: "Capitol Records, home of the Beatles," chirruped the receptionist...

...Patti shrieks and ululates and is the queen of today's melisma junkies — that's The American Spectator • March 1997 That was typical of an evening when even the white contributors seemed to be playing on black terms...

...White middle-class audiences take it for granted that black melisma-choked renditions are by definition more felt...

...Simpson's home, Johnnie and the Dream Team—the world's most expensive housemaids—went round, removed all the photographs of O.J.'s white pals, and substituted snaps of distinguished African-Americans...

...M ' ost blacks are lousy tap dancers, just like most whites are...

...And, inevitably, it was Jessye Norman who sang "Of Thee" on the Capitol steps...

...riots to plug his book, Why Black People Tend to Shout...

...Country'n'western music is the white answer to jazz, but there are no proud, affirmative "celebrations" of it at Broadway theaters...

...Doesn't the diversity of that list make "cool out" and "gimme five" look just a bit weedy...

...to say, she takes a perfectly good monosyllable and elongates it to 15 — "lu-u-u-uu-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-urve" —as if soulfulness were measured by the yard...

...Ever since, most black singers (including those in the recent Broadway revival) have sung "That 01' Man River...

...Country is fine and dandy if you're the sort of stump-toothed, inbred mountain man who likes nothing better than a jigger of moonshine and a bunk-up with his sister...

...But it's regarded as unworthy of notice by any of the more serious forms...

...Yet a lot of whites are uncomfortable with the vocabulary of black culture...

...It's a crude redaction of black soulfulness...

...You could, I suppose, make the case that pre-1960's white cultural figures are tainted—the argument being that, if you celebrate the honkies of Tin Pan Alley, you're insulting the black talent at whose expense they prospered...

...In the former category I'd place James Taylor, whom I hadn't consciously seen on TV since he was married to Carly Simon: now bald, gray, bespectacled, and tuxedoed, he jerked along during his duet with Aretha Franklin and her African-American choir with about as much sense of rhythm as Al Gore doing the Macarena...

...H ow odd that African-American culture should emerge as the preferred mode of national discourse at the very time when the most influential African-Americans seem determined to impose a sort of trickle-up apartheid...

...Black culture is nothing to do with primal jungle energy...

...Go to any old Broadway revue, and you notice that the black cast members, particularly the large female ones, always get louder cheers than the white ones...

...It was the triumph of what well-meaning whites have been conditioned to believe for years: that black culture is more authentic, more honest...

...Under the British Raj, many Indian words passed into the English language, and a few of them crossed to the New World, including (to pluck at random) pajamas, bungalow, cheroot, verandah, khakis, cummerbund, jodhpurs, and karma...

...And, most inevitably of all, at the Inaugural Gala the big stars were Aretha Franklin, Babyface, Savion Glover, and Stevie Wonder—while the white folks were, to paraphrase one of Stevie's early hits, either uptight or outta sight...

...By the time Patti had bulldozed her way through it, that house had been reduced to rubble...

...Popular music is supposed to be the story of canny white hustlers hijacking an authentic, honest, black vernacular—or as Savion Glover puts it in Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk: "It's raw, it's rhythm, it's us, it's ours...

...Jackson would say) or (as the Rev...

...It can't all have been the work of Johnnie Cochran, though he was, of course, present that day in Washington, signing autographs, pushing his new TV gig, and maybe touting for presidential business—If the distinguishing characteristic don't fit, you must acquit...

...When Marc Carnegie reminded us last month of Professor Gates's inability to distinguish between Shakespeare and Robbie Burns, I charitably assumed that, as a Professor of both English and Afro-American studies, he was heavier on the Afro-, light on the English...

...they demand to know, and so he tells them: She's in a casket, traveling freight...

...Scott Joplin's rags are formal, restrained, serious—for want of a better word, educated music...

...He couldn't get to play them in concert halls and conservatories, so instead he took jobs in bars and whorehouses...

...Jackson, whose definition of appropriate African-American visibility bears no relation to the actual black population of America (ii percent): last year, he was criticizing glossy monthlies for only using one black cover star per year—even though, statistically speaking, that's about right...

...After years of black actors' complaints that they're confined to domestic servant roles, leave it to Johnnie Cochran to demonstrate just how critical a tiny housekeeping role can be to the plot...

...But that was typical of an evening in which, even in their own moments, the white contributors seemed to be playing on black terms...

...Another turn-of-the century black composer, Will Marion Cook, studied with Dvorak, but wound up writing "exotic" Broadway shows like In Dahomey and Bandanna Days and novelty hits like "Bon Bon Buddy, De Chocolate Drop — Dat's Me...

...The title reminded me of a guy I often think of as the archetypal Oprah guest: he was a sports writer and he turned up on her special on the L.A...

...Or, as he puts it, But baby's cries can't waken her In the Baggage Coach Ahead...

...We're on a train late at night, a young man has a mewling baby whose cries are disturbing the other passengers...

...I think that theory's historically dubious: a century ago, a March 1997 • The American Spectator significant number of Negro songwriters were cleaning up in the music business — some, like Ben Harney ("Mister Johnson, Turn Me Loose") and Bob Cole ("Under The Bamboo Tree"), wrote in styles we now think of as "black...

...Noise / Funk, a "celebration" of black rhythms from tap to hip-hop, with rap poetry by Reg E. Gaines, is as limiting a black stereotype as anything whitey's devised: all this "raw, earthy, noisy funk" talk is surely as patronizing as Adelaide Hall doing "Diga Diga Doo" in a few bananas and feathers in Blackbirds of/928...

...Circumstances forced Joplin from the conservatory to the brothel...

...As black vernacular culture has moved to the center of national life, white vernacular culture has headed for the hills...

...Sinatra disdains melismas, but so did Nat "King" Cole, Fats Waller, Maxine Sullivan, Mabel Mercer, Louis Armstrong...

...that's just a PC version of minstrelsy...

...rioters to copyright them...

...Broadway's Laurie Beechman sang Rodgers and Hammerstein's "You'll Never Walk Alone" backed by the massed choirs of burnt Southern churches...

...But guys like Gussie Davis don't fit the theories of "cultural appropriation" and artistic exploitation...

...In essence, "ebonics" advocates now wish to extend that principle to exam grades...

...Yes, Hammerstein's lyric is filledwith "dat" and "dese" (obviously, he was self-taught at "ebonics"), but, curiously, when Paul Robeson sang the song in the London production of Show Boat in 1928, the biggest problem he had was wrapping his beautiful, impeccable vowels around the soi-disant dialect lyric...

...But he must surely have been impressed at the way the approved national expression of American culture is increasingly black...

...It would be nice to attribute this—what's the word...

...I note the presence on the Professor's list of "bad," which in "Black English" means "really good...

...I forget the reason...

...Country music, the American music industry's biggest-selling category, was represented by Kenny Rogers and Trisha Yearwood, who sang not a country song but an execrable clunker of an anthem written by the president's high school chum—"Ifwe all pulled together, we could be so strong...

...himself—were amazed to discover after all these years that he was, in fact, black...

...As to Professor Emmons's list of "Black English" words that have filtered into the American lexicon: hip, cool, gig, jiving around, get high, gimme five...Is this list seriously a cause for black pride...

...The promotion of black vernacular culture as both America's inclusive, authentic national culture and black America's principal activity is a distortion of history and, as with most of these distortions, its main victims seem set to be blacks themselves...

...Even "thug" and "looter" are Indian, despite the best efforts of, respectively, Tupac and the L.A...

...Cole hung up, disgusted...

...This idea that black culture is an artistic channeling of black oppression, black anger, black victimization, the authentic voice of the streets, etc., is crazy...

...Indeed, I'm not sure there is any coherent kind of "black culture": Duke Ellington has more in common with Ravel than with Snoop Doggy Dogg...

...That's one reason why they like Colin Powell, another black man who tends not to shout...

...City College, but if they do, they're singing: "01' man Emmons Dat ol' man Emmons He must know sumpin' He don't check nothin...

...Just for the record, Professor: "01' Man River" is not a Negro spiritual, but a number by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, two "hymies" (as the Rev...

...Where's her mother...

...As they say in minstrel shows: take it away, Professor...

...There was a good example on ABC's Sinatra tribute a year or so back, when Patti LaBelle was asked to sing Frank's salute to the American Dream, "The House I Live In...

...But, again, he took his music seriously, which is why he was a great influence on Ellington (and, incidentally, the link between Duke and Dvorak...

...In advance of the jurors' inspection of O.J...

...Yet raw, earthy white culture never gets a look-in at inaugural galas or other elite venues...

...Having betrayed the legacy of Joplin and Ellington and instead substituted some updated version of the old refrain about those jungle rhythms, African-American leaders are, inevitably, insisting on the expansion of their "vernacu46 lar" view of black culture into other spheres...

...But, as incidental music for whoring goes, it's the best there is...

...Jesse Jackson—a projection of the nation's preferred spiritual MARK STEYN is theater critic of the New Criterion and movie critic of the Spectator of London...

...Proponents of "ebonics" like to cloak the subject in spurious scholarship, but what's staggering is how lazy most of it is—almost as if they're so used to putting one over on whitey, they don't have to try anymore...

...Even "The Star-Spangled Banner," as arranged for pop-gospeller Sandi Patti, had been given syrupy new choruses about "freedom's dream" and "the lantern of hope," in a zany attempt to transform Francis Scott Key's lumbering verses into a power ballad like "You Make Me Feel (Like a Natural Woman...