Crossover

By Charlie Braxton

A few days ago several friends including Cheo sent me a series of posts concerning the controversy over a conference on Asians’ roll in hip hop. The conference was called "Changing the Face of the Game: Asian Americans in Hip-Hop." It seems that the controversy centered on questions raised by Kenyon Farrow concerning Asian American hip hop journalist Oliver Wang’s comment which he felt de-emphasized the central role that Black people play in hip hop culture. Reading the many critiques and counter-critiques going back and forth reminded me of one of my favorite poems.

“They done taken my blues and gone,” was written by the legendary Harlem Renaissance bard Langston Hughes. The line is the title to a powerfully emotional poem lamenting what Norman Kelly, author of the book, Black Heat, aptly describes as the colonization of Black music. Hughes wrote this poem during the Jazz Age, a period when mainstream white America began a love affair with jazz music. During this period of Prohibition whites like Sinclair Lewis, Gertrude Stein and went “slumming” to Harlem nightclubs that served up a heaping helping of jazz, blues and booze. During this time jazz and blues artists like Louie Armstrong, Bessie Smith and Duke Ellington would routinely play for racially mixed audiences as well as establishments in Harlem like the famed Cotton Club, which catered exclusively to white patrons who wanted to experience Black music while avoiding close contact with the people whom the music emanated from. Pretty much the same way white kids from the suburbs, who make up the majority of the sales for hardcore gangster rap, don’t want to live in Compton CA or Fifth Ward in Houston to experience to all too real debilitating affect of poverty and racism that people in the ghettos and barrios of America face everyday. Naw, they just love the music –the beats, the rhymes, the rhythms, the rebellious spirit of hip hop and there’s nothing wrong with that.

The problem I have is when the dominant culture’s love for Black music leads to their wholesale (pun intended) appropriation and control of it, which allows them to dictate the ebb and flow of the music. This includes rewriting the music’s history, dictating what is or is not authentic or whose is or is not hot, saturating our community with unbalanced music and making huge profits while doing so. Profits which are rarely distributed fairly to Black musicians or Black people, I might add.

Take Benny Goodman, a white musician who was influenced by New Orleans jazzmen such as Johnny Dodds and Jimmy Noone, for example. The so-called “King of Swing” made a fortune playing swing, a form of jazz pioneered by Black jazzmen like originators like Fletcher Henderson, Count Basie, Duke Ellington and others. In fact, Henderson arranged much of the music that Goodman used to ascend to his musical throne. Benny Goodman went on to fame and fortune while Fletcher Henderson died broke and relatively unknown, even though, to his credit, Goodman publicly acknowledged Henderson role in his success. Goodman is still known the world over as the King of Swing. Then there’s Elvis Presley, the so-called King of rock & roll, who rode the backs of Black musicians such as Howlin’ Wolf all the way to fame and fortune. The same can be said for the bible thumping, Pat Bone whose tepid cover of Little Richard, the Grand Architect of rock n roll, “Tutti Frutti” not only took the original song out of context, but sounded stale compared to the real thing. But nevertheless today rock music is still considered a white thing despite the fact that Blacks invented and continue to play it, as the documentary Electric Purgatory: the History of Blacks in Rock n Roll points out.

These bitter historical lessons have not been lost on the Black people in the hip hop generation. Hip hop culture was started in the South Bronx by the children of the African Diaspora (i.e. African Americans, Afro-Latinos and Blacks from the Caribbean). This is not to negate any other races who may have participated in the culture, but, the bottom line is hip hop music is a Black art form. This why whenever any none-Black or Latino steps into the hip hop arena regardless to whether it’s Vanilla Ice or Eminem or anybody else they are viewed with suspicion. It’s not that they don’t like these people personally; it’s just that they know the history of Black music has one major theme –we make it and they take it and they are determined not to repeat it.

BlogOn: Will the legacy of hip hop go the way of most cultural institutions in America, that is, be re-invented and resold without attribution to the people who created it? WhatchuTHINK?