This blog is an addition to a capstone project on Modern American Blackface in The Music Industry. It allows a visual and open acessability for everyone not just for those capable of reading and processing acedemic paper
More ways in which Azalea presents the black body as both under her ownership (white gaze) but for her own capitalistic means. She shows black womanhood as only entertainment for whiteness to adapt or for men to fine within her white body.
Take a look at these images and asses the way in which Azalea, a white Australian woman, uses Black bodies and Black pain for her own capitalistic mocking. The way in which she steals from blackness is apparent, nut also it’s important to note the ways in which her history complicated the notion of black identity and womanhood. Azalea sees black women as grotesque props to often be mimicked and laughed at.
The way in which Iggy Azalea takes ownership over the black body is disturbing. She twists the way in which black women have used twerking to define their own sexual freedom, and uses it for her own capitalistic success. In every frame of Mo’Bounce these black women are posed for Azalea’s benefit. Twerking is only to be commodified for Azalea, and it seems to be the only aspect of black women hood that Azalea knows about. Yet, it’s important to note that twerking does not define one’s sexuality or blackness. This ideology is only composed through the white imagination of Azalea herself. These Black women are posed to be gazed upon, instead of setting up their own boundaries through “disrespectability politics”, they are confined to a white gaze. Iggy Azalea, a white women, get to define the terms for them and tells them when and how to “bounce” whether she looks at them in the back-round of the frame or positions herself in the central narrative.
Here, a young Azelea talks about how she grew up in Australia and her desperate need to come and live in America.
The issue isn’t the fact that Azelea wants to rap but it’s her fetishization with black people and America that is un-easy. She feels the need to find escape or refuge in black culture, without truly experiencing what that means. As a white woman, with the context in the history of whiteness, will it ever be ok to commodify a culture? Can a white women ever seek refuge inside blackness?
Never while talking about her career and life does she mention her love for music but she does mention her love for money.
1:30 “I felt like; It just felt right (being in America); It felt like a celebration. I had gotten there. I had made it.”
2:28 “The thought of failure was really not the option for me”
She also does not recognize all of the black women in music who came before her, which is a problem considering that she dons a “blaccent” (far from her own) when she raps.
“Sorry, the old Taylor can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Because she’s dead” - Taylor Swift’s Look What You Made Me Do
But can the old quirky white Taylor actually be killed?
I argue that she can’t. Taylor Swift’s history within the black community, white supremacy, and within whiteness cannot be removed. She places her white feminist gaze upon everything she does, whether or not she knows this.
She only recently spoke out against voting, against Klan members, the LGBT+ community,and for Black lives. Asking someone with this platform to speak out and up for the fans who support her is the bare minimum. Asking a wealthy white women in 2017 to speak up for LGBT community, who supports her, IS the bare minimum. White women like Taylor often tow the line between what is the right thing and what will make them more money. For a long time, speaking out against white people was a way to loose one’s fanbase. Taylor only spoke up when it became cool to do so.
Therefore, this new edgy and urban side of Taylor that she will soon drop allows her to try and shed her whiteness to be come something else more ethnic and urban altogether. Yet these are all things she’s never experienced and her views about in-equality are base level, so why should she be given access to these things? This commodification of blackness is the same methods that blackface in post civil war days was used.
Once again Taylor is trying to shed her old quirky whiteness to become edgy but she does this with the help of imagining blackness. She raps, tries to make herself more urban, wears two piece street wear, and even surrounds herself with black people. She commodifies what she thinks will make her look cool for her own gain, and I would argue that it’s unnatural for Taylor. This is a culture that she framed herself as not being familiar with her whole country music career and shown in “Shake it Off”. So why all of a sudden try to be this? In The Music Industry stealing or trying to be an imagined ideal of black is what will sell. She’s made switched from country to pop, so she figures why not make the switch from quirky white to ethnic cool as if authentic blackness can be easily bought and performed through the white gaze.
Gone is the now quirky innocent image of Taylor and here is a more darker and edgy version of herself. She uses a urban look and graffiti to make herself look cooler, not to mention her use of a more black linguistic sound (knew, tryin, tho, he don’t, sayin). This tiny appropriation isn’t the outright worst thing for Taylor, but it still is unnatural to put on a costume for a more urban feel to escape from your old image.
In this Taylor places herself as the gazer and the voyager. She looks are multiple cultures through the lens of being her quirky white self. The issue with this is that she tries to commodify this world while showing how different and above it she is. This is shown specifically in her twerking and hip hop section in which she sets herself as center stage amidst black women twerking. She gawks at them and laughs at how absurd it all is, but this is all just stereotypes of what she thinks blackness is. She dresses up in a cultural context of blackness and what she thinks it is (hoops, leopard print, twerking, hip hop) She, too, places herself in a white narrative upon everything. She frames this group as the “other” and herself as the main figure. Even when the black women are given solo’s their bodies, or butts, are the only central figure. While this was probably done without malicious intent, It’s concerning how she uses their bodies to frame her own sense of self awareness as a white woman. This consumption of wearing a white imagination blackness parallels to blackface, which did the exact same thing.
Once again we see Katy’s commodification and obsession with capturing the blackness of image and profiting off of it. She images black and POC men to be capitalized off of. She takes the gifts from them and turns the men into literal objects like dice, wine, and even animals. The women, black women, are only shown through cat like heads removing them from the narrative. It is Katy herself who tries to become the other: a black woman or dark horse. This is all probably unintentional but images like this do hold power. It’s also not the first or last time she would try and consume/mock blackness. This relates to how blackface often reduces blackness to commodified and fun images. White supremacy places ownership over the black body in any way they like.
This is Katy Perry’s Prismadic World Tour “I Kissed a Girl”. She appropriates both black stereotypes and Egyption culture and tries to parallel them with themes of sexulizations, queerbaiting, Ghetto-ness, and tweaking. These may look like fine images to thee average eye under white gaze and a capitalistic mindset but if you look closer it’s quite starteling. I’m surprised no one on her team looked at this as negative.
Katy is prepared to stereytpye these mummies as a dehuminzing characature in which Black women have been forced to play into. Black bufoonish dancing women with hoops, big lips, big butts, and big breast....all of which Katy does not have. She paints these mummies as the other, coming to get her. Coming to make her kiss them and trap her into a web of naughty behavior.
This ideology of black women having big butts is connected through a historical black women who was bought and paraded around Europe as the women with a large butt. She was thought of as savage (black women have reclaimed that word only to have white women re-use it) and less of a woman. Her name was Sarah, but they called her the Hottentot Venus. The picture below is a depiction, a drawing, of what she looked like. I suspect it was extremely exaggerated and see through the eye of the white gaze. She too, was commodified as black body meant to be purchased and looked upon as Katy poses these mummies to be.
I’d like to note that hood/ghetto/street culture and style were born out of resistance, vibrancy, and harsh oppression in which forced us to create culture out of the little that we have. It asks black women to find the beauty in nothing, to find the beauty in the pain and trauma we were forced to be. To create our own fierce personas. I, as a black woman, do not reject “hood culture” but I reject what white people think it means. Below I’ve posted some pictures of black women that have existed throughout history and where our “hip hop/street culture” comes from, all of which the white gaze depicts us as dehumanizing people without looking at full context of our culture and our means of survival.
Take a close look at the way in which perry tries to adopt blackness as a cool summer feature. She gets to choose in what she purchases and buys (commodification and capitalism) including culture. Like Nails, Tacos, and hair (weave and edges) which are based on Asian, Black, and Latinx cultures/stereotyes. She imagines that by buying and wearing these things will make her cooler and fun. However this culture cannot be bought or taken, which is why she looks so unnatural posed against theses images. This is the same with blackface, which poses white people to imagine and embody their ideology of what they see in black people (blackness) for comedy and commodification. Katy Perry unintentionally does this same thing, it is blackface in a new form but with same intention: escapism/white suprimacy/commodification.
This song is sampled from a classic 90s black anthem by Montell Jordanm called “This is How We Do It”, which is even more concerning.
Take specific notes of the way in which Ariana uses cultural language and rapping as hers (been, thru, bad, who’woulda, savage, be). These are hints into why and how Ariana and the Music Industry have used black language as their own, and what makes me feel so unsettled about 7 Rings. She is not the only artist to do this, as we will see.
Because it’s the sound of complete artistic freedom.
This idea that Black music continues to be stolen and watered down to try to fit a white population will appear again and again in my evidence on how this is modern day blackface. You will hear how white artists in current day are trying to emulate a black sound, look, and structured improvisation in the music industry just as they did with blackface at the end of the Civil War.
Here are a few quotes to which I think give great context:
“It’s the conflation of pride and chagrin I’ve always felt anytime a white person inhabits blackness with gusto. It’s: You have to hand it to her. It’s: Go, white boy. Go, white boy. Go. But it’s also: Here we go again.”
“Particular to black American music is the architecture to create a means by which singers and musicians can be completely free, free in the only way that would have been possible on a plantation: through art, through music — music no one “composed” (because enslaved people were denied literacy), music born of feeling, of play, of exhaustion, of hope. What you’re hearing in black music is a miracle of sound, an experience that can really happen only once — not just melisma, glissandi, the rasp of a sax, breakbeats or sampling but the mood or inspiration from which those moments arise. The attempt to rerecord it seems, if you think about it, like a fool’s errand. You’re not capturing the arrangement of notes, per se. You’re catching the spirit.“
“This is to say that when we’re talking about black music, we’re talking about horns, drums, keyboards and guitars doing the unthinkable together. We’re also talking about what the borrowers and collaborators don’t want to or can’t lift — centuries of weight, of atrocity we’ve never sufficiently worked through, the blackness you know is beyond theft because it’s too real, too rich, too heavy to steal.“
“Blackness was on the move before my ancestors were legally free to be. It was on the move before my ancestors even knew what they had. It was on the move because white people were moving it. And the white person most frequently identified as its prime mover is Thomas Dartmouth Rice, a New Yorker who performed as T.D. Rice and, in acclaim, was lusted after as “Daddy” Rice, “the negro par excellence.” Rice was a minstrel, which by the 1830s, when his stardom was at its most refulgent, meant he painted his face with burned cork to approximate those of the enslaved black people he was imitating. That night, Rice made himself up to look like the old black man — or something like him, because Rice’s get-up most likely concocted skin blacker than any actual black person’s and a gibberish dialect meant to imply black speech. Rice had turned the old man’s melody and hobbled movements into a song-and-dance routine that no white audience had ever experienced before. What they saw caused a permanent sensation. He reportedly won 20 encores.....Across the Ohio River, not an arduous distance from all that adulation, was Boone County, Ky., whose population would have been largely enslaved Africans. As they were being worked, sometimes to death, white people, desperate with anticipation, were paying to see them depicted at play.“
“Perhaps minstrelsy’s popularity could be (generously) read as the urge to escape a reckoning. But a good time predicated upon the presentation of other humans as stupid, docile, dangerous with lust and enamored of their bondage? It was an escape into slavery’s fun house....Paradoxically, its dehumanizing bent let white audiences feel more human. They could experience loathing as desire, contempt as adoration, repulsion as lust. They could weep for overworked Uncle Ned as surely as they could ignore his lashed back or his body as it swung from a tree.“
“the insult of being asked to look at the dancing of a real negro.” So Barnum “greased the little ‘nigger’s’ face and rubbed it over with a new blacking of burned cork, painted his thick lips vermilion, put on a woolly wig over his tight curled locks and brought him out as ‘the champion nigger-dancer of the world.’ ” This child might have been William Henry Lane, whose stage name was Juba. And, as Juba, Lane was persuasive enough that Barnum could pass him off as a white person in blackface. He ceased being a real black boy in order to become Barnum’s minstrel Pinocchio.”
“But these were unhappy innovations. Custom obligated black performers to fulfill an audience’s expectations, expectations that white performers had established. A black minstrel was impersonating the impersonation of himself. Think, for a moment, about the talent required to pull that off.“
“ Loving black culture has never meant loving black people, too. Loving black culture risks loving the life out of it.“
A picture of Thomas Dartmouth Rice
Morris, Wesley. “Why Is Everyone Always Stealing Black Music?,” August 14, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/music-black-culture-appropriation.html.
Whites not only appreciate black culture: they buy it. Having appropriated music, visual arts and the literature traditionally associated with African Americans, they have put it on the market. Black culture is now open for business.
Ellis Cashmore, The Black Culture Industry (pg.1)
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