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Miley's mistake one of race and not racey?: The 2013 VMAs Were Dominated by Miley’s Minstrel Show
Some awards were handed out at last night’s MTV Video Music Awards, but, really, only Wikipedia and Kanye West keep track of those. There was an interminable Justin Timberlake medley, interrupted, very briefly, by an *NSYNC reunion — after which, presumably, Timberlake’s ex-bandmates were Medevac-ed back to their South Florida retirement communities. Bruno Mars played the excellent “Gorilla,” the finest Def Leppard tribute song you’ve heard all year. Katy Perry closed the show with an enjoyable, boxing-themed staging of her jock-rock single “Roar,” which was hyped throughout the broadcast, inaccurately, as her “biggest hit ever.”
*snip*
Cyrus has spent a lot of time recently toying with racial imagery. We’ve seen Cyrus twerking her way through the video for her big hit “We Can’t Stop,” professing her love for “hood music,” and claiming spiritual affinity with Lil’ Kim. Last night, as Cyrus stalked the stage, mugging and twerking, and paused to spank and simulate analingus upon the ass of a thickly set African-American backup dancer, her act tipped over into what we may as well just call racism: a minstrel show routine whose ghoulishness was heightened by Cyrus’s madcap charisma, and by the dark beauty of “We Can’t Stop” — by a good distance, the most powerful pop hit of 2013.
A doctoral dissertation could (and will) be written on the racial, class, and gender dynamics of Cyrus’s shtick. I’ll make just one historical note. For white performers, minstrelsy has always been a means to an end: a shortcut to self-actualization. The archetypal example is in The Jazz Singer (1927), in which Al Jolson’s immigrant striver puts on the blackface mask to cast off his immigrant Jewish patrimony and remake himself as an all-American pop star.
Cyrus’s twerk act gives minstrelsy a postmodern careerist spin. Cyrus is annexing working-class black “ratchet” culture, the potent sexual symbolism of black female bodies, to the cause of her reinvention: her transformation from squeaky-clean Disney-pop poster girl to grown-up hipster-provocateur. (Want to wipe away the sickly-sweet scent of the Magic Kingdom? Go slumming in a black strip club.) Cyrus may indeed feel a cosmic connection to Lil’ Kim and the music of “the hood.” But the reason that these affinities are coming out now, at the VMAs and elsewhere, is because it’s good for business.
http://www.vulture.com/2013/08/jody-rosen-miley-cyrus-vmas-minstrel.html?mid=facebook_vulture
*snip*
Cyrus has spent a lot of time recently toying with racial imagery. We’ve seen Cyrus twerking her way through the video for her big hit “We Can’t Stop,” professing her love for “hood music,” and claiming spiritual affinity with Lil’ Kim. Last night, as Cyrus stalked the stage, mugging and twerking, and paused to spank and simulate analingus upon the ass of a thickly set African-American backup dancer, her act tipped over into what we may as well just call racism: a minstrel show routine whose ghoulishness was heightened by Cyrus’s madcap charisma, and by the dark beauty of “We Can’t Stop” — by a good distance, the most powerful pop hit of 2013.
A doctoral dissertation could (and will) be written on the racial, class, and gender dynamics of Cyrus’s shtick. I’ll make just one historical note. For white performers, minstrelsy has always been a means to an end: a shortcut to self-actualization. The archetypal example is in The Jazz Singer (1927), in which Al Jolson’s immigrant striver puts on the blackface mask to cast off his immigrant Jewish patrimony and remake himself as an all-American pop star.
Cyrus’s twerk act gives minstrelsy a postmodern careerist spin. Cyrus is annexing working-class black “ratchet” culture, the potent sexual symbolism of black female bodies, to the cause of her reinvention: her transformation from squeaky-clean Disney-pop poster girl to grown-up hipster-provocateur. (Want to wipe away the sickly-sweet scent of the Magic Kingdom? Go slumming in a black strip club.) Cyrus may indeed feel a cosmic connection to Lil’ Kim and the music of “the hood.” But the reason that these affinities are coming out now, at the VMAs and elsewhere, is because it’s good for business.
http://www.vulture.com/2013/08/jody-rosen-miley-cyrus-vmas-minstrel.html?mid=facebook_vulture
'ratchet culture' :
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ratchet
Ratchet: The Rap Insult That Became a Compliment
Last December, when Beyoncé posted a picture on Instagram wearing doorknocker earrings inscribed with the word ratchet, the Internet exploded with speculation: It would be the title of a new single; she and Lady Gaga were collaborating again; she was shaking up her image; it was the name of her next album. Fueling the fires were comments Azealia Banks made to MTV Brazil that she and Lady Gaga were working on a song called “Ratchet.” Because Lady Gaga had posted a picture with earrings similar to those in the Beyoncé photograph in September, it was thought that the two megastars, and perhaps Banks, too, could be working on a follow-up to their hit single “Telephone.” Eventually, Beyoncé’s representative told the Cut: “There is no confirmation on any song titles.”
*snip*
Ratchet can be traced back to the neighborhood of Cedar Grove in Shreveport, Louisiana. “You talk to working class black people [down there],” says Dr. Brittney Cooper, a co-founder of the Crunk Feminist Collective. “Ratchedness comes out of that. And some of that particularity gets lost when it travels.” The first appearance of ratchet in a published song was in 1999, when Anthony Mandigo released “Do the Ratchet” on his Ratchet Fight in the Ghetto album. “Mandigo introduced me to the word, He got it from his grandmother,” remembers Angela Nichols, who goes by Angie Locc and rapped on the track. In 2004, Earl Williams, a producer known as Phunk Dawg, recorded a new version of the song, featuring the better-known Lil Boosie (currently incarcerated), from Baton Rouge, as well as Mandigo and another Shreveport rapper named Untamed Mayne. This version, and the associated dance, caught on and Mandigo’s Lava House Records began making a name for itself.
In the liner notes of the CD, Phunk Dawg wrote a definition of ratchet: “n., pron., v, adv., 1. To be ghetto, real, gutter, nasty. 2. It’s whatever, bout it, etc.”
*snip*
That doesn’t mean all black women have reclaimed the term. “There’s an emotional violence and meanness attached to being ratchet, particularly pertaining to women of color,” says Michaela Angela Davis, an image activist and former fashion editor of Vibe. She sees the ratchet phenomenon as related to a larger problem of how black women are portrayed in media. “We’re only seen through this narrow sliver, and right now that sliver is Ratchet. We don’t get to be quirky and fun and live in Williamsburg. Wolves don’t fall in love with us.” Instead, Davis only sees groups of black women fighting on TV in shows like The Real Housewives of Atlanta, Basketball Wives, and Bad Girls Club. “The only interest that pop culture has in black women is this ratchet world.” Later this April, at a symposium at Georgia State University, Davis will launch a campaign called “Bury the Ratchet.” It will look to reduce the negative depictions of African-American women in media, and especially target their affects on bullying.
But there is more than the harsh side to ratchet, argues Dr. Cooper. While she recognizes that the expression, when used to describe a person, is often pejorative, she has also sees women embracing “ratchet … as an attempt to de-pathologize it” and to celebrate both its edginess and its roots in the southern working class.
*snip*
http://nymag.com/thecut/2013/04/ratchet-the-rap-insult-that-became-a-compliment.html
Last December, when Beyoncé posted a picture on Instagram wearing doorknocker earrings inscribed with the word ratchet, the Internet exploded with speculation: It would be the title of a new single; she and Lady Gaga were collaborating again; she was shaking up her image; it was the name of her next album. Fueling the fires were comments Azealia Banks made to MTV Brazil that she and Lady Gaga were working on a song called “Ratchet.” Because Lady Gaga had posted a picture with earrings similar to those in the Beyoncé photograph in September, it was thought that the two megastars, and perhaps Banks, too, could be working on a follow-up to their hit single “Telephone.” Eventually, Beyoncé’s representative told the Cut: “There is no confirmation on any song titles.”
*snip*
Ratchet can be traced back to the neighborhood of Cedar Grove in Shreveport, Louisiana. “You talk to working class black people [down there],” says Dr. Brittney Cooper, a co-founder of the Crunk Feminist Collective. “Ratchedness comes out of that. And some of that particularity gets lost when it travels.” The first appearance of ratchet in a published song was in 1999, when Anthony Mandigo released “Do the Ratchet” on his Ratchet Fight in the Ghetto album. “Mandigo introduced me to the word, He got it from his grandmother,” remembers Angela Nichols, who goes by Angie Locc and rapped on the track. In 2004, Earl Williams, a producer known as Phunk Dawg, recorded a new version of the song, featuring the better-known Lil Boosie (currently incarcerated), from Baton Rouge, as well as Mandigo and another Shreveport rapper named Untamed Mayne. This version, and the associated dance, caught on and Mandigo’s Lava House Records began making a name for itself.
In the liner notes of the CD, Phunk Dawg wrote a definition of ratchet: “n., pron., v, adv., 1. To be ghetto, real, gutter, nasty. 2. It’s whatever, bout it, etc.”
*snip*
That doesn’t mean all black women have reclaimed the term. “There’s an emotional violence and meanness attached to being ratchet, particularly pertaining to women of color,” says Michaela Angela Davis, an image activist and former fashion editor of Vibe. She sees the ratchet phenomenon as related to a larger problem of how black women are portrayed in media. “We’re only seen through this narrow sliver, and right now that sliver is Ratchet. We don’t get to be quirky and fun and live in Williamsburg. Wolves don’t fall in love with us.” Instead, Davis only sees groups of black women fighting on TV in shows like The Real Housewives of Atlanta, Basketball Wives, and Bad Girls Club. “The only interest that pop culture has in black women is this ratchet world.” Later this April, at a symposium at Georgia State University, Davis will launch a campaign called “Bury the Ratchet.” It will look to reduce the negative depictions of African-American women in media, and especially target their affects on bullying.
But there is more than the harsh side to ratchet, argues Dr. Cooper. While she recognizes that the expression, when used to describe a person, is often pejorative, she has also sees women embracing “ratchet … as an attempt to de-pathologize it” and to celebrate both its edginess and its roots in the southern working class.
*snip*
http://nymag.com/thecut/2013/04/ratchet-the-rap-insult-that-became-a-compliment.html
Posted without comment. Still thinking about this view.
14 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
I can't take on another discussion right now!
Either way, yes, you're getting old! 
I'm afraid if I start twerking I'll throw out my back or dislocate my hip. Uh, maybe I am getting a little old, or I'm a tad outta shape or both. 
I'll get right on it. 
