Reply #110: true dat [View All]

[alcibiades_mystery]

all you need to hear is an E True Hollywood story in which some cracker ass cracker says "it's the bomb" and you know that term's over with. Ever see a frat boy destroy the entire oeuvre of Parliament Funkadelic, simply by dancing to it? I have.

The author is clearly being absurd in his recommendations (i.e., white people should only listen to "white music"), primarily because neither music not people fit neatly into such categories. However, if the author is commenting on the commercialization of African American cultural forms, their capacity to be lifted from the cultural conditions in which they develop and in which they hold very specific social meanings, and transferred into a general form, in which their context and social meaning is lost, devalued, debased, then he is correct. Many (not all) white boys who pimp limp it up, talkin all hard and signifyin, are simply performing a minstrel show - temporary and unconnected to anything substantive in the black cultural forms out which the pimp limp and the value of signifyin emerged. Once these forms travel, they lose their value as both a defense mechanism and point of cultural production in African American communities. On the plus side, however, these forms can attack white privilege at its base: the performance of whiteness is shown to be just that, a performance. This doesn't get you out of the problem of white dominance (which, yes, of course, continues to exert its full and terrible force), but it chips away at the foundation of the problem. So, upside and downside to the white boy shuffle, sho nuf.