Skip a Beat: Rewriting the Story of Popular Music
Pop Music Studies Conference 2003, April 10-13, EMP
The strange intersection where what started as black culture spills over into white America has produced some of the most creative books by critics and humorists. For example, Greg Tate's new anthology, Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture, collects essays, poems, and scenes that investigate this very intersection with complete seriousness and success.
Tate's own contribution, "Nigs R Us, or How Blackfolk Became Fetish Objects," which introduces and sets the tone of the collection, is a no-holds-barred exploration of the differences within the black community regarding controversial pop-culture icons, such as Eminem. While astutely observing that as many blacks seem to embrace Eminem as reject him, Tate quotes retired basketball star Charles Barkley, who "finds great... irony [in] living in a time when the best rapper... is White and the best golfer is Black." The introduction is vintage Tate, whose criticisms over the past 20 or so years have consistently offered sharp and imaginative interpretations of black music and its complex place in our society. (Indeed, one piece, a conversation between Greg Tate and Vernon Reid, is titled "Steely Dan: Understood as the Redemption of the White Negro.")
On the more comic side of this kind of inquiry into the modern and messy racial consciousness of popular America lies Ego Trip, a small, multiethnic troupe of irreverent, effortlessly clever writers from all over the country. Over the past four years, they have labored long and hard to produce the masterpieces Ego Trip's Book of Rap Lists (1999) and Ego Trip's Big Book of Racism! (2002)--each containing more facts, sarcasm, and humor than you could ever soak up in a black or white lifetime.
During this year's pop music conference, one will be able to see the serious and the comic, the intellectual and the witty, in total action. On Friday, April 11, Greg Tate is to offer the serious in his lecture "Matrilineal Rule and Black Pop Theory: The Dominance of Black Women Artists in Contemporary African American Music"; the following day, the Ego Trip crew is to offer the comic with "Women in Hip Hop: Who Cares?" The Trip's seminar will also ask: "Will the Real 'New Tupac' Please Stand Up?" and "Which White Music Critic Thinks He Knows More About Rap Than Us? (Answer: All of You.)" Both approaches will be productive.
