I’ve been reading Amiri Baraka’s Blues People, specifically “Swing—From Verb to Noun,” and I think a lot of what he was describing in jazz still applies to how Black music enters white America today, especially once money gets involved.

Baraka’s point is that Black music comes out of a specific way of living and seeing the world. White musicians could learn the sound without sharing the life that produced it. Once that happens, the white artist can become a kind of shell for that music, a familiar face that helps carry it into a market already built to understand him.

Condition becomes costume.

A lot of Black culture comes from adapting to circumstances that weren’t chosen. Poverty, segregation, incarceration. Black people experience those conditions and create culture inside of them.

Later somebody else can purchase that aesthetic.

You can put on the clothes, use the slang, copy the posture, rap about the lifestyle, and take it back off whenever you want. The cultural appearance gets separated from the experience that produced it.

From verb to noun.

I love the name of Baraka’s chapter.

The verb is the living thing. People doing something because it means something inside their actual lives.

Then American capital turns it into a noun. It gets named, packaged and sold as a genre.

Black experience produces slang, flow, cadence, fashion and sound. Then those things can be packaged so cleanly that somebody can buy the image without ever touching the life underneath it.

The Trojan horse.

This is what I keep thinking about with white UG rappers.

For a lot of America in the 1920s, their first idea of jazz came through white musicians influenced by
Black musicians instead of the Black founders. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band became the first jazz band to record, and Baraka points out that they were heard by much of America before the actual Black innovators.

That’s the Trojan horse role.

The Black culture inside. The white artist gives it a face America already knows how to understand.

The parasitic translation.

As swing moved further into American culture, white swing musicians got access to studio work and higher-paying opportunities while Black musicians were being excluded from those same opportunities.

The creature feasting on it thrives. The people who made it don’t.

Participation isn’t automatically exploitation.

I wanna make this clear because Baraka does too.

He says white participation in jazz wasn’t always just imitation. He gives Bix Beiderbecke credit as an actual innovator and talks about white musicians who genuinely entered the music and made something of their own through it.

The debt still exists.

Even when white musicians developed legitimate styles of their own, Baraka still says the debt to Black music and the culture it came from had to be understood.

You can participate. You can innovate. You can make great shit.

But the lineage doesn’t disappear just because the music wears a different face.

Would love to hear thoughts or criticisms.

Desire and contempt at the same time.

White ug rap fans often obsess over Black slang, Black male style, Black music, Black masculinity, the way rappers move and talk, and still are often casually anti-Black towards actual Black people. The culture is desired, but the people are disposable as fuck.

Consumption without obligation.

I find that white artists in this space can take the sound, clothes, slang, posture, criminal imagery, whatever, and then just leave when it stops being fun. The artists and their fans get the excitement of the culture without having to carry the social consequences attached to being Black.

Irony as permission.

The “I’m just joking” layer matters a lot. It gives people room to imitate racialized behavior, make weird jokes, perform caricatures of Black masculinity, then retreat into irony if anybody calls it out. Preventing any further discussion, or examination of their behavior. #NotThatDeepBro

The body fetish thing.

Lastly, UG spaces can get weirdly obsessed with Black male and female bodies and presence: skin, hair, grills, muscles, “aura,” whether someone looks dangerous, whether they look soft, whether they’re masculine or feminine enough. I fucking hate it.

Please post thoughts or criticisms below!