On Ownership and Value: Response

Ronald Radano has written an elegant and intellectually ambitious meditation on racial authenticity and the history of black music. As always, his erudite prose frames a classic theme in the study of African-American music in an arresting manner that forces us to think deeply about the question. In this brief response, I would like to present the most intriguing aspects of Radano's argument as well as offer a critique that suggests another avenue for thinking through the same issue. I have known the author for many years now and am pleased that he asked me to write this response, especially since he knows that my way of looking at things is quite different.

I am intrigued by the way that Radano frames the problem of authenticity and black music by suggesting that it is an outcome of a paradoxical relationship between sound and property in the history of African-American music. He points out that although the musical talents of the enslaved were among the things that the slavemaster owned and could earn money with, the power of black music was such that it could not be contained by the property system, and indeed exposed the limits of white supremacy, by "giving material form to what lay beyond their grasp" (that is white people's grasp). Central to Radano's argument is a critique of African-American musical and moral authenticity in defining what is such a huge part of the "sound of the nation." This sense of cultural pride, forged in response to the structural conditions of slavery and later a racially hierarchic musical marketplace, as he also points out, has paradoxically become a point of conflicted unity and deep desire in American society.

If, as Radano has argued, the power of black music has always exceeded the containment of the property system, it is also true that African-American artists have never been paid in proportion to their influence on American popular music. This is due in part to the racially hierarchic nature of the music industry that throughout the twentieth century seemed to require well-positioned and often well-intentioned non-African Americans to advocate for African-American artists (all the while taking their cuts), and in part the condition of being a minority. I often point out to my students that although the percentage of African Americans in the U.S. population has ranged between 10 and 13 percent, their contribution to mainstream popular musical aesthetics has been substantially greater, one could argue in the range of 60 to 75 percent. If the economic system were fair, in other words, African-American musicians should have been paid in proportion to their aesthetic contribution. In the legendarily exploitive economic contexts of the early and mid-twentieth centuries, this was never true.

I am not as troubled as Radano by the discourse of racial authenticity which frequently emerges in our debates over the sound of the nation, because (as I have argued more fully in Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call Out to Jazz and Africa) it historically has been one of the few discursive weapons available to African Americans to protest the inequalities of the economic outcome, as well as to advocate for self-determination. Moreover, the invocation of racial authenticity—at least in the history of jazz—has most typically occurred in response to either unreflective white liberal behavior or overtly racist behavior. It has been situational, in other words: sometimes the ethnic walls are up and sometimes they are not. That discussions about this complicated history should often evoke ambivalent responses is hardly surprising. What seems most of interest is what circumstances make the walls go up and down.

Historically among the biggest triggers for the raising of racial walls has been white insistence that the music be viewed as colorblind, despite the fact that African Americans have played such a prominent role in musical development. However well-intentioned the idea that music ideally should be universal, in practice this claim was often used to censor African-American claims that they have a special relationship to the music by virtue of having [End...