Two Excerpts from 1978 Black And White Minsterel Show and some questions

[anthonyeaston.livejournal.com]

some questions for the britshes:

1) is this really what punk was working against? because if this went out to 18m homes, and sold number ones, that is the story of punk defeating traditional middle class culture? i dont have my reynolds with me, but i do not remember he mentioning this?
2) why are the men blacked up and not the women?
3) Why was this so popular, between the stage shows, the traveling revue, the tv show, the singles, the albums, the charting--this was a massive success.
4) How do critics of pop integrate this kind of material into the narrative of the UK? If we are poptimists, is there a way of redeeming this? I mean Where Dead Voices Gather by Tosches has a connoisseur's taste, a crate digger's sense of history, and founding mythology to rest his rennovation of Emmet Miller on, if one was going to write about this, what lens would you use?

I am mostly thinking of Tom's upcoming entries on early 70s pop on poptimist, an the comments about the history of UK no. 1s, but anyone can pop in.

Comments

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

There was a discussion of the Minstrels in a recent Popular thread (the one on Typically Tropical would be the logical place but Popular is rarely logical).

To answer the questions:

1. Lockedintheatti is right I think - they're a 60s phenomenon which lingered into the 70s rather than something which was in full cry when punk started. I don't doubt that several of the people who hated swearing on the telly were also Minstrels watchers. The second clip above is actually from the last ever programme!

2. I suspect the answer is that the women are generally in skimpy outfits and you'd need full-body make-up to do it.

3. There was a big audience for old-timey music - musical numbers, song-and-dance, music hall, trad jazz - and this was the only real vehicle for it. So it's more a by-product of the PREVIOUS rock revolutions (56 amd 63/4) which marginalised the music on it. I think, bizarre as it may seem, for the first decade or so of the show's life the people behind it simply didn't realise it was racist! And obviously the show's core audience either didn't realise or didn't care.

4. I think you'd use the lens of "what happens to pop audiences as they age?" - the Minstrels were definitely a show your grandma watched. You could also put them into the narrative of changing race relations in the UK of course! (Something that always annoyed me a bit on ILX (and does when it happens on Popular) is American posters treating UK attitudes to race as equivalent to American ones: the causes and manifestations of racism in a society where a large black population has been there for 300 years but enslaved or legally oppressed for the majority of that time are going to be very different from those in a society where a smaller black population arrived rapidly over a 10-20 year period as full citizens.) You could take a variety of political lines on the Minstrels - they were an expression of fear about black immigration; they were a manifestation of Imperial nostalgia; they were a way for older people to cope with immigration; and so on. None of them quite ring true though - I think the old-timeyness of the Minstrels is the key to why their presentation in blackface was so enduring.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Something that always annoyed me a bit on ILX (and does when it happens on Popular) is American posters treating UK attitudes to race as equivalent to American ones

It was always the other way round for me! I always got so infuriated with the UK posters just seeming...disingenuous and blinkered and ignorant when it came to matters of race, eg on that fucking Ronaldinho thread or whatever it was.

In many ways it's a huge shame that the UK has never had to question itself in ways that other countries, with huge and obvious sources of 'national shame' (slavery, Nazism, whatever), have had to do; because sweeping bad shit under the carpet, or just not even realising it's there, is really endemic to British culture.

As for minstrelsy I didn't even realise it was all that popular in the UK. My parents seem to take it for granted that minstrelsy = racist (and they're pretty conservative themselves). I don't think my grandmother would have watched it, though less for enlightened reasons than pure snobbery.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Oh the other way around annoys me too! The specific example I was thinking of was the ideas of "home" in 70s US and UK race relations. In the US with the huge success of Roots there was an idea of Africa as a homeland in the sense of a birthplace of culture, a strong ground for an individual identity. In the UK "home" had a very different meaning because the black community had so recently arrived - it was a place they were constantly told by whites to go back to. (Of course these meanings weren't exclusive within or to each culture). So (for instance) a song by white guys about a Brixton bus driver's yearning to go home has the potential to be coded VERY differently in Britain than in America.

The story of the Minstrels is the story of *everyone* collectively realising that minstrelsy=racist!

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

there's an interesting story, i think in will freidwald's book on jazz singers, where someone (possibly freidwald himself) is nervously broaching to the jazz figure they're interviewing the idea that eddie cantor, a singer who blacked up a la jolson, was nevertheless an awesomely talented popular performer, and the (black) jazzman in question somewhat testily agrees, saying "yes, you know, black folks aren't idiots, we ARE able to spot talent beneath silly greasepaint ..."

bcz blacking up was so widespread in a particular era -- including a handful of black performers who felt they had no option but to black up -- it became the repository for a wide range of elements of pop culture, good AND bad, and there's a bit of a pushback argument that its banishment has meant that some of these good elements were lost with the bad

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

In many ways it's a huge shame that the UK has never had to question itself in ways that other countries, with huge and obvious sources of 'national shame' (slavery, Nazism, whatever), have had to do; because sweeping bad shit under the carpet, or just not even realising it's there, is really endemic to British culture.

Yes! There's the weird self-congratulatory thing about Britain being 'tolerant' that is wheeled out all the ruddy time, often in support of doing something *intolerant*.