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

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

minstrelsy sat within UK popular culture as a marker of american entertainment (of the days of yore), and as such had been succeeded -- in uk taste waves -- by several pre-rock shifts as well: after all, the first popular wave of global touring minstrelsy predates the jazz age (the jubilee singers were i think a hit in the uk in the 1870s); and jolsonism (which i'm gnna call the second wave) predates teadance jazz and croon and swing, and trad (which slightly counter-intuitively only hit big in the uk AFTER swing, as a retro return to the good old days): post-war there was also the fads for big broadway musicals (my dad and his dad loved oklahoma!) (absoltely anything that becomes a marker for gay taste my dad loves) (hmmmm) and -- to a lesser extent in terms of impact on light entertainment, but not utterly absent, cool and modern jazz

ALL of these are pop spasms that predate rock'n'roll: most of them would have fashioned a taste community who found minstrelsy at best bizarre and dated, and -- often -- to be disdained and disapproved, for a bunch of reasons, some at least relating to basic racial decency

(the first race riots taken as significant in the uk were in notting hill, london, in 1958: mum wd have been 23, dad 28 -- years later i remember the riots being part of a TV drama series and mum and dad talking very earnestly about how they'd felt about them abt the time, though they lived far far away in the country, nowhere near the violence)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

But in the clips above those pop spasms - broadway musical numbers and trad jazz - are exactly what the B&WMS is offering. I think the specificity of previous spasms had got a bit compressed by the most recent biggest one.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

youtube causes my computer to freeze so i couldn't watch it

but yes, i think by the late 70s this is exactly what was happening, you were getting a kind of one-stop shop for pop fads before c.1940 say (musicals have a bit of a long tailer tail) and within that, a complex -- and contradictory -- setting aside of ways in which this terrain had earlier been a kind of salad of all the ethical battles, when all concerned were a lot younger

of course this is the same as troll-you-come-to-love dynamic, isn't it? modern vs trad jazz being a battle so whiskered by then that really the combatants HAD long ago Got a Room, and that room turned out to be the BaWMS ---:o

so yes: there was also -- maybe -- in the fandom for this type of show a tolerance (by trad fans, say) of minstrelsy, despite its still seeming stupid and dated, bcz where else could they enjoy trad on telly? and the degree to which trad fandom had once (long ago) also functioned as a kind of symbolic anti-racism for a particular half-generation, was somehow dovetailed into this love-to-hate odd-couple deal?

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

was there a (very late) period where the show remained exactly the same but with no blackface, or am i imagining it? i guess it kind of segues into summertime special in my head at this point...

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Yes I half remember that too!