In my last semester of doctoral coursework at NYU, I took a class called Research On Urban And Minority Education, taught by Alex Freidus. For my final paper, I wrote about the racial politics of music education. I had written versions of this paper for other courses, but Alex supplied some key concepts and vocabulary I had been missing, and I felt like this was the first time I had really been able to get my arms around my core idea: that school music is a site where white privilege is reproduced. On May 8, I posted the paper on this blog, as I have with all of my grad school writing assignments. I got some gratifying rah-rah responses from other progressive music educators, with more Facebook and Twitter shares than usual, and that felt good.
I also got one strange comment:
The most interesting thing about this article is that it requires the reader to be familiar (and in agreement) with a very specific ideology (postmodernist relativism) in order to be understood according to the author’s intentions. To a normal educated person, the content of this article reads as shockingly racist, and deeply morally confused. In order for it to sound somewhat palatable, and not like the incredibly racist screed that it is, the author has had to torturously render the entire thing using a strict postmodernist vocabulary.
I’m used to cultural conservatives calling me racist for talking about racism. But I wasn’t sure why this guy was harping on the word “postmodernist.” It’s an accurate description of my scholarly approach, but it also describes every other mainstream academic in the world. It would be like disparaging me by calling me an American. This is before I found out that “postmodernism” is a Jordan Peterson buzzword.
Then, a couple of weeks later, the real excitement began.
The first conservative outlet to pick up my post was The College Fix on May 22. The site’s tag line: “Original. Student Reported. Your Daily Dose of RIGHT-Minded News and Commentary from Across the Nation” (emphasis in original.) It was founded by National Review contributor John J Miller and is run by something called the Student Free Press Association, which seems to serve no function except to collect donations, and whose board of directors includes Betsy DeVos’ son. I assume I came to The College Fix’s attention because they have a Google alert set to the phrase “white supremacy” plus “education.” Their post summarizes my argument, quotes Wynton Marsalis’ recent attack on rap, and accuses me of “whitesplaining.”
The post itself is not interesting, but the comments below it are. The first few address the idea that rap isn’t music, or that it isn’t good music.
[Rap and hip-hop] certainly aren’t music. Where is the pitch and tone? Where are the melody and harmony? Rap is just verse spoken above a beat. A beat on its own is not music, as it has no real pitch.
Duke Ellington. Miles Davis. Charles Mingus. Herbie Hancock. Like classical musicians, these guys were composers. Kendrick Lamar isn’t worthy to pick the lint out of their belly buttons. Hein is virtue signaling his sorry ass off in order to be “down with the cause” and “woke”. Pathetic, but not surprising.
Kendrick Lamar is not a musician. The difference between a musician and a nonmusician is that a musician plays a musical instrument.
These posts were followed by a comment full of overtly racist invective directed at me. I complained about it, and the site administrators quickly deleted it. Before they did, however, this person responded to my takedown request.
What a fukkking crybaby.You come up with the most nonsensically “correct” shite and then whine and prove you`re spineless.Did you honestly expect to not take the occasional inappropriate hit after writing the manure contained in your article?
This is a lot of emotion for a discussion of the seemingly marginal field of music education. When I first started thinking about the racial politics of music ed, I sometimes felt like I was being overly paranoid, seeing bias where it maybe didn’t exist. But by getting so angry at my essay, the College Fix commenters helped to validated my project. Many of them condemn rap using racist language that I thought had vanished decades ago.
There are a lot of things in which white culture is superior, and music is one of them.
Rap is a classic example of how blacks handle everything; it’s (real music) hard to do and you have to, you know, study and stuff. So they take it to it’s most basic level…..all the sound is the same, lyrics are the same as the everyday filth they use and ANYBODY can do it. They did the same with “equal education “…..they were incapable of rising up to the level of the then existing white schools, so the answer (encouraged and supported by teachers union) was to lower it down to their moronic level. Of course, they still can’t measure up. As a race, they have not added one positive thing to humanity.
Someone even managed to work in how upset he is that it’s no longer acceptable to use the word “niggardly.” This is a remarkable word to feel passionate about using.
Several College Fix commenters reacted emotionally to ideas that don’t appear in the actual paper. I argue that music teachers should get exposure to more culturally relevant styles and practices, especially hip-hop. Some commenters read this and took it to mean that we should stop teaching white music entirely, and that I therefore am secretly working toward white genocide. Robin DiAngelo coined a useful term for this kind of hysterical overreaction: white fragility. This comment is a perfect example of white fragility in action:
Seeing that white supremecy consists of anything that involves white people, at any time in history, I find myself not particularly concerned with accusations that this or that thing is white supremecy.
Imagine being so defensive that hearing any criticism of racism generalizes out to hearing a blanket condemnation of all white people throughout history. I can only assume there’s some projection going on here.
The next right-wing site to pick up my post was KotakuInAction, the Reddit forum that gave birth to Gamergate. I can see why an education blog would want to write about what they see as leftism run amok in education. I didn’t understand what the racial politics of music education have to do with ethics in gaming journalism, though. The forum description says:
KotakuInAction is a platform for open discussion of the issues where gaming, nerd culture, the Internet, and media collide.
We believe that the current standards of ethics in the media have alienated the artists, developers, and creators who perpetuate the things we love, enjoy, and enthusiastically build communities around. We have observed numerous incidents involving conflicts of interest and agenda-pushing within media which we feel are damaging to the credibility of the medium and harm the community at large. We believe much of the current media is complicit in the proliferation of an ideology that squashes individuality, divides along political lines, and is stifling to the freedom of creativity that is the foundation of human expression.
Apparently the connection between Gamergate and my paper is that I’m an example of leftist scholarship stifling free speech. The Reddit commenters address the same themes as the College Fix commenters, but with a bigger vocabulary and better spelling.
I love the sheer gall of the suggestion that modern hip hop, from any artist, is equal to some of the greatest symphonies in cultural memory, ones that survived ages in the memetic battleground of culture, without the safety net of the internet and cheap digital storage.
As with the College Fix people, many of the Gamergaters didn’t read the paper.
He wants classical Euro-centric music REMOVED from the curriculum. He wants it gone. He doesn’t want it to exist, he doesn’t want it taught. He wants a key part of western civilization erased from the cultural memory.
One clever person thought he could gotcha me with the Frankfurt School.
You would think a lefty in music has read Adorno and Horkheimer regarding the culture industry. After all, Adorno was a pianist himself who was worried about the commoditization of music and its effect on European high art. And this was one of the principal intellectuals who set up critical theory
This person might be surprised to learn that not all leftists admire Adorno. I don’t, mostly because of his backwards ideas about jazz, but also because he placed too much faith in the liberatory power of atonal composition.
As for this comment, guilty as charged:
As per usual, the progressive activist wants a subject, in this case music education, to stop being about the subject and instead be about progressive activism.
Remember, kids, talking about racism is the real racism:
I guess everything must be divided by race, teachers, authors, science. Stormfront must be jealous their race purity ideology isn’t this extreme.
This one is interesting for appropriating the term “whitefella,” which is Australian aboriginal slang.
Good thing this whitefella is here to help the poor downtrodden darkies up out of ther ignorance and shame with their hippin and hoppin and boppin music. He’s just here to do for them what they can’t do for themselves, the poor things.
The most thoughtful of the Gamergaters is this Jordan Peterson fan. He and I ended up having a constructive back-and-forth.
This may be a slight tangent, but this strikes me as very similar to what Jordan Peterson has been saying about a ‘War against Competence as a basis of Hierarchy’. That is, the idea that there is a genuine difference in quality between (say) Beethoven, Bach and Mozart on one hand and Kendrick Lamar on the other is now anathema to many people.
This segment of the populace, this intellectual movement against hierarchy, has to account for why some things are popular and enduring and other things are less so. Well, if you eliminate competence as an explanation, you’re kinda only left with power politics and prejudice. You’re left with ‘Mozart is only good because we claim it is good’. If that’s the case… then all you need to do to make one artist better than another is claim that they are.
This guy is not wrong in his summary of my argument. I’m trying to undermine “objective” notions of artistic quality because they’re motivated by pernicious ideology. Peterson followers think that doing so will lead to the collapse of civilization, whereas I think that doing so will improve civilization. But I can understand their anxiety.
Lower down the thread, we get to the trolling that Reddit is famous for.
But many people believe that Beethoven secretly wuz kangz, too. So it’s okay!
“Kangz” is fake black slang for “kings.” The commenter’s idea here is that black people believe that Beethoven was black. Similarly:
Is it ok to teach Mozart because Mozart wuz Black?
I don’t know what to make of this idea. I’ve never heard a black person advance it; I’ve only ever heard it attributed to them by white racists.
Further down the thread, we encounter the inevitable anti-Semites.
plz make the pattern matching stop. PLEASE. I. BEG. OF. YOU.
The comment above links to an archive of an old blog post of mine talking about my Jewish heritage. I suppose it points to the archived version in case I become ashamed of being Jewish on the internet and decide to delete the post. The idea here is that my fellow Jews and I have a secret agenda to commit white genocide.
WHY. IS. IT. SO. COMMON.
I’m not even white, I’m supposed to not care, why can’t I turn off the pattern recognition?
One of the Gamergaters people came over to my blog to attack me, courageously using an anonymous email from Getnada.
I don’t say this very often… but I’d take literal white nationalists if they’d purge people like you from any sort of platform where you, not just have a voice, but get to “educate” anyone. You’re anti-white, racist, piece of crap scumbag, and I can’t wait until idiocy from the likes of you and others results in backlash… [Lots more ad hominem attacks with shaky grammar and spelling]… As a white person to another, and I’m not sure if you hear this often or not, you’re a disgrace to white race. You’re what’s wrong with it. We must do better. Meanwhile, feel free to do a Rachel Dolezal.
Over the next few days, my paper worked its way through the bowels of the right-wing blogosphere, appearing on The Patriot Post on May 23, Accuracy in Academia on May 24, and The Global Dispatch on May 29.
Then, on June 4, independently of everyone else, Slipped Disc wrote a post denouncing my paper. Slipped Disc is a site that a friend of mine once described as “the Breitbart News of classical music.” I first came to their attention last year when I wrote an emotional Twitter thread that expressed the same ideas as the ones in my whiteness paper, but in a more stream-of-consciousness way. At the time, I was feeling some strong emotions about Trump, and connecting them to frustrations I was having with the music academy. In the ensuing Twitter conversation, I took some pushback from other music academics, which I deserved, and it led to a mutually respectful and productive debate. The Twitter thread also attracted some nasty alt-right people, but on the whole, it was a positive experience, and I ended up staying friendly with most of the people who I debated.
This constructive tone is not the one that Slipped Disc and its commenters took. The most prominent voice among them is the composer and critic John Borstlap:
To which civilization do we want to belong? The exclusion of many African-Americas has resulted into a subculture which offers an alternative to cultural symbols which are perceived as signifying white oppressors. When the white youth embraces this subculture and prefers it to classical music, it is simply mob influence and taking the easy route. Elevating the subculture to educational levels is an entirely political gesture and has nothing to do with music whatsoever…… it is legitimizing primitivism, and a gesture of identification with the right of not belonging to the West and its history, with the ‘liberation’ from the incentive to know about things that are better, to grow up to become a mature adult. There is an expression in such phenomenae of being tired of the notion of ‘civilization’, of controlling primitive instincts, and a deep longing for the primitive jungle of unthinking and unfeeling, as can also be noticed in the spreading fashion of setting tattoos, wearing piercings (sometimes through lips, noses and eye brows, and unprintable places): a longing for the animalistic existence without burdens, while in the same time pampered by the conveniences of modernity.
To talk about these utterly disgusting products as a serious art form, i.e. a form of expression which has something of artistic / aesthetic qualities, only reveals a complete lack of understanding what art is. There are two meanings of the term ‘culture’: 1) the artistic products of a civilization, representing the best this civilization is capable of; 2) the way people live, so: culture in a much wider sense. Only in this 2nd sense are these examples items of culture and what kind of culture? It is aggressive, nihilistic, celebrating the worst of what the human being is capable of: the underworld of subhuman life. And that the musicians make use of musical tropes, albeit of the most primitive kind, does not make it better.
I have been accused in the past of arguing against straw men. I want to thank Borstlap for going on a public forum and explaining that rap is “primitive” and “subhuman,” thus blatantly voicing racist attitudes that normally I have to uncover through careful interpretation.
Most of the commenters on Slipped Disc and forums like it are careful to show they aren’t racist by voicing admiration for jazz, because its musical sophistication makes it an art music, not like all the garbage on the radio. Borstlap agrees that jazz is worth studying, even if rap isn’t. But then he explains jazz using language that’s more typical of 1918 than 2018:
But in comparison to the best of the classical repertoire, jazz IS mindless instinct. That is the best quality it has, if it has any quality at all. Jazz is the instinctively feeling around a restricted basis of simple structures to improvise upon and it is in these improvisatory forms in which it is the player, not the music, which is the most important thing – not a work written down but the instinct of a musical performer creating on the spot. The best performers achieve the most beautiful musical moments…. please let it be mindless instinct. There is also ordering and complexity in instinct.
Ridiculous to compare it with art music.
I’m not reproducing all the personal attacks directed at me on the various threads, because who cares. My friends responded to the attacks with an outpouring of support and concern. Some even waded into the comment threads on my behalf. I appreciated the intent, but it wasn’t necessary. I’m a very privileged person, and I have nothing to fear from internet trolls. Last year, it was upsetting when the Nazis started showing up in my Twitter replies, but now that I’m working on a dissertation, I’ve been treating these kinds of interactions as valuable ethnographic research opportunities. So now I can engage from a detached, anthropological mindset.
I admit to having some sympathy for the Gamergaters. If Reddit had existed when I was an angry and isolated young white guy, I would have been at risk for being sucked in by it. I know how wounded these guys are, and how eager they are to be seen and validated, even if they don’t express their needs well. A little compassion for them goes a long way. I’m also trying to be conscious of the fact that for every active participant in an online forum, there are many more passive onlookers who are less doctrinaire and more open to having their minds changed. So when I write responses, I’m writing for the passive readers, not the angry commenters. We’ll see whether it works.
The problem is that you can’t make room for rap without taking room away from something else – there are only so many hours in a school day.
Kids will get rap in their friends’ cars, on the radio, at parties, etc…
They don’t need more rap exposure in school, but they would benefit from being exposed to the traditional art music of our culture, so that they can understand our cultural history.
If you read the essay, you will see that the choice in most schools isn’t between classical music and some other music, it’s between classical music and nothing. The substantial majority of kids choose nothing. I would prefer to expand the music offerings to include more things that the kids will want to participate in, but if we have to divert resources away from classical in order to do so, that’s a tradeoff I’m willing to make. All the kids listen to rap, but few of them have the opportunity to create it, and that’s the key difference. I believe that the job of music education is to turn young people from consumers into producers, and that mission will only succeed if the kids can produce the music that’s meaningful to them.
Thanks Ethan, you are correct, I should not be so utterly dismissive of hip-hop. Here’s one I have listened to a few times and find musically interesting.
2Pac – Thug Life – Str8 Ballin (10)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2_59XpOU7M
The drums are a loop I guess, the syncopation is stimulating though. There is so much groove.
I have no connection whatever with the lyrics, I can’t really make out what is being said, nor can I find any impetus within myself to decipher what it is about. Presumably there is meaning in it for the writer and for the primary audience. I don’t know how I would get there. My life is not a particularly easy one, but it is difficult in ways that do not seem to find any resonance in 2Pac’s world.
But since there is meaning for those who do live this lifestyle, such lyrics certainly don’t lose out when compared to the old style “moon June croon” type of lyric-writing. I was angry and floundering when I made overly contemptuous comments about hip-hop.
This busy dangerous world seems to become more so, and this year particularly
has revealed that the “powers that be” are mostly making a mess of things. Who
can turn down the heat on this frying-pan Earth?
Reading those quotes you pulled was actually pretty entertaining in a darkly humorous kind of way. I liked the original article, but I’m not sure I agree that the exclusion of non-Western musics in music education is mainly due to implicit racism. I can see the connections you brought up and find them very interesting, but I think the biggest factor is that higher academia in general scoffs at people who are good at real-world applications but bad at more theoretical things. People in most universities have a comparatively hard time using work experience to opt-out of certain introductory classes compared to people with the right degree/course taken prior.
How is African-American music “non-Western”? It literally comes from America.
My experience in academia has been that they have been perfectly willing to take my real-world experience and let me skip intro courses, as long as that experience aligns with the content (factual and ideological) of the intro courses.
I sampled a lot of hip-hop lyrics in my latest foray into the morass of commercialised pap-music, couldn’t find very much of value amongst the tons of dross.
Back when it was still called rap music, Grandmaster Flash came out with a poignant and prescient Message
… Admiring the thugs and pimps driving big cars, spending lots of money money
And you’ll wanna grow up to be just like them, huh…
And thats unfortunately the bullying ego-trip that today’s hip-hop heroes exalt
What a shame that Grandmaster Flash was so correct, but nothing it seems could prevent the pollution of our musical culture by money-seeking egotists like Fiddy Cent et al.
The Message
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five
Hip-hop is the ally of racism and egotism, not at all its enemy, and racism must be destroyed, however long that may take.
The lyrics in the chart-topping hits are mostly dumb and venal, but this has been the case in every style of music for literally ever. If you want intellectual stimulation and emotional uplift among currently popular artists, I suggest Chance the Rapper and Kendrick Lamar.
What a strange world we live in, and it is just so typical that in these matters that the music educator has the best understanding of racism, and rightly condemns it, whilst the racist has the better understanding of hip-hop and rightly condemns it.
Hip-hop is the cash-cow of the music industry, and an enemy of music. But music will survive against the attack of the big-money brigade.
The music industry needs music, however marginally, but music can thrive without paying protection money to the music industry. Racism needs the concept of race, and if/when that flawed concept can be discarded, racism will be eliminated.
Subvert the dominant paradigm, thats a great motto, and requires ALL aspects of power and status to be opposed.
Hip-hop is the tool of the money-crew and exalts the values of power, bullying, and hegemony.
What some people refer to as “confidence” is in actuality a cowardly capitulation to rampant consumerism, the hegemony of designer-label bling, status-seeking and ego-boosting selfishness. There is musical value in hip-hop, if the cod-clever lyrics and the mind-destroying drum loops could be erased from the tapes, what is left would be a palette of inspiring ambient sound effects for some sort of relaxation music.
Without thus erasing the dumb self-centred vocals and mindless repetitive drum-loops, hip-hop is without redeeming features whatsoever.
Racism is without redeeming features at all. Misguided attacks on racism will not weaken it.
Congratulations Ethan on surviving your exposure to the alt-right hordes, and most definitely holding your own against the worst of them.
I do not agree that “the racist has the better understanding of hip-hop” – criticisms of the music tend not to be well-informed. It’s true that rap is a cornerstone of the commercial music industry, but it’s also a grassroots folk form in every city in the world. Sometimes the commercial hits inspire underground and amateur participation, and sometimes the amateur underground crosses over into the commercial mainstream. Maybe it made sense to cleanly divide commercial hits from “authentic” music in the rock era, but rap (and dance music) have a more complex relationship to money.
I’ve seen it argued that race is a concept that grew out of racism, not the other way around. I believe this to be true. Colorblindness perpetuates white privilege. We can’t just stop talking about race and hope for the best; we need to attack racism directly.
Hip-hop sometimes exalts the values of power, bullying, and hegemony. Sometimes it exalts black empowerment, and gives a voice to marginalized people. Sometimes it does all of those things at once. It’s too simplistic to say that the swagger of rap is coextensive with consumerism. It makes sense for Americans to express swagger in materialistic terms because we’re a materialistic society. If rappers want to speak in widely understood language, they have to speak in the language of consumerism. But there’s as much subversion of consumerism in rap as there is glorification of it. Rap is saturated with dark comedy and many lyrics are ironic.
The drum loops aren’t “mind-destroying”, they have musical qualities of their own that in some ways represent a significant aesthetic advance over humans playing instruments. There’s a kind of meditative focus you get from electronic production that you can’t attain in any other way. You can shape the timbre and space of a drum loop much more finely than you can with a part played on a kit. Rap producers spend incredible amounts of time EQing and mixing individual drum sounds, the logic being that the exact right hi-hat repeated for three minutes will be more impactful than a variety of just okay-sounding hi-hats. Listen more closely.
The vocals are similarly a lot more substantive than you seem to think. The semantic content of the lyrics is less important than their sound. This was true of rock, jazz, blues, soul, and most other popular music too; most lyrics in those genres are vacuous and dumb on the page, but they come to life from the sound of the performer, their emotion, the way the vocal timbres are shaped by recording technologies, the way those timbres interact with the instruments. Rap is the most creative vocal music in the world right now.
Yes Ethan, thank you, as so much of what you are saying here is as perceptive, informative and convincing as you are always capable of. You knock much of my arguments through the floor, and I need to put a lot of thought into why my visceral reaction to hip-hop is so negative. If you don’t mind I will simply for now unreservedly grant your arguments as obviously superior to mine, and if I may, I shall reply if I can muster further worthwhile contribution. That is always my aim, to participate productively, and I apologise if my words come over as combative or otherwise unhelpful. Thank you.
Along with many other music fans, I put much of the blame on Phil Collins for turning 80’s drumming into an over-compressed and over-quantified dreary sameness; that is still how I hear hip-hop drumming, and death-metal for that matter.
So my ears are still stuck in the past I guess. It’s a matter of taste, or perhaps just habit that causes one to like or not like cetain pieces of music.
Here’s some grassroots music from my country. This is Home Sweet Home by Australian group Fitzroy Xpress, and the drummer does fills occasionally.
The variation of timing and dynamics in his snare-work is not detrimental to my hearing, it is refreshing.
I much prefer his live drumming to the endlessly repeating drum-loops that spell hip-hop.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhVGOkpCYUg
Inherent racism spawned the concept of race; paradoxical as that might sound, I do agree with you and that indeed is a valuable insight. Thank you.