HUM 223: 'music ... the new cotton'?

Two themes we will be studying in Humanities 223 (ethnic music) are expropriation and commodification of ethnic art forms. Want to know what they can feel like? Read Edmund W. Lewis' editorial column on Spike Lee's Hurricane Katrina documentatary in Louisiana Weekly, an African American newspaper in New Orleans. Lewis isn't complaining about Lee's movie, he's complaining about the way black music is exploited for the tourist dollar. Here's what he says about it:

New Orleans is still a town where the ruling minority gets wealthy off the genius, creativity and labor of people of color while treating tourists of color who come here for events like the Bayou Classic and Essence Music Festival like animals. It's a city whose world-famous hospitality and warmth are seldom extended to the black masses who barely make it in the best of times.

This is a city where it is crystal clear, as some revolutionary poets and others have suggested, that music is the new cotton. While there's an abundance of talent and creativity among the city's musicians of color, most of the money generated by the music goes directly into the pockets of those who own the majority of the city's record labels, music stores, nightclubs and tourist venues. Some of the best talent African America has produced has been reduced by bigotry to sharecroppers by opportunitists.

Music is the new cotton? The reference, of course, is to black slaves picking cotton for the white masters who exploited them.

How true is it? We'll be studying that in HUM 223.

For the record, Lewis liked Spike Lee's "When The Levees Broke" ... as far as it went. Lewis says:

The beauty and resilience of New Orleans shine through the documentary despite the ugly circumstances under which the documentary took place.

There is lots to laugh and cry about in the documentary, as well as ample opportunities for anger.

Watching Condoleeza Rice shop for shoes during this national disaster will certainly do nothing to endear her to people of color or increase her chances of becoming the first female or black president. And President Bush's legacy will always be tainted by his piss-poor response to Hurricane Katrina.

One of the more surprising aspects of the film was the outspokenness of some of the more successful people of color who appeared in the documentary. In New Orleans there is a long, sordid history of privileged people of color doing and saying as little as possible about racial inequity and injustice. Katrina obviously changed that as the haves and have-nothings suffered alongside one another.

Spike Lee did the best he could do. But those who know the history and reality of living in this city know that he didn't bring it the way he could have. It is impossible to understand what happened last August without fully grasping the history of New Orleans.

Then again, the brother only had four hours.

From all the reviews of the movie, including Lewis' in Lousiana Weekly, it's as powerful as "Do the Right Thing" (1989).