Last Friday, Professor Ron Radano, an ethnomusicologist, gave a paper entitled “Global Black Sound-Objects: Collection, Reclamation, and the Racial Politics of Ownership” as a part of the Ethnomusicology Lecture Series. At first, I felt apprehensive due to his first argument in his abstract “that common notions of musical theft (i.e., of White people stealing Black music) are actually upside down.” I was curious to see how he would navigate such a statement. Certainly, he did not mean to vindicate the white musicians who had stolen their music, such as in the case of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings and Joe “King” Oliver’s “Eccentric,” but rather, he decided to draw attention to the physicality of music through recordings. In other words, music was possessed by white audiences, or rather “white power” as he chose to term it, through the sale of musical recordings. Through the process of “Signifyin,’” consisting in this talk of purposeful storytelling, hidden meanings, and laughter, Black musicians were able to subvert the total white ownership of their sound objects in a similar way as they had done with white ownership of their bodies. Radano also sees an irony in the high value or incredibility of these sound objects to white power because of their perceived lack of credibility as music. (Yes, he insightfully chose to play with the two meanings of incredibility here.)
Musical objects, to Radano, were first represented through the products of recordings took by colonialists in Africa during the late nineteenth century. This discussion then moved to the first recordings of Black minstrel performers, such as in George Washington Johnson’s “Laughing Song” from the 1890s which is full of resonant laughter and hidden meanings. As later pointed out by respondent Tsitsi Jaji, the meaning of the lyrics, “They said, ‘His mother was a Princess,/His father was a Prince,/And he’d been the apple of their eye/If he had not been a quince./But he’ll be the King of Africa/In the sweet by and by,’/And when I heard them say it, why/I laughed until I cried.,” could be lost to white audiences and better understood by Johnson’s Black audiences, who had ancestors who were enslaved.
He closed the paper by leading us through an example of Louis Armstrong’s appearance in a short segment of a Betty Boop cartoon from 1932 singing “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You.” Through recording, Fleischer Studios was able to own the sound and image of Armstrong, juxtaposing his face and music to that of a cannibal chasing the two protagonists through the jungle, despite Armstrong’s efforts to present a respectable image through the formal attire of his band.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPpOJvm6998
Considering music as an object, as Radano has proposed through recordings, may lead to more innovative ways to describe the relationship between race and musical ownership. I’m looking forward to the publication of his forthcoming book, Alive in the Sound: Black Music as Counter-History, to further explore these avenues.
