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"Frat Rap": A New Form of Minstrelsy?
The 2013 Video Music Awards were a hot topic not only for
fans of pop culture, but also for those interested in racial issues, due to the
fact that they showcased performances by white artists appropriating aspects of
Black art forms. Professor David J. Leonard from the Department of Critical
Culture, Gender, and Race Studies at Washington State University recently wrote
an article titled “Frat Rap and the New White Negro” in which he describes the
emergence of a new genre that he refers to as “frat rap,” which has taken a
strong hold in universities across the country, and incorporates rap and hip
hop styles, but is performed by white rappers. He describes the appeal of this
new genre as a “safer” form of rap. He writes, “Rap concerts, hip-hop clubs, or
house parties located in America’s inner cities are sites of policing and fear,
but those same practices are “just good fun” when frat rap and the university
is at the center.” His description of “frat rap” is reminiscent of minstrel
acts, which also relied on the appropriation of Black music, and were eventually
seen as a “clean” and “non-offensive” form of entertainment for the white middle
class. Similarly, Leonard describes “frat rap” as an expression of a white
imagination, through “…cultural appropriation, a subtle reinforcement of
segregation, and a desire to try on perceived accents of blackness.” These
connections are important within our campus communities, but also within the
greater US context, because they signal the emergence of a new form of
minstrelsy, in a country that is often believed to be “post-racial.”
Do you think that "frat rap" represents a new form of minstrelsy?
3 comments:
I think that "frat rap" does represent a new form of minstrelsy. Similarly to how blackface minstrelsy unified working and middle class audiences with their common whiteness, so has "frat rap" with the high school and college-aged demographic through it's "banal" lyrics. When Leonard says "The popularity of those artists...cannot be understood outside their whiteness," it further solidifies "frat rap" as a form on minstrelsy. Without blackface, much of the content performed in blackface minstrelsy would have been deemed inappropriate and confusing to the everyday audience. While I'd heard the term "frat rap" used before, I hadn't thought of it as a form of minstrelsy until now. Although it's definitely not as obvious as blackface, the subtleties of minstrelsy certainly speak against the notion of a "post-racial" America.
This is on a slightly different note, for a different genre but I feel as tho things overlap--
Last night I was in LA for a spoken word show by queer, white artist Andrea Gibson. After the show I had a conversation with a young woman who had just moved to LA from New York and who was surprised by the high number of white spoken word artists here. She said the beauty of spoken word poetry is that it appeals to a diverse group of people, but that it is important to note that contemporary spoken word poetry has been shaped by the blues, the Harlem Renaissance, beat poets and hip-hop over the last century or so. I found this interesting and wanted to share.
Does the trend of spoken word poets being white mimic the whiteness of popular contemporary hip-hop artists as you said here?
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