Disengaged Engagement and Cultural Theft--Katie Moore

It is often said that great suffering is necessary to create the most profound art.  While some artists actively seek out hardship in order to improve their art, while others have it thrust upon them.  The slave spiritual most definitely falls into the latter case, although the slaves who created and sang these songs likely did not consider themselves artists creating art, but rather a group of people expressing themselves in one of the few acceptable mediums.  Cruz constantly refers to black spirituals as “songs of sorrow,” borrowing the phrase from Douglass, who also described spirituals as telling “a tale of woe …they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish” (Cruz 1999:23). Numerous other historical accounts of black spirituals cited by Cruz also emphasize the intensity of emotion and lament inherent in the songs and their performance.

Cruz engages with the spiritual within the context of the social, political, economic and cultural constructs of the time in order to understand how a burgeoning awareness and interest in black culture shaped the way minority or ethnic studies would develop in the United States.  For those abolitionists sympathetic to the plight of life, many were entranced by the spiritual as they “discovered” slave spirituals as “meaningful” sound rather than incomprehensible “noise”  (Chapter 2).  However, many could not face the reality of what the spiritual represented, preferring instead to hover in the limbo that Cruz calls “disengaged engagement.”  While developing a growing appreciation for the aesthetics of slave spirituals, they refused to come to terms with the social, religious, political, and economic structures that informed their message and their sorrow.  Masked in romanticism and sentimentalism, the white users of the slave spiritual were able to admire the beauty and passion of it at a comfortable psychological distance without genuinely engaging in the source of the pain within the voices.  “As a mode of disengaged engagement, aesthetic appreciation divorced from the artist’s life functions as a denial of that life” (31).  After their “discovery” by white listeners, the sounds of the “authentic” spiritual quickly entered mainstream and entered a cycle of appropriation and commodification.  Cruz terms this the “narrative of cultural theft,” where black cultural expression was transformed from “genuine” to “tarnished,” moving from “‘black roots’ to ‘white fruits’” (25). 

The idea of “cultural theft,” is just as relevant in discussions of American music (once the term also included blacks in the concept) as it is in the present.  I took a class during my undergraduate studies entitled “American Popular Music,” which covered popular music forms in America, from the minstrel show as the first truly American music, to Tin Pan Alley, ragtime, Hillbilly, blues, rock and roll, punk, New Wave, etc.  One of the most shocking things I took away from the class could be very aptly named “cultural theft,” as it was theft in the most literal sense.  Although there are many examples of this, the one that stuck with me was the dual recording of the song “Sh-Boom,” first released by an all-black R&B group called The Chords in March of 1954, followed by its release just months later by an all-white group called The Crew-Cuts in late July.  While songs hit songs were often covered by multiple artists, before it had mainly been a racially homogeneous affair, with white artists covering other white artists’ songs, and black artists covering black songs.

(The Chords Version)

(Crew-Cuts version)

The Chord’s version was one of the first doo-wop/rock-n-roll song to reach the top ten on the pop charts (rather than the genre-specific R&B charts), however, The Crew-Cuts cleaned-up, more traditional version reached #1 on the Billboard charts for 9 weeks and stayed on the charts for 20 weeks.  While previously, covered songs were noticeably different in their various versions, the commodification of black songs by white groups took a different turn, replicating the melody, arrangement, and rhythm of the black versions.  This seems like cultural appropriation to the extreme, crafted during a time when rising racial tensions necessitated even more disengagement with black cultural expression, while there was still a fascination and appreciation for their cultural and musical aesthetics (especially among teenagers who were more likely to engage with African American artists and songs).  Cruz points out that there has recently been some “cultural amnesia” within the scholarship of cultural analysis that disregards the roots of cultural studies in its outgrowth from the historical and social relationships of the 19^th century (14). By combining the framework of cultural constructs that shaped the relationships of “makers” and “users” of cultural forms over time, we can reach a deeper understanding the ways we interpret and relate to “cultures on the margins,” which often includes appropriation and disengaged engagement through overlooking the implications of  commodifying culture.