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Eric Clapton“Stormy Monday”

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IIII

Is a White Musician Playing the Blues Wrong?

Is a White Musician Playing the Blues Wrong?

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Taylor’s Central Argument

Paul Taylor: “…So Black and Blue: Response to Rudinow”

Buddy GuyBuddy Guy Eric ClaptonEric Clapton

All I want to do is hear him play. Race, size, color, nothing matters when a

guy’s got it, and Eric’s got it.

I’m qualified to sing the blues because of what’s

happened to me; but I still don’t think I’ll ever do it as

well as a black man.

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Taylor’s Central Argument

Paul Taylor: “…So Black and Blue: Response to Rudinow”

• “For [Buddy] Guy the blues is colorblind, while [Eric] Clapton is convinced that his performances suffer somehow because he is white. Who is right?” (417) Rudinow argues we should prefer Guy’s view to views like

Clapton’s—that the blues is something one can learn, rather than something essentially dependant on race membership.

But Rudinow misunderstands the nature of the blues: he misses important nuances of the racialist discourse.

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Recall Rudinow

• Proprietary Argument: One can be a participant in an authentic blues performance only if one belongs to the community whose members stand in some sort of ownership relation to the blues idiom—the black community.

Objection: The notion of ownership is an “elaborate red herring”—how a community is meant to own a style of music is unclear.

“Black Blues Authenticity Thesis” (BBA) – that “white blues” performances are unacceptably derived from the original sources of the blues, and so cannot count as authentic blues performances.

• Experiential Access Argument: One can be a participant in an authentic blues performance only if one knows what it is like to live as a black person in America, and one can only know this if one has lived as a black person in America. Otherwise, one will not be authentically expressing the requisite emotion.

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Recall Rudinow (cont’d) Objection 1: The Experiential Access Argument seems to

require some sort of myth of “ethnic memory”—that “mere membership in the ethnic group confers special access to the lived experience of ancestors and other former members.” (418)

Objection 2: Discounting the myth of ethnic memory, the Experiential Access Argument can be reformulated as involving secret cultural codes—but this obscures “what is crucially and universally human about [the] central themes” of the blues. (418)

Objection 3: This reformulation seems to allow for authentic white performances if the performer is properly initiated into the blues community.

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Recall Rudinow (cont’d)

• “[Rudinow] paints much too simplistic a picture of the blues idiom as a racialized cultural space and of the subjectivities [socially-constituted beings] that occupy it.” (418)

• Rudinow characterizes the BBA as being centrally about the performers, but the BBA’s claim may be characterized more centrally about the audience, and only derivatively about performers.

While Rudinow’s objections to the BBA, as he states it, are solid, his characterization of the BBA itself is not.

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Dewey’s Theory of Situations

• Experiences are made up of situations that take on meanings in relations to their surrounding situations.

• Artworks unify these situations in the perceiver’s consciousness by connected feelings.

Artworks are “experiences that art objects participate in and occasion, distinguished from other kinds of experiences principally in that they intensify and clarify certain features common to those experiences.” (418)

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Reformulating the BBA

• BBA1: “Candidate blues performances in which white performers

participate cannot work in the experience of the BBA-adherent listener in a way generating the feeling that marks blues performances proper.” (419)

We can characterize the BBA as a claim about the capacity of the audience:

On the Deweyan approach, even if a listener cannot tell if a performer is white, such a performance may fail to produce the “authentic blue performance feeling”—the experience may be stunted.

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Reformulating the BBA (cont’d)• BBA2: “The candidate performances fail because the blues is a

racial project, and moral deference is owed to black contributions to this project.” (419)

The moral dimension arises from the blues being a racial project: a “cultural space within which the meaning of race is articulated.” (419)

In “moral deference”, the listener takes the performer to be expressing moral pain, and in turn bears witness to this moral pain.

“[C]andidate blues performances in which whites participate fail because the BBA adherent is unconvinced that the performer can properly bear witness to the racialized moral pain that the blues is about.” (419)

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Reformulating the BBA (cont’d)• Rudinow: How can the blues be about black experience in any

way that exclusively picks out black performers today, who arguably are as distant from the experiences of the founders of the blues as are today’s white performers?

It may be that the blues is about what the contemporary and historical experiences of being African American have in common: the experience of being “a member of an oppressed an downwardly constituted social category, subject to racialized hostile misfortune.” (419)

Where Rudinow contends that membership in an ethnic group confers access to the experience of former members of that group, in fact membership is partially constituted by such access. That is, one cannot be a member of the group unless one has access to such experience.

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Reformulating the BBA (cont’d)• All this said, the reformulation of the BBA is not racist:

On one level, it is a claim about psychological facts about individuals.

On another level, it is a claim about the currency of certain components of certain racialized discources.

“When Rudinow says that the essence of the blues is a stance embodied in sound and poetry, he fails to consider either who might be taking the stance—a racialized subject—or what the stance orients one toward—the blues as a racial project.” (420)

“White people can’t play the blues” can be analyzed as, “I can’t properly respond to candidate blues performances in which whites are the principal participants” because whites do not have access to the store of common black experiences.

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Reformulating the BBA (cont’d)• Possible Objection: Generalizing the BBA has unfortunate

consequences—for example, ruling out Denzel Washington in the role of Hamlet.

Reply: The blues is a racial project; Hamlet is not.

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Joel Rudinow: “Reply to Taylor”• Taylor interprets the BBA as a set of claims not about

performers and performances, but about audiences, audience members, and their experiences.

• But what are we to make of Clapton’s self-deprecation? Clapton seems to be making a claim about his

performances, and about himself as a performer.

All I want to do is hear him play. Race, size, color, nothing matters when a

guy’s got it, and Eric’s got it.

I’m qualified to sing the blues because of what’s

happened to me; but I still don’t think I’ll ever do it as

well as a black man.

What are we to make of Buddy Guy’s appreciation of Clapton’s performances, in which Guy seems to orient himself as a listener?

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BBA-Adherent Listeners• If the BBA is a claim about listeners, what does it say about

those listeners? It seems to say that they are incapable of appreciating

certain performances on account of the performer’s race. BBA1 says that for some listeners the racial identity of the

performer is aesthetically relevant. Taylor’s “BBA-adherent listener” must have verified the

racial identity of the performer as a precondition of the aesthetic experience of blues appreciation.

Taylor calls the BBA-adherent listener a “subjectivity”—a socially-constituted being, but however much we are socially-constituted, we are still human beings.

We should attend primarily to the music.

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BBA-Adherent Listeners (cont’d)• Attending primarily to the music doesn’t mean ignoring its role in

the social life of the community. Granting that attending to the blues means recognizing it

as a “racial project”, a racial project is “simultaneously an interpretation, representation, or explanation of racial dynamics and an effort to organize and distribute resources along particular racial lines.” (422)

The blues must surely be seen as evolving as a racial project, which leaves the question of the authenticity of white blues open.

• Is white blues (part of) the same racial project as black blues? If not, we must consider other questions as well:

1) Is the blues one racial project, or many?2) Is contemporary black blues (part of) the same racial

project as early delta blues?

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BBA-Adherent Listeners (cont’d) Whatever the answers, the question of the authenticity of

white blues remains open pending further argument. And this argument will have to do better than merely

suggesting that the blues might be about what contemporary and historical African Americans have in common, exclusive of other groupings.

“It will not do simply to assert in a question-begging way that there is not anything crucially or universally human about the blues, nor simply to assume a particular racialized exclusivist delimitation of ‘the (true) blues community.’” (422)