Recorded Music at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.
He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States, and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about Blacksound at the University of California Press website.[African Americans were largely seen as] property, unable to claim rights for their own bodies, unequal in producing work deemed worthy of property claims (as they were also viewed as subhuman through the systematization of slavery). Under these conditions, the very aesthetics they produced became sources of property to be copyrighted and claimed by white music industrialists through sheet music, through other publications, and in their own performances within the exploitative models of the developing popular music industry.As it turns out, page 99 provides a snapshot into the larger thesis and political stakes of my book, Blacksound. This page happens to be the last page of Chapter 2, which is also the end of Part I of my book. The book is organized chronologically: Part I addresses the development of commercial music through blackface minstrelsy during the antebellum era under slavery, while Part II considers how blackface’s commercialization throughout the nineteenth century shaped the emergence of the commercial music industry and music copyright at the turn of the twentieth century in the establishment of Tin Pan Alley, Vaudeville, Broadway, film, and the popular recording industry–all taking place during the Jim Crow segregation era.
Blackface effectively established the commercial industry between the United States and United Kingdom, and it provided the aesthetic/sonic basis of popular sound and culture in both nations, albeit to differing degrees. The theatrical form created scripts of black performativity (developed within Blacksound) that became racialized as “authentically” black and often degenerate when taken up by black people. For white people, the same scripts were thought of as “othered,” through which they could freely express and imagine/construct their own self identity. Blackface allowed white performers to take blackness on and off at will, both on and off the minstrel stage, and their audiences bore witness to the transformative acts within their own imaginaries, safely distanced from having to actually be and experience blackness.
(White) Europeans/European-Americans had the ability to simultaneously insert themselves into the ruse of the blackface mask and, in turn, blackness, while being able to remove the minstrel mask and/or reassume more proper performances of citizen in their public selves. Blackface performance allowed white people to negotiate their bodies, personhood, and construction of whiteness by reveling in blackness under the rules of Victorian and antebellum societies. At the same time, this culturally homogenized group vis-à-vis blackness was able to carefully and effectively manage the commercialization, circulation, and absorption of the very aesthetics that were exploited in the performances of the black musicians from whom they originated. The following chapter considers how the aesthetic of intellectual performance property became even more subtly embedded into the formalization of blackface minstrelsy and the amalgamation of Blacksound through Stephen Foster, one of its most prolific composers, known affectionately as the “Father of American Popular Song.”
Because page 99 is essentially the end of a conclusion, it directly lays out my study of the legacy and impact of blackface minstrelsy on the making of American popular music, its industry, the construction of race and race-relations, anti-blackness, culture and politics. It also foreshadows the discussion in the following chapter/Part of how we begin to develop notions of intellectual property (in music) during slavery, as mostly white blackface performers, producers, and audiences took up ephemeral black performance aesthetics in sheet music and in live minstrel acts.
Blacksound is defined most simply as the sonic complement to blackface minstrelsy that serves as the foundation of American popular music, its industry, culture, politics, and entertainment. One thing that the page misses is that a major aspect of the book is deep musical and cultural analysis of mostly non-recorded music performances (both commercial and folk) throughout the nineteenth century to support the thesis and demonstrate how Blacksound is constructed and shifts over time. But overall, if someone read this one page, they would have a general (though not nuanced) understanding of the overall book and concept of Blacksound.
--Marshal Zeringue