A century ago, musicians, comics, cartoonists, and writers applied blackface to express simple-minded sentimentality, an inexhaustible craving for leisure, and malapropisms galore. (For a few happy decades, as Harper's Monthly gag pages and Edison ethnic recordings attest, artists and wits also had the option of going Irish.) The jazzbos at my college affected a weird kind of dignified petulance that I guess was the rich kid version of Miles Davis. Nowadays the in-demand roles are sullen thugs and motor-mouthed scam artists. I'm inclined to see these as transformations in the cultural marketplace rather than in The Souls of Black Folk.
Bellona Times 02/05/03
