First Daphne Brooks in The Nation writes on the black minstrelsy of Amy Winehouse:
To borrow a question from Winehouse herself, "what kind of fuckery is this?" Well beyond merely singing, as a white woman, about her desire for black men, Winehouse, in what is perhaps her real innovation, has created a record about a white woman wanting to be a black man--and an imaginary one at that, stitched together from hip-hop and bebop and juke-joint mythologies. She's a "ride or die chick" from another era, the Jewish English lass who's rolling with the boys, who morphs into the J. Hova gangsta driving the Jag herself.
Then Mark Anthony Neal reads the video for Raphael Saadiq's "I Love That Girl" through the lens of post-race nostalgia in the age of Obama and Palin:
More to the point, Saadiq's amorous (reckless) eyeballing would have likely been met by Klansmen and torches if "Love that Girl" was in true synchronicity with the historical era that informs it. And yet this is the beauty of the Obama-moment--the freedom to forget the country's not-so-far-fetched racial history--and the very reason so many of the old-race guard remain unswayed by the obvious possibilities the moment affords.
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Actually, the article from Daphne Brooks was not great. It was garbage. Here is my letter to her:
Hello there. I would like to complain about your awful article about Amy Winehouse in "The Nation." I get the Nation to read serious articles about real issues, not a bunch of unprovable nonsense about pop music. Please explain to me clearly the point of your article. From what I can tell, you are saying that Amy Winehouse should stop making pop music because she sounds like people who made pop music in the past. Or is it that she should stop making music because she is trying to be a black man? Or she is tarnishing the (dull) legacy of Lauryn Hill? It's hard for me to tell, because everything is written in the irritating style of a word-drunk music review for the college paper.
You say her music is a travesty, so something must be done about it, right? Are you hoping that by publishing your article in the Nation, its 100,000 or so readers, most of whom are probably 60+ years old, will return the 3 copies of Winehouse's albums that they collectively bought?
You seem shocked, just shocked, that Winehouse's music has an element of a minstrel show to it. I guess I would be surprised by that too, IF I HAD NEVER LISTENED TO ANY POPULAR MUSIC RECORDED SINCE THE INVENTION OF THE RECORD. I don't quite get why she is so much worse than anything else out there to the point that she merited your pretentious trashing a few pages away from the article about the involvement of the International Criminal Court in the persecution of war crimes in Darfur.
Your craptacular article, with its wordy bullshit about hipster cred and "so so def pop ya collar" whatever may have fooled the aged academics who run the Nation (I can just picture them going, "I don't know what a 'ride or die chick' is, but this young lady really speaks with the voice of her generation"), but not me! Next time, please consider selling your articles to Spin magazine or some other crummy periodical that specializes in long winded, freshman-dorm rants about hipsters and J. Hova.
I have been reading the nation for 10 years now, and yours is the worst article I have ever read. I eagerly wait your defense of this nonsense.
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