Race & Music in America
Transcript for Student Voices
Charrise Barron and Marcus Grant
[music]
You’re listening to Student Voices, a podcast featuring student-led interviews of Brown University faculty based on the Race & in America panel discussion series, curated by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America in partnership with the Office of the Provost.
Marcus Grant: Hello, my name is Marcus Grant, and I’m a current first year PhD student in the Department of Music, studying ethnomusicology and musicology, and my research centers on Black American protest, music, and hip-hop, and particularly during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Charrise Barron, an Assistant Professor in both Africana Studies and Music, about the recent panel discussion on Race & Music in America, so welcome, Dr. Barron.
Charrise Barron: Thank you so much, I’m excited to be here with you.
MG: Indeed. During your panel on Race & Music in America, you have discussed the genre categories of race, in particular between jazz, hip-hop, rock and metal, and genres along those lines, and discussed how the music industry between 1920—starting with with race records, and even to today, with the recent Super Bowl performances, including Eminem, Dr Dre, Snoop Dogg, Mary J Blige, 50 Cent, Kendrick Lamar—how there are certain race implications with genre. In particular, one of your main claims is that the music industry is part of a larger racialized entertainment-industrial complex, and you finished with saying that the music industry is a racialized complex and demands a certain type of performance of race, and if one were to deviate from that type of performance, they’d sort of jeopardize their financial viability in the music marketplace. And I’d like you to kind of discuss more about that, but, in particular, I have a question just in terms of, how the current or past artists, and if you know of anyone who has successfully blurred the lines of race in the music industry?
CB: Do I know anyone who’s successfully blurred the lines in terms of race in the music industry? I would venture to say that a lot of white artists have been able to perform music that is coded ‘Black’ or somehow ‘ethnic,’ and they find great, great, great success doing that, but it’s much harder for a Black person, for instance, to move into the mainstream without, as I was saying in my presentation, without either suffering some measure of alienation from the community from which they have emerged, or some other kind of toll taking place, even if they’re able to have a lot of financial success.
MG: Indeed, so yeah, so I’m thinking of, you know, Bobby Caldwell, like, listening to his voice, he sounds sort of Black, and he’s in this kind of like soul, R&B vibe, or even, you know, Eminem, obviously, and he was in that Super Bowl performance; other artists even, you know, now who have—who are white, who then sort of are able to go into, you know, quote-end quote “Black” music and be successful, and that’s another conversation in and of itself. But I think the biggest thing that, for me, is like, when I listened to Bobby Caldwell or even like Bruce Springsteen early on, I was just like—oh, I thought Bruce Springsteen was actually Black.
CB: Wow.
MG: Just because of his voice. Yeah, so, it’s interesting, and then I mean I’m sure we’ve both seen the recent documentary that Questlove put out, called the “Summer of Soul.” And there was a portion of that where the Five Dimensions [ed: 5th Dimension?] talked about how they were, they were singing “white music,” and then she and, you know, one of the performers questioned, how can you color music, you know, how can you put—you know what I’m saying. So I know that that conversation has been going on for a long time, and I just appreciate your, you know, you brought up Michael Jackson, you brought up Whitney Houston, and those artists who have indeed, similar to those artists that I just mentioned, received some backlash for sounding quote-end quote “too white,” or kind of appealing more towards a white audience, and, like, the music industry, so yeah, interesting, interesting, very interesting.
CB: It is interesting, indeed. I think one of the amazing things about Whitney Houston is that phenotypically, she is clearly, I think it’s fair to say, clearly Black or of African descent, but was still able to achieve a great deal of success in the pop world; but as you’ve mentioned, as I mentioned before, she did feel some alienation from the Black community even as she achieved these great markers of success in the music industry.
MG: Now, I know you also have a wide background in gospel and Christian music, so in your experience in the gospel realm, and, you know, in consideration of genre categories such as “gospel” and quote-end quote “Christian contemporary music” or CCM, which have general racial implications attached to them, are there any artists that blur those lines? You know, I’m thinking of, like, Jonathan McReynolds or, like, Tasha Cobbs, who are Black and necessarily sing more contemporary Christian music, and then, perhaps, how are these distinctions a reflection of, you know, a present day, perhaps more inclusive Christian religious practice?
CB: So, you raised a question about gospel and Christian music, and we know that in the American music industry, “gospel” denotes Black Christian music and “Christian,” the term “Christian,” actually refers to a kind of white gospel music or white Christian music, so even within this genre that is considered a kind of sacred music, or music that supposed to represent transcendence in general, we still, in the industry, find these clearly racialized markers. In terms of artists like Tasha Cobbs and Jonathan McReynolds, I will say Tasha Cobbs in particular is an artist—a Black artist—who performs some covers of Christian music, particularly the subgenre called “praise and worship,” and praise and worship music, in particular, has been a site of much controversy as it relates to race and representation in the church world as well as in the music industry. We’ve entered into a time where there is a kind of global Christian, especially a kind of Pentecostal or evangelical-inflected Christianity—and when I say “evangelical,” I’m speaking not politically but broadly, as those who understand that one must have a relationship with Jesus Christ, one must have a kind of conversion experience, that one must witness and share the gospel with others, you know, holding these certain tenets of Christianity, that’s what I mean by “evangelical” when I use that term, rather than a kind of political turn that “evangelical” takes on in the US—but we see this this global Christianity is often represented through, and expressed through, praise and worship music. And this praise and worship music has been published and taken all over the world from these publishing houses that are based within or around churches that are predominantly white or pastored by, you know, white American or Australian Christians, and so we find that there is an insertion of culture in this music that then gets taken up as a representation of spirituality and religious practice and it can be a very dangerous, a dangerous kind of space to dwell in, in which one can equate one’s relationship with Christ, or measure it, by how well one is engaging with a music that is a cultural production, even as it is a part of religious practice. So, Tasha Cobbs is a Black woman who does this praise and worship music, and she has found great success in covering songs that have come from white Christian spaces, whereas Jonathan McReynolds, I would venture to argue that he is a kind of—he operates in a space that I wouldn’t necessarily call praise and worship; it’s more of a post…how would I say…it’s a post-neo-soul…
MG: Ah, okay.
CB: But also, praise and worship, Christian praise and worship-inflected kind of space, in that he uses the guitar, or acoustic guitar, as a kind of grounding instrument, rather than, say, a keyboard, or a Hammond organ, which we associate more with gospel music, and the guitar, acoustic guitar’s more related or more associated with white Christian music practice. But his use of the guitar, and his high tenor voice, all of that, in my mind, doesn’t necessarily make me think “praise and worship,” because his music, because of what he takes up in the lyrics of his music, it’s not a kind of praise and worship content, even though the instrumentation may align more closely with what we think of as praise and worship.
MG: Yeah, and I know he also considers himself more of, like, a singer-songwriter who also is Christian-based, and you know, kind of writes Christian music based off of his singer-songwriter background and less of—I mean, they’re predominantly gospel, because I mean, listen, I grew up listening to, you know, John P. Kee and Donnie McClurkin and, you know, and those artists that I know are just like kind of quintessential gospel artists, and have careers specifically like saying, “I’m a gospel artist,” and there’s a little bit of a difference now, there’s a bit of a blending now of genres to a certain extent, but also, I think, there are some racialized implications along with that. So just like you said, like gospel and certain instruments, like you said, you know, like the drums and the organ, keyboards, that sort of sound is indicative of, you know, a Black space, as opposed to, like, the acoustic guitar or, you know, like a certain timbre of the voice, you know, can be more along the lines of a more white space. And I’m thinking about certain churches who have a more diverse congregation and I’m just thinking, how then do we sort of create music that is appropriate for that sort of space? And I think artists such as, you know, Jonathan McReynolds is, like, doing something along those lines.
CB: Okay, so you’ve touched on a couple things that I want to circle back to. So one is, you mentioned that Jonathan McReynolds doesn’t want to be boxed into the category of Christian or religious or gospel artist or musician or composer; there is a desire among many gospel artists to not be boxed in, right? And part of that has to do with what we know assigning oneself to a genre does to your career trajectory, so in the same ways that gospel artists have worked—and I argue in my current book project that many gospel artists have worked very hard to cross over, to break out of gospel into white Christian music or into Black mainstream music, you know, R&B, hip-hop, that space—there is an expectation of the potential, and there are limits, or expected limits, of how much one could earn, or what kind of success and reach one could have if you’re in a gospel genre or if you’re in Christian, and so people want to detach from that. And the reason why I wanted to circle back is because it reminds me that these are some of the same limitations in terms of religion: tying oneself to religion can do the same kinds of confining that artists want to break from as putting oneself in racialized boxes that the music industry really forces you into. So I wanted to mention that, but then, you know, you’re asking this question: well, what can churches do to deal with the cultural and the religious and, you know, how can you make a space that is generative across these various demographics? And I would venture to argue that the music that Jonathan McReynolds, in particular, is creating, is a kind of music for consumption not necessarily in the church, anyway! It is not necessarily for consumption in the church, but consumption beyond, and again, it’s a kind of genre-breaking kind of music, it’s not your typical church music, but I think one of the great things that we can do, or people can do in church is pull from a lot of different traditions. They all can help make a generative and transformative space and experience.
MG: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Dr. Barron. I’m looking forward to hearing more and reading more about this in your upcoming projects.
CB: Thank you!
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Student Voices is a feature of the Race & in America digital publication series developed by the Brown University Library. Our theme music is “see the unseen” by Butter. Explore the series at digitalpublications.brown.edu.