White people with acoustic instruments covering rap songs

I turned this post into an academic journal article with proper citations–click to read it in Visions of Research in Music Education.

Also see the Adam Neely video!

White people appropriating black music is America’s main contribution to world culture. Black music itself is a big deal, too, but it is dwarfed by the commercial ubiquity of white imitators. It’s easy to dismiss the crass knockoffs, the modern-day minstrels, and the cynical thieves. But what happens when a white person is expressing sincere admiration, with only the purest intentions? What happens when Chris Thile sings “Alright” by Kendrick Lamar, as he did on the February 6, 2016 broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion?

If you’re unfamiliar with Kendrick’s song, get familiar, it’s one of the most significant musical works of this century so far, and it comes with a devastating video.

This song is a hard one to play and sing, and Chris Thile does it more than capably. He’s a brilliant musician, arguably the best mandolin player in the world, maybe the best one ever. He has spent his entire career transgressing genre boundaries. Based on interviews, he seems like a good person. Who can blame him for being taken by Kendrick’s song? Who can blame him for wanting to learn it, and sing it at home for his son, and then eventually do it on stage?

I have to admire Chris Thile, in a way. He had little to gain by doing “Alright” in front of the Prairie Home Companion audience, and much to lose. I went to a couple of tapings of the show back in the Garrison Keillor era, and while the crowd might have been politically liberal, it was also very old and uniformly white. Thile’s risk paid off, to an extent–you can go online and read positive reactions from people who had never heard “Alright” before, who were impressed by it, and who were even motivated to go listen to the Kendrick Lamar original. So, mission accomplished, right?

I’m trying to be generous here, but the fact remains that Thile’s performance is “skin-crawling,” in the words of one of my Twitter friends. To his credit, Thile recognizes that his version was problematic: “I would readily admit that my love of the song kind of blinded me… I think it was a bad call.” This whole situation raises uncomfortable questions for other white people (like me) who admire black music and want to imitate it. Robby Burns puts the question well.

@ethanhein I often ask how someone like Thile progress artistically without embracing musical influences that challenge him. And what avenue does he have to explore this without imitation? I think in this case he is trying to challenge his audience as much as he is himself.

— Robby Burns is on Mastodon (@robbyburns) October 19, 2018

Of course Thile should be paying attention to Kendrick, everyone should. And there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with straying outside your lane; that’s how innovation happens. Here’s the problem, though. Music is never just organized sound. It’s inextricable from cultural and political context. The Western classical concept of “absolute music” would have us believe that musical works exist in some Platonic realm of pure abstraction, but that belief is itself a politically motivated ideology. It’s easy to ignore the cultural and political issues of eighteenth century Vienna and other faraway times and places. But if you’re an American in the present day, you can’t ignore the issues around “Alright.”

So what should Chris Thile and the rest of us be doing? One alternative that would be more in the spirit of hip-hop would be for Thile to write a song over the beat/backing of “Alright” that’s truthfully autobiographical, or at least plausibly fictional. Because, does Chris Thile actually hate the po-po? Are they going to shoot him dead in the street for sure? You might say, well, Thile has done plenty of murder ballads in bluegrass contexts, and he didn’t literally mean those either. But the whole point of Kendrick’s music is that it revolves around autobiographical truth-telling. Maybe the best thing Chris Thile could have done was to just play Kendrick’s track intact for the Prairie Home Companion audience (or even better, the video) and let it speak for itself.

There’s a whole genre of YouTube videos showing white people playing rap songs on acoustic instruments. For example, here’s Artie Figgis doing a Wu-Tang classic on guitar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHJjmE_cDSQ

I will say this, the guy plays beautifully. I especially admire him for his ability to capture the track’s Thelonious Monk samples. His guitar interpretation of “Big Poppa” by Biggie Smalls is beautiful too. His rapping, however, is not so beautiful, and unlike Chris Thile, Figgis isn’t shy about using the n-word. Are his interpretations ironic? His deadpan expression makes it hard to tell.

Update! This guy made a new video explaining why he no longer uses the n-word in his covers. It’s thoughtful and worth watching.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eAY76U5vSo

Both Chris Thile and Artie Figgis have made a good-faith effort to study their source material closely and attend to its nuances. Not every white rap cover artist can say the same. Here are two especially objectionable examples, drawn from this post on Noisey.

These guys certainly are proud of themselves for being clever and audacious. “Oh, look at me, doing something naughty and improbable.” Chris Thile was at least engaging seriously with the substance of “Alright” and not just going for a patronizing chuckle.

Is every white rap cover automatically a bad idea? Emily Wells does a version of Biggie’s “Juicy” that I can get behind.

Why is Emily Wells so much less cringeworthy? I guess I appreciate that she isn’t trying to emulate the vibe of the original at all, that she made a genuinely new and personal work of art out of it. She sounds like Emily Wells, not like an awkward imitation of Biggie. (Artie Figgis does “Juicy” too, and while his rapping doesn’t do much for me, his interpretation of the beat is a thing of genuine beauty.)

On the other side of the aesthetic spectrum, there’s a whole universe of white people doing joyless covers of R&B songs. Pomplamoose’s condescending take on “Single Ladies” is among the worst. The duo’s musical sophistication makes their cover that much more obnoxious–with so much skill, you might expect these two to also have developed better judgment. It’s especially grating when they make fun of the bridge.

I will admit that some of my revulsion for the likes of Pomplamoose comes from the fact that they force me to take an uncomfortable look in the mirror. I’ve spent my musical life playing blues, funk, jazz, and R&B, and producing hip-hop and techno. I like to think I treat my source material with more respect than Pomplamoose does, but I’m sure I’ve done some tone-deaf appropriating too. After seeing Office Space, I got obsessed with “Down For Whatever” by Ice Cube, and even performed it in front of a small audience one time. I also sometimes do “I Know You Got Soul” by Eric B and Rakim in class. How much daylight is there between me and Chris Thile, or between me and Pomplamoose for that matter?

I’m trying to do better, though. I want to challenge white supremacy, and I take bell hooks seriously when she says that “contemporary commodification of Black culture by Whites in no way challenges White supremacy when it takes the form of making Blackness the ‘spice that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.'” We need that spice, and it’s impossible to resist reaching for it when it’s all around us. I’d like to believe that there’s a way for us to use the spice more gratefully, and to give more back in return. This is especially urgent in the context of music education. I want there to be more hip-hop in the music classroom, but music teachers are overwhelmingly white, and until that changes, we run the risk of creating an army of Chris Thiles. Right now, there’s probably a well-meaning choral arranger trying to work up an arrangement of “Jesus Walks” for middle school kids to sing. I would like us to nip that in the bud, but first we need to think of constructive alternatives.

Updates: There are some fascinating conversations around this post happening on the Facebook Music Educators and Hip-Hop Music Education groups. Also, I did a mashup of Kendrick Lamar and Chris Thile, it got taken down from SoundCloud, but if you want to hear it, send me an email, it’s… something.

More thoughts: I’m especially interested in which lyrics Thile chose to alter and which he kept intact. He omitted all the n-words, understandably. He replaced them with “brother” (makes sense) or “Calvin” (the name of his infant son, to whom he likes to sing the song at home.) Thile also chose not to say “motherfucker”, I assume because NPR doesn’t like the word. At one point, he replaces it with “little buddy,” presumably meaning his son again, that’s sweet. He replaces “fucked up” with “messed up”, which again, fine. He replaces “pussy” with “women.” But otherwise he keeps the lyrics intact. Including “we hate the po-po.” Why? I know “po-po” isn’t a curse word, so that’s why Thile left it in. But once he’s altering lyrics, why not alter that? Why not say “they hate the po-po”? Maybe he just wasn’t thinking about it on that granular a level. But this song is really complicated, he must have listened to it many times to transcribe it all, and then practiced it quite a few times to nail all those fast lyrics. The changes have to have been at least somewhat considered.

Another thing. When you search for Chris Thile on Google, one of the first hits is this:

This is a fascinating video, because it’s all about race without ever expressly saying so. Thile talks about the reserve shown by classical concert audiences, which is a key signifier of whiteness, one that many music teachers are very intent on imparting to their students. My son took some preschooler group piano lessons, and at their little performance, the kids had to walk onstage with their music tucked under their arm and bow stiffly to the audience before sitting on the piano stool in a specifically decorous way. It had nothing to do with music, and everything to do with white bodily comportment.

Thile bookends the video with two different performances of “Rebecca” by Herschel Sizemore, one in “Baroque” style and one in “bluegrass” style. The differences are instructive. “Baroque” style is flowing and linear, with straight eighth notes and slight rubato in the timing. “Bluegrass” style has a metronomic beat, with swinging eighth notes and lightly funky phrasing, an implicit backbeat, and lots of improvised blues embellishments. In other words, “bluegrass” style brings in the musical signifiers of the African diaspora in America. This is no accident. Bluegrass is a combination of British Isles fiddle tunes and the blues. Before he founded the Blue Grass Boys, Bill Monroe learned blues from a black fiddle player named Arnold Shultz.

Earlier in this post, I talked about how maybe it’s okay that Thile doesn’t literally mean the lyrics to “Alright” the same way he doesn’t literally mean the lyrics of the many murder ballads he has sung in his various bluegrass bands. If you Google “Chris Thile murder ballad,” one of the top results is this one:

The very first comment on it is careful to distinguish between this genre of song and “rap or other tripe.” Got it? Bluegrass bands singing about murder is fine. Rappers singing about it is tripe. Very logical.

Last thing: multiple people have referred me to this video of a white lady doing a karaoke version of “Work It” by Missy Elliott:

This performance isn’t uncomfortable at all; it’s delightful. Missy herself signed off on it. Why is Mary Halsey so cool when Chris Thile is so awkward? For one thing, she’s rapping over an actual rap instrumental, not a mandolin, that helps. Also, the subject matter of the song is more plausible coming from her. Her obvious good humor helps too. But I don’t feel like I have a conclusive answer to this yet. Here’s a suggestion I got from Twitter:

https://twitter.com/rbxbex/status/1054795098809077760

Your thoughts are welcome.

Yet another update: Kira Grunenberg wrote a rebuttal to this post, and she respectfully disagrees with me. Go read her insightful post, then read my response:

Hi Kira. Please call me Ethan! Thanks for this response, it’s a lot to think about. My post is a collection of thoughts that I wrote down more or less in the order I had them, and I keep coming back to it, revising, reconsidering, and responding to the many comments it’s been generating. You’ve given me a good opportunity to drill down on all these thoughts further.

I’m not a fan of Chris Thile, per se, but I admire him. There was a time in my life when I was obsessed with newgrass virtuosos like Bela Fleck, and if Chris Thile had been on my radar then, I would have idolized him. He’s only one degree of social separation from me, and I have every indication that if we met, I’d like him. I picked his cover to write about because my feelings about it are so complicated. There’s a “purely musical” level on which I think his Kendrick cover is a superb achievement. I lined it up with the original in Ableton Live, and listening to them superimposed, it’s impressive how precisely Thile conveys the complexities and nuances of the track with just his mandolin and voice. In an alternate universe close to this one, twenty-five-year-old me might have tried a similar performance, though I wouldn’t probably have pulled it off with so much skill. So part of my discomfort around the cover is the pain of looking hard in the mirror at my younger self (and probably, still, present self.)

I don’t think that people should only be allowed to perform songs that are autobiographically truthful. I have sung plenty of songs in public that had nothing to do with my personal lived experience . But rap is different from other genres of music. Rap songs don’t have an existence that’s separate from their writer. Some rappers do employ ghostwriters, but it’s a secretive and shameful practice. You’re supposed to write from a real place, and you’re only supposed to rap your own lyrics. Cover songs are vanishingly unusual in rap. It’s more common for a rapper to play a recording of another rapper’s song during a show than to do a cover of it! The strength of that norm should make any of us hesitant about doing rap covers, not just white people.

By this standard, of course, the lady doing the Missy Elliott song should provoke just as much bad feeling as Chris Thile. After thinking about it some more, I think the difference is that she’s doing karaoke, rather than a cover. She’s playing the character of Missy Elliott. Chris Thile, on the other hand, is not playing the character of Kendrick, he’s singing as himself, directly addressing his baby son. That makes the line about the po-po far more jarring than if he was doing Kendrick karaoke.

You and I agree that cultural appropriation can be a good and beautiful thing. But the relative privilege level of the cultures involved makes a difference. When Chicanos appropriate Morrissey, they’re appropriating upwards, doing something subversive. When white people celebrate Cinco de Mayo or Day of the Dead, they’re appropriating downwards, and perpetuating colonialism. The two aren’t equivalent.

Amy Winehouse is a complicated character. She was an excellent singer and songwriter, but if you’re a fan of Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, you know that there’s some cultural appropriation issues there. Sharon Jones never got a tenth the recognition or money that Amy Winehouse did, even though she sang the same style of music, backed by the same band. Sharon Jones was understandably angry about it. That isn’t Amy Winehouse’s fault, but it doesn’t speak well to the culture around her.

Addiction is indeed distributed across every social group in America. Police brutality, however, isn’t. Every white person has been touched by drug problems, directly or indirectly, but white people don’t relate to struggles with the po-po the way that black people do.

To me, everything about Thile’s genre-hopping video is about race. The bodily comportment rules in the concert hall aren’t arbitrary. They only emerged after European and American societies started making regular close contact with Africans. Historically, concert halls were full of rowdy socializing. They didn’t take on their churchlike atmosphere until the nineteenth century, as Europeans and Americans started asserting their nationalist and imperialist identities in earnest, and as whiteness emerged as an ethnic identity. There’s some research around how the racial politics of bodily comportment continue to be an issue in music education, for example: Gustafson, R. (2008). Drifters and the dancing mad: The public school music curriculum and the fabrication of boundaries for participation. Curriculum Inquiry, 38(3), 267–297. I see it in my own life; for example, watching a white choir director demand that black girls in chorus stop stomping and clapping along with a Christmas carol.

As for “pop,” I agree with Amiri Baraka: in America, that word is a euphemism for black music. You can’t talk about the conflict between classical music and an American vernacular form like bluegrass without talking about race. Even the terms “highbrow” and “lowbrow” are racial. They emerged during the era of phrenology – “highbrow” describes the high foreheads of Anglo-Saxons, while “lowbrow” describes the low, sloping foreheads of the lesser races.

The example of Smoke is an interesting one. Jazz clubs didn’t have “no talking” rules back when jazz was a black popular music. (Charles Mingus and Nina Simone complained bitterly and often about people talking during their sets.) The sacralization/classicalization of jazz only dates back to the 1980s, when, for better or for worse, it became an academic music. On the one hand, it’s nice to go to a jazz concert and be able to hear everything. On the other hand, the music is not exactly the dynamic creative force it was back when it was being played while people smoked, drank and danced.

If it were just me and my feelings, you could certainly dismiss them if you didn’t share them. But both Chris Thile and Mary Halsey got strong and opposite social media reactions to their respective covers from a wide range of listeners. It’s worth examining why so many people (including Chris Thile himself) thought his cover was a bad idea, while everyone from Missy Elliott on down approves of Mary Halsey.