In Ross’s third chapter, we’re revisited by our old friend: the idea of authenticity in opposition to selling out. It made me think back to our previous discussion and I found myself asking if authenticity and selling out have anything at all to do with the artist or is it merely an issue of perception?

Last week, my own cynical, capitalist soaked opinion was that artists have never been divorced from the money and, while their goal may be to express something, to affect people around them, they’re also trying to get fed doing it. Our romantic notion that the frighteningly unstable Van Gogh should be the standard by which we judge seemed unrealistic.

But when Ross quotes Langston Hughes’ poem, lamenting the loss of jazz to dominant white hands, my focus shifted from artist to consumer:

You've taken my blues and gone --

You sing' em on Broadway

And you sing'em in Hollywood Bowl,

And you mixed'em up with symphonies

And you fixed'em

So they don't sound like me.

Yep, you done taken my blues and gone.

It seems to me that the stakes of authenticity may actually be more important to the consumer/reader/viewer/listener. There is something in this poem that makes me wonder if the concept of authenticity and selling out isn’t more about identity and the ability to control how it’s represented. Ross neglects to give us the rest of the poem but here it is:

You also took my spirituals and gone.

You put me in Macbeth and Carmen Jones

And all kinds of Swing Mikados

And in everything but what's about me--

But someday somebody'll

Stand up and talk about me,

And write about me--

Black and beautiful--

And sing about me,

And put on plays about me!

I reckon it'll be

Me myself!

What seems so powerful to me about this poem is that it feels like a call to action; while the speaker is riling hirself up, I can imagine the reader, feeling similarly slighted by inauthentic representations, feeling the need to take up a pen and do it themselves.

Ross does a pithy job of describing how the semi-distinct cultures of white and black Americans relied on each other for source material, and makes sure to remind us that words like imitation, theft, and appropriation are used since the system of exchanged favored on color group at the expense of another. But there is something in his excellent historical illustration that masks the kind of psychic damage Hughes expresses in his poem. When the ability to represent oneself is taken away, no matter the reason, whether well intentioned or ill, it does a kind of violence. Representation acts as a kind of psychic mirror through which we feel our sense of self re-solidified; we identify with things we feel reflect who we are.

There was just something in this third chapter, so excellently executed, that seemed to miss the spirit of the voice it invoked. There was something that felt inauthentic to me, a quality learned rather than lived.

So I guess I’ll end, not with a Rothko this time, but with one of my favorite poems by Hughes:

Café 3a.m.

With weary sadistic eyes
Spotting fairies.
Degenerates,
some folks say.
But God, Nature,
or somebody
made them that way.
Police lady or Lesbian
Over there?