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All arrangements of these songs are INADMISSIBLE.
Inadmissible songs may appear in multiple categories as listed below.
All arrangements of these songs are INADMISSIBLE.
Inadmissible songs may appear in multiple categories as listed below.
This song belongs to the late 1800’s/early 1900's genre known as "c**n songs" that portray Black people in exaggerated and demeaning stereotypes in the lyrics and theme of the song, and often in the sheet music cover art.
C**n songs were designed to characterize Black Americans in a way that would amuse whites and play into white anxiety over the freeing of the enslaved and the threat of reconstruction. The humor often approached a sort of fear mongering not present in minstrel shows. Minstrel fantasies of life on the old plantation, populated by “happy Southern darkies” were replaced by those of a free people in competition with whites for jobs and social status. Thus, Black people were portrayed in flashy clothes with straight razors, as gamblers, hustlers, conmen, profligate womanizers, chicken thieves, buffoons, doomed social climbers, bullies, promiscuous and libidinous caricatures, and the Black Mammy-type berating and dominating her husband or lover.
Blackface Minstrelsy portrayed racist, demeaning caricatures of Black people, shown as naive buffoons or uncontrollable children who danced their way through and expressed a fondness for the system of slavery (video montage of blackface caricature).
Please see this Blackface Minstrelsy document for details on this noxious genre, its influence on the perception of Black people, and its presence today.
See individual song links for additional song-specific information and research.Alexander's Ragtime Band - 1911 (Alexander = minstrel character, dialect)
Big Bad Bill is Sweet William Now - 1924 (no dialect, but dangerous hustler & dominating wife caricatures)
Bill Bailey, Won't You Please Come Home - 1902 (dialect, philandering/useless husband/domineering wife)
Hot Town (Darktown) Strutters Ball - 1917 (dialect, blackface, offensive sheet music art)
Little Liza Loves You (aka Little 'Lize; Liza Loves You) - 1885 (dialect, direct reference to "coon")
Midnight Choo Choo -1912 (dialect, formulaic call and response, longing to return South)
Put Your Arms Around Me Honey - 1910 (dialect, silly jargon)
Medley with this song: Deed I Do (unattributed medley)
Rich Girl - 2004
This song is inadmissible due to clear cultural appropriation. Gwen Stefani has been a serial and unapologetic offender throughout her career, targeting a number of marginalized communities – African American, Chola, East Indian. This song is an especially egregious example where the target community is the Harajuku area of Tokyo, internationally known as a center of Japanese youth culture and fashion, specifically “Harajuku Girls.”
Stefani built her 2004 debut solo album, Love. Angel. Music. Baby., around a “Harajuku aesthetic.” This in and of itself may not have been an issue, but for the way she went about it. She hired 4 young Japanese and Japanese-American women, calling them her “Harajuku Girls” and naming them Love, Angel, Music, and Baby (L.A.M.B.), and even referred to them as her “imaginary friends.” She not only used them as backup dancers in her videos, but also paraded them around as her entourage in public appearances, silently voguing behind her during interviews, and reportedly contractually obligated them to not speak or speak only in Japanese in public.
Comedian Margaret Cho describes Stefani's Harajuku Girls as a minstrel show that reinforces ethnic stereotypes of Asian women as weak and submissive. Writer Mihi Ahn notes: "Stefani has taken Tokyo hipsters, sucked them dry of all their street cred, and turned them into China dolls," little more than ethnic accessories and props.
The lyrics in Rich Girl exemplify the objectification, tokenization, and fetishization that makes this song so problematic (referring to “getting” these young women and dressing and naming them as if they were dolls or pets):
I'd get me four Harajuku girls to (uh huh)
Inspire me and they'd come to my rescue
I'd dress them wicked, I'd give them names (yeah)
Love, angel, music, baby
... ...
From the hoods of Japan
... ...
See Stefani and her L.A.M.B.,* I rock the fetish
*L.A.M.B. refers to the names she gave the 4 young Japanese women
Additional References:
Gwen Stefani hits back at Harajuku Girls cultural appropriation claims
Gwen Stefani's History of Cultural Appropriation — Femestella
“R-E-S-P-E-C-T . . . Find Out What It Means to Me”: Appropriating vs. Appreciating Cultures
Dixie: Note that concern about the term “Dixie” is not an indictment of the South. The issue is that the term, “Dixie”—not the South—has become inextricably associated with racist ideologies, since the days of minstrelsy to the present. “Dixie” evokes a very specific time in the south—a nostalgic romanticizing of the antebellum South with its devastatingly cruel and dehumanizing institution of slavery and the subjugation African Americans endured for over a century afterwards. Details and additional references may be found here.
See individual song links for additional song-specific information and research.Are You From Dixie? - 1915
Indiana Andy (A Yankee Doodle Dandy in a Dixieland Band) - circa 1977
Let Me Sing and I'm Happy - 1928
Mardi Gras March - 1959
Medley with this song: Dancin' In the Streets of New Orleans/Mardi Gras March medley
Original Dixieland One-Step - 1917
Swanee -1919
That's a Plenty - 1914/ lyrics added 1949
Idealized old South: during the decades after the civil war, a genre of songs (along with other arts and discourse) emerged in support of the “Lost Cause” mythology, idealizing the antebellum South in order to assuage White Southerners, maintain the antebellum way of life, portray slavery as a benign institution, and roll back the emancipation of the freed. (reference 1 | reference 2)
See individual song links for additional song-specific information and research.Are You From Dixie? - 1915
Swanee -1919
Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah - 1946
Alaskan Bliss (parody of Mary's a Grand Old Name) - 2019 (stereotyped racial identity of the Arctic indigenous)
Huron Carol (Jesous Ahatonhia) with de Brébeuf / Middleton lyrics - c1640
Little Gomez - 1985 (racist Latino/Mexican stereotypes)
Sheik of Araby - 1921
Inadmissible due to the clear existence of the “Jezebel” trope - a negative and derogatory portrayal of a Black woman as a hyper-sexualized character.
The Jezebel stereotype originated during slavery as a rationalization for sexual relations between white men and black women, especially the rape of the enslaved by slavers. This portrayal of black women as lascivious by nature and using sex to manipulate men is an enduring stereotype to this day. The descriptive words associated with this stereotype are singular in their focus: seductive, alluring, worldly, beguiling, tempting, hypersexual, and lewd. Historically, white women, as a category, are portrayed as models of self-respect, self-control, and modesty - even sexual purity, but black women are often portrayed as innately promiscuous, even predatory. (reference)
See individual song links for additional song-specific information and research.Lady Marmalade - 1974
Lady Marmalade was not written during the antebellum, reconstruction, or Tin Pan Alley years. Nevertheless, this modern song -- written in 1974 by two White male composers, inspired by one of the composers’ experiences in New Orleans’ red light district -- plays into the Jezebel stereotype, describing a worldly and seductive temptress with imagery of skin, the “color of café au lait” awakening “the savage beast inside.” The original lyrics in the first release of the song (by The Eleventh Hour, with lead vocals by one of the composers) are in the first-person, male point of view.
While a case may be made for the LaBelle recording having turned the trope on its head, “blowing up the racist Jezebel stereotype by flaunting their sexual agency” (reference), this would not be the case with mostly White singers performing the song.
Louisville Lou - 1923
Sweet Georgia Brown - 1925
The lyrics have been sanitized in SA arrangements removing references to a black prostitute, so many have interpreted this as a song about a flirtatious, coquettish woman...but the original sheet music clearly indicate this is a tongue in cheek song written by White men who wrote about a naughty Jezebel sex worker.
The song was used in the 1976 Black musical Bubbling Brown Sugar: performance of Sweet Georgia Brown
In the 1943 Black musical film, Cabin in the Sky (based upon the 1940 Broadway musical of the same name), a character named Georgia Brown -- a beautiful gold digger -- was patterned using the Jezebel stereotype and the character’s name related to the song “Sweet Georgia Brown.”
Cabin in the Sky videos: Lena Horne | Cabin in the Sky 1943 Ethel Waters Eng13
The film also pushed the stereotype that lighter complexion black women (i.e., those like Georgia Brown) were beautiful/sexy; whereas darker complexion black women (like Petunia) were not perceived this way.
Other historical significance:
Black women had limited opportunities after slavery was abolished, many women were alone, separated from their families and found themselves having to resort to prostitution to make a living. Many men who could afford to pay good money for their services were white.
The mammy is the “most well-known and enduring racial caricature of African American women.” While the term, “mammy,” was used by some southerners to refer to their mothers, it does not negate the potency of the harmful caricature and the response elicited whenever that term appears in lyrics.
The Mammy was created by white Southerners to redeem the relationship between black women and white men within slave society in response to the antislavery attack from the North during the ante-bellum period. From slavery through the Jim Crow era, the mammy image served the political, social, and economic interests of mainstream white America. During slavery, the mammy caricature was posited as proof that blacks -- in this case, black women -- were contented, even happy, as slaves. Her wide grin, hearty laughter, and loyal servitude were offered as evidence of the supposed humanity of the institution of slavery.
The mammy caricature portrayed an obese, coarse, maternal figure. She had great love for her white "family," but often treated her own family with disdain. Although she had children, sometimes many, she was completely desexualized. She "belonged" to the white family, though it was rarely stated. Unlike Sambo, she was a faithful worker. She had no black friends; the white family was her entire world.
The Mammy Caricature - Anti-black Imagery - Jim Crow Museum
Blackface Minstrelsy portrayed racist, demeaning caricatures of Black people, shown as naive buffoons or uncontrollable children who danced their way through and expressed a fondness for the system of slavery (video montage of blackface caricature).
Please see this Blackface Minstrelsy document for details on this noxious genre, its influence on the perception of Black people, and its presence today.
See individual song links for additional song-specific information and research.Camptown Races, The - 1850 This is a minstrel song.
Hello My Baby (Hello! Ma Baby!) - 1899 (dialect, blackface)
Honey Dat I Love So Well - 1898/99 (dialect, blackface)
Hot Time In The Old Town Tonight - 1896 (dialect, blackface)
I Love To Sing-a - 1936
Let Me Sing and I'm Happy - 1928
Oh Susanna - 1848 This is a minstrel song.
Swanee -1919
Because the original song is a Negro Spiritual -- the central medium by which the enslaved expressed the suffering of an inhuman existence* (reference 1, reference 2) -- it is HIGHLY disrespectful to adapt this song with altered or parody lyrics. Therefore, this adaptation and any other such adaptations or parodies of any Negro Spiritual/Work Song are inadmissible.
See individual song link for additional song-specific information and research.Down by the Riverside - "bright-eyed doll" Adaptation - 1953 (Please see the research document for the original song.)
Birth of the Blues - 1926 ("darkies" in original lyrics, stereotypical visualization of Black people)
Indiana Andy (A Yankee Doodle Dandy in a Dixieland Band) - circa 1977 (key references and tropes that hearken back to songs romanticizing the Old South, raggy music)
Leroy The Redneck Reindeer - 1995 (stereotypical/derogatory characterization of poor White people)
My Old Kentucky Home - 1852 (used in minstrel shows, longing for idyllic enslaved life in Kentucky)
South Rampart Street Parade - 1938 (dialect, stereotypical depictions, reference to enslaved encampments)
That's a Plenty - 1914/ lyrics added 1949 (caricatures Black people)
When I See an Elephant Fly - 1941 (stereotypical, minstrel-like crows that perform the song in Disney's animated film, Dumbo)
This song is inadmissible because its lyrics and message trivialize* an egregiously violent and racist event in American history. The 1949 Los Angeles Zoot Suit Riots (10 nights of mayhem) resulted from a culmination of anti-Mexican-American sentiment and began with White uniformed servicemen brutally attacking Mexican American youths at a jazz club (some as young as 12-14 years old), targeting those in zoot suits.
Zoot suits were an attire that originated among stylish African Americans in Harlem, where dancers wore loose clothing that accentuated their movements. The style became popular among Mexican Americans and other minority groups and soon became seen by the White majority as a “badge of delinquency.”
While amazingly, no one was killed during the riots, over the course of 10 nights, thousands of White servicemen, off-duty police, and civilians inflicted terrifying racially-targeted violence throughout downtown Los Angeles and surrounding minority communities (e.g., a Black defense plant worker was yanked off a streetcar, after which one of his eyes was gouged out with a knife”). Reference
*While acknowledging the Riots as “shameful,” “despicable and unfortunate,” and the sailors as “angry, drunk and misguided,” the song’s composer Steve Perry has called Zoot Suit Riot “an expression of proud marginalism,” in an appropriation of the Mexican American Pachuco counterculture:
I guess it seemed like a Pachuco rallying cry that could double as a dance anthem for those of us interested in swing music and culture at a time when nobody else was.[1]
To me, the simplified duality I used as I wrote the song was: we swingers were in solidarity with our counter cultural ancestors the “Zoot Suiters” and we were opposed to the ‘sailors’ who represented the squares who weren’t yet hip to our growing communal jive.[2]
Thus, Perry obliviously appropriates a counterculture arising out of racial oppression and equates the racialized violence of the riots to a clash between hip swing music enthusiasts and the “squares.”
[1] Steve Perry of Cherry Poppin Daddies : Songwriter Interviews
[2] https://www.facebook.com/CherryPoppinDaddies/posts/10153951684586260:0
Please see additional details about the riots below.
See individual song links for additional song-specific information and research.Zoot Suit Riot - 1997
Grapefruit Diet (Parody of Zoot Suit Riot) - 1998 While this song is not racially problematic, it is inadmissible because the original song that it parodies is inadmissible.