Yesterday, Robert Stanley Martin argued that there was satirical intent in R. Crumb’s Cheap Thrills album cover.
Contrary to Noah Berlatsky’s reading of the second panel in his “Crumbface” essay (click here), I don’t feel any of it is gratuitous. It’s a pointed rebuke that did not flatter its ostensible targets. Telling Joplin that’s she’s engaging in a “Mammy” routine, as well as identifying her audience in part with an Al Jolson figure, is not something that would be calculated to endear Crumb to either. And given the avowedly anti-racist liberal politics of the San Francisco counterculture scene that Joplin and her early audiences belonged to, Crumb also pointed the way for their political enemies to cluck at them for hypocrisy. It didn’t cause offense because Joplin and her audience were sophisticated enough to both recognize and at least tacitly acknowledge the failing Crumb was highlighting.
It’s a thoughtful defense. I’m still not convinced though.
First, Robert says that Joplin and her fans would not have found Crumb’s satire of their black appropriations comfortable.
However, Drew Friedman’s account seems to contradict this:
Interestingly, Crumb’s original intention was for this art to run on the back cover and a portrait of Joplin to run on the front. But Joplin loved the the comic strip art so much, (she was an avid underground comics fan, especially the work of Crumb, and already at that point in her escalating career, had the power to hire her own cover artist), she decided to run it on the front.
That certainly doesn’t sound like Crumb’s satire made Joplin at all uncomfortable. I haven’t been able to find anything online suggesting that fans were put off either. Maybe Joplin’s just kind of dumb of course…or maybe, as Robert suggested, she was self-aware enough to find a pointed reference to her black roots amusing. Still, if satire doesn’t cause its targets even the least discomfort — if they in fact want to put it on the cover of their product — does it make sense to call it satire?
More important than intention or audience reaction, though, is the image itself. And I don’t think that image sustains a claim of satire.
Look at the rest of the album cover; the images other than the blackface caricatures. None of those images is satirical, or pointed. Instead, they’re silly and/or sexy and/or energetic. Many of them rely on goofy puns (“Piece of My Heart”, “Combination of the Two”) The center top image shows a woman (probably meant to be Joplin) in a sultry pose with prominent nipples clearly visible through her top. On the left hand side, there’s a drawing of a goofy, stereotypical Indian with traditional headdress. On the bottom, there’s a caricature which seems to conflate Jesus and Eastern mysticism.
Robert argues that the blackface caricatures are different. Instead of an expression of high-spirited high-times and easy irreverence, he argues, the blackface caricatures are a critique. In them, Crumb is showing Joplin’s connection to and reliance on a black musical tradition, and linking her to earlier white performers who relied on that tradition, like Al Jolson.
But, as an alternate reading…couldn’t Crumb just be more or less thoughtlessly using blackface iconography because it’s funny and energetic? Couldn’t the images just be examples of high-spirited high-times, and of Crumb’s irreverent refusal to bow to the 60s equivalent of political correctness? Couldn’t his use of blackface be like his use of prominent nipples or his use of a sacrilegious Jesus caricature? That is, couldn’t the blackface caricatures be used because they are fun, and because they are (at least somewhat) shocking, rather than because they skewer Joplin and her fans?
Intent is hard to parse, of course. But I think if you’re going to argue for satire, you need to explain what Crumb has done to distinguish between blackface-as-critique and blackface-as-nostalgic-scandalous-good-times. If the cover can be read as fun good times, and the blackface can be easily incorporated into the idea of fun good times, and Joplin and her fans embraced it, presumably as an icon of fun good times, it’s really not clear to me why I should give Crumb credit for making a pointed political statement. On the contrary, it seems to me that he’s using blackface like he’s using nipples and silly puns — as a cheap thrill. And, as I said before (to Jeet Heer’s annoyance)using blackface as a cheap thrill still makes Crumb, to my mind, kind of a shithead.
I have to say too…even if Robert is right, and it’s a satirical take, I still find it pretty dumb. As I note in that Comixology article, “Summertime” is one of the great interracial collaborations in American song. Written by George Gershwin about the black experience, it was based on Eastern European folk melodies and adopted by many of the greatest American performers of various races. It’s a song whose history challenges the usual narrative of white appropriation of black music. George Gershwin didn’t don blackface to become a pretend black person; he collaborated with black people over decades in order to interpret an American experience through an American art that was neither white nor black.
The usual narrative of blackface appropriation— applied to Elvis, or Janis Joplin, or whoever — is itself part of our racist past. It assumes that blacks are the authentic creators of music, the magical Negroes, to whom whites must go to draw upon true musical genius. And I think you can actually see Crumb’s cover as plugging directly into this; his use of black caricatures does not so much critique Joplin’s music as light-heartedly validate it. The caricature in the center bottom panel, the black man digging Joplin’s music, is not a sneer at Joplin — it’s a goofy thumb’s up. See! Whoohoo! Even black people dig this music! Similarly, the shouting baby, all gusto and throat, is not a critique, but a funky wink. Joplin gets her lungs from that true source. And that true source is a stereotypical black mammy.
American music is, and has always been, both black and white, with performers of every race borrowing and learning from each other. The reason blackface is racist is not because white performers were inspired by blacks, but because they gilded their black influences with invidious racist stereotypes. Crumb’s use of blackface caricature is, therefore, neither fun nor, even in the most generous interpretation, insightful. It perpetuates simplistic images of black people and of race in the U.S. The Cheap Thrills cover is an ongoing testament to Crumb’s great illustration and design skills, and to the extremely limited intelligence with which he often employs them.
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Update: This post is part of an ongoing roundtable on R. Crumb and race.
I just went ahead and listened to various recordings of Summertime – the Vaughan one you posted, one straight from Porgy & Bess, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Janis Joplin. Of them all, Joplin’s seems to be by far the furthest in the direction of the notion of “authenticity” represented by the blackface mammy stereotype character. The Ella Fitzgerald recording has a keening quality, and Holiday’s has a certain roughness, or at any rate more roughness than the other recordings – but none of them are as rough, as mournful and keening and Authentic as Joplin’s. My opinion on Joplin should be taken with a grain of salt since I’ve hardly ever listened to her at all and know very little about her, but I wouldn’t exactly be shocked if she was reaching for a very romantic (and very racist) idea of Authentic Black Music. The sort of thing that might be represented to her crowd by musicians like Leadbelly, I suppose – “pure,” “raw” music, straight from the cotton fields, “discovered” by white musicians and music folk (Bob Dylan!).
Perhaps Crumb could be making fun of that reaching-for-Authenticity-as-represented-by-bullshit-notions-of-blackness act with the mammy caricature…. Then again, his own musical taste seems to be very much about fetishising the Exotic, the Authentic, the Olde and the Raw, not just in music made by black people but by poor rural white folks, and by various people of color from what one of his illustrations in The Sweeter Side of R. Crumb deems “the torrid regions of the world.”
I don’t know exactly how thoughtful he was about using the mammy figure, but at its very most it couldn’t have gone beyond “ha ha, lookit us, Janis fetishises Black Authenticity and so do I.” Which, you know, is pretty damned boneheaded and insufficient. And racist.
Of course, I’m clueless as to why he would use the mammy figure for Summertime in particular. Is it because of the song’s line about cotton fields? Is her rendition of Summertime more screamingly Authentic than the other tracks on the album, or her other recordings to date? I dunno. Maybe it was just sort of random, perhaps it just sorta popped into his head to use it ’cause, you know, it’s one of his ways of being Edgy? I sure hope not…
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…if satire doesn’t cause its targets even the least discomfort — if they in fact want to put it on the cover of their product — does it make sense to call it satire?
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Why not? Does “satire” necessarily have to be barbed, cutting? Lemme look the term up to be sure:
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sat·ire
1. the use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc.
2. a literary composition, in verse or prose, in which human folly and vice are held up to scorn, derision, or ridicule.
3. a literary genre comprising such compositions.
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Ulp! I guess it does…
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Anja Flower says:
Of course, I’m clueless as to why he would use the mammy figure for Summertime in particular. Is it because of the song’s line about cotton fields? Is her rendition of Summertime more screamingly Authentic than the other tracks on the album, or her other recordings to date? I dunno. Maybe it was just sort of random, perhaps it just sorta popped into his head to use it ’cause, you know, it’s one of his ways of being Edgy? I sure hope not…
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Well, what do the lyrics say?
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Summertime,
And the livin’ is easy
Fish are jumpin’
And the cotton is high
Your daddy’s rich
And your mamma’s good lookin’
So hush little baby
Don’t you cry
One of these mornings
You’re going to rise up singing
Then you’ll spread your wings
And you’ll take to the sky
But till that morning
There’s a’nothing can harm you
With daddy and mamma standing by
Summertime,
And the livin’ is easy
Fish are jumpin’
And the cotton is high
Your daddy’s rich
And your mamma’s good lookin’
So hush little baby
Don’t you cry
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http://www.stlyrics.com/songs/g/georgegershwin8836/summertime299720.html
The setting is the South; a caretaker, who surely is a black “Mammy” as traditional among wealthy whites there, is comfortingly singing to a crying baby. Crumb’s rendering is pretty straightforward; and note the melancholy expression on the Mammy’s face; she knows she won’t “rise up singing…spread [her] wings
And…take to the sky.”
Well, if the song is indeed sung by a mammy-type character in Porgy & Bess, that might explain things some. The Wikipedia article on the opera (which I’ve neither listened to nor watched) documents concerns from various quarters about the opera engaging in racial stereotyping from when it was first released onwards, and says that it continues to be controversial amongst African-Americans: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porgy_and_Bess
It could be that Gershwin actually used a mammy stereotype character, and Crumb’s making fun of that; even if that were the case and we somehow came to the conclusion that it was okay for him to use the derogatory image in this instance, though, it wouldn’t change the fact that his habits in using racial imagery are a bit racist at best and horrifying at worst.
I haven’t seen the entire opera, though I’ve heard portions of it…and this song a lot.
The character singing is a black woman. She isn’t a mammy character, though, as I remember it…and, yes, according to Wikipedia; she’s a young mother, and she’s singing to her own baby, not to a white charge. The lyrics of hope contrast with the bluesy music; it’s always seemed to me to be clearly bittersweet, singing about hope but aware of the very limiting realities facing blacks. It’s also sung in the opera in an urban setting, so it’s somewhat nostalgic and romanticizing rural life.
African American performers have done various things with it…I think Vaughn in different versions emphasizes the melancholy and the longing. Joplin’s is mostly about her barreling through; she and her backing band lack the subtlety to do the song justice, and I think her failure emphasizes the uncomfortable quest for authenticity that can mar her performances (it’s much less of a problem on something like Ball and Chain, where she’s channeling more straightforward anguish and manages to translate it more easily into her own emotional experience of heartbreak; the authenticity comes from breakup pain rather than from the specific history of African-American oppression.)
Joplin’s version is not good, but Crumb’s version is the worst interpretation of the song pretty much ever, I think. Even if you think he’s making fun of Joplin (which I think is dubious), turning Summertime into a blackface mammy caricature is really egregious. It’s exactly the sort of thing a racist might do, it ends up ridiculing and patronizing the hope and pain in the song essentially on the grounds that black people are just goofy caricatures and their hope and pain is kind of fun and kind of funny.
I don’t think Crumb is actually trying for racism or anything; I agree with Trina that the album cover isn’t hateful. I think Crumb’s just being thoughtless. The result is still pretty horrible though.
Just to reiterate…the lyrics in the song (which Mike reprinted) are sung by a black urban woman to her own baby. The melancholy in the lyrics is not for herself, but for her child. There’s a nostalgia for a rural south…but for an imaginary rural south, free of oppression, where her child could grow up free.
Crumb’s version, by making the woman a mammy, trivializes her grief (which seems either unmotivated or entirely selfish, rather than based on her worries for her child) and also literalizes the nostalgia, which in his version is quaint and fun rather than, as in the song, deeply ambivalent.
One of the things that’s most invidious about the mammy stereotype is the assumption inherent in it that black people have no families; that their devotion is entirely towards their white charges. Gershwin’s song, on the other hand, is about the pain black mothers feel at raising children in the teeth of oppression. Crumb is taking a song which pushes back quite strongly against racist stereotypes, and reinterpreting it through the prism of those same racist stereotypes.
Noah –
“African American performers have done various things with it…I think Vaughn in different versions emphasizes the melancholy and the longing. Joplin’s is mostly about her barreling through; she and her backing band lack the subtlety to do the song justice, and I think her failure emphasizes the uncomfortable quest for authenticity that can mar her performances (it’s much less of a problem on something like Ball and Chain, where she’s channeling more straightforward anguish and manages to translate it more easily into her own emotional experience of heartbreak; the authenticity comes from breakup pain rather than from the specific history of African-American oppression.)”
I’m a Joplin fan – certainly more so than you are, I suspect – but I have to pretty much agree with you regarding that particular song. I’ve never thought of it as a song that specifically requires a black singer though: the first artist it always evokes in my mind is Peggy Lee, who did an absolutely beautiful version of it.
Re. Crumb’s blackface art – I find “satire” a bit of a stretch but I can certainly see it as awkward parody.
My impression is that he’s intellectually disapproving (in that he recognises the racism and understands that racism is wrong) but emotionally affectionate (in that he genuinely enjoys the aesthetic and can’t separate it from his comforting obsession with nostalgia) towards the tropes he’s playing with, which makes it feel more complicated and uncomfortable than it would be if he were just being transgressive for transgression’s sake.
What Joplin and her audience got from it is a rather different question of course.
I like Joplin! Ball and Chain is great; Piece of My Heart is fun. “Mercedes Benz” is a favorite. “Summertime” is a low point for her, though.
I don’t think the song requires a black singer by any means. Chris Connor’s version of it is beautiful. I haven’t heard Peggy Lee’s, but I can certainly imagine her doing a great job. And Doc Watson’s version is superb.
Your take on Crumb seems plausible.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…the lyrics in the song…are sung by a black urban woman to her own baby…The melancholy in the lyrics is not for herself, but for her child…
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“Your daddy’s rich
And your mamma’s good lookin’”?
Rich? As it turns out, — Google’ing more info –the father was an impoverished fisherman; so the song is filled with comforting lies and dreams.
Yet it’s very likely that all Crumb had to go on for his illustrations was listening to the songs, reading the song lyrics at best. Unless he hit the library and researched “Summertime” and “Porgy and Bess,” (good luck in finding anywhere near as much info as the Web makes readily accessible) just from the lyrics, he’d surely assume the same as I did; that this was a Southern “mammy” singing a lullaby to a rich white baby.
Re “Summertime”:
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Gershwin began composing the song in December 1933, attempting to create his own spiritual in the style of the African American folk music of the period….Gershwin had completed setting DuBose Heyward’s poem to music by February 1934…
The song is sung multiple times throughout Porgy and Bess, first by Clara in Act I as a lullaby [to her own baby] and soon after as counterpoint to the craps game scene, in Act II in a reprise by Clara, and in Act III by Bess, singing to Clara’s baby.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summertime_%28song%29
What makes the song great (and “Porgy and Bess” is loaded with masterworks; I love “It Ain’t Necessarily So”) at
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95761927
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Porgy and Bess tells the story of Porgy, a disabled black beggar living in the slums of Charleston, South Carolina. It deals with his attempts to rescue Bess from the clutches of Crown, her violent and possessive lover, and Sportin’ Life, the drug dealer…
…Clara, a young mother, sings a lullaby to her baby (Summertime) as the working men prepare for a game of craps…Clara’s husband, the fisherman Jake, tries his own lullaby…with little effect.
Jake and the other fishermen prepare for work (It take a long pull to get there). Clara asks Jake not to go because it is time for the annual storms, but he tells her that they desperately need the money.
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From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porgy_and_Bess , which features a fascinating look at the various productions of the opera…
I’ll never forget seeing Janis and Raquel Welch on a “Dick Cavett” show. Welch in passing mentioned comics, and Joplin — the previous guest — leaned over enthusiastically, saying something like, “Isn’t Crumb great?” Welch didn’t get who she was talking about at all…
Sonuvagun, here it is:
Raquel Welch, Dick Cavett and Janis Joplin talk (June 25, 1970): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXs2UZ3zgxE&feature=related
Janis Joplin on Dick Cavett (July 18, 1969): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1UJ5Keo3TQ (More Cavett interviews with her on YouTube…)
I have to think that if Crumb really wanted to send up the politics of race he would have put blackface on Joplin herself, and not just drawn one of his go-to mammy characters. He’s said at various points that this was a commercial job that he had no particular lover for, and my guess is that if he was poking fun, he wasn’t trying too hard. The thing is, he loves drawing so much that the images compel anyway.
Dan Clowes once said something to the effect that comics fans, and he was including himself here, long for the idea of a forgotten history populated by great artists working outside the mainstream. But if you look at the actual history, you see great technicians churning out rote genre work (he cites Toth). I wonder if Crumb isn’t part of this… we want to claim legitimacy for the medium so we’re overly inclined to forgive its shortcomings.
I agree that the cover seems much more like commercial work for pay than like a personal statement.
Porgy and Bess was and remains a huge landmark in American culture; any library could have told Crumb more about the song if he’d wanted to bother. But, as Nate says, he probably wasn’t putting that much thought into it.
I love the Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday versions! The version of Summertime I have on my iPod is sung by a soprano, which was definitely a mistake … the song is at its best when sung by a woman (or man) with a deep voice, a contralto or an “earthy” voice like Holiday.
I’m a big fan of Gershwin … and I don’t actually have anything to say about Crumb. Um, back to the comics discussion.
I don’t think I wandered too far into issues of race a few years back when I did all this, and I’m afraid most of the links to the songs have long since disappeared, but I had some fun looking at all kinds of versions of “Summertime,” and I figured as long as you are talking about it, you might want to check into this series: http://euclidrecords.blogspot.com/search/label/SUMMERTIME
Hey Steve; sorry that got trapped in the filter first time out. Thanks for the link!
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Noah Berlatsky says:
I agree that the cover seems much more like commercial work for pay than like a personal statement.
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Yeah; look at the way Crumb flatteringly depicted the male band-member just above the “Hell’s Angels” logo, with groupies swooning over him. Crumb detested rock-star guys!
Do you know what cartoons are? These are cartoons. You whippersnappers may not realize it, but you aren’t required to act like you’re sucking up to college professors your whole life! No one who was there was worried about “stereotype” hogwash, and that isn’t Jesus, it’s James Gurley for Christsakes. You won’t ever know what’s funny about this album cover. Get over it. Worry about the lameness that confronts you in the mirror every morning.
Kudos for deploying “whippersnappers”! Confusion to the youngsters…
Do you know what blogs are? This is a blog. You old fogeys may not realize it, but you aren’t required to lick Crumb’s horny toes all your life.
Whoa, Noah! My bloghole was totally stripmined by your reply. So badly eroded I thought I’d achieved extinction. But after about two minutes, I struggled to move around a bit and realized I’d survived! Not only that, but the desperation with which you must have waited for nearly two years for someone to comment struck me as pitiful. So I’ll cut you some slack, if you’ll allow me to present a short history lesson: If, in 25-40 years a small group of young people for some archaeological purpose uncovers this blog as you call it, their misinterpretations of it will no doubt seem pitiful to you. And if you still feel at all that your mental masturbations in the ripe old year of 2011 are worth defending, I wish you luck trying to make yourself understood. But don’t kill yourself over it, kid…Speaking of Crumb’s horny old toes, you haven’t researched them too well if this “mammy figure” is the most disturbing caricature you’ve discovered. For starters I’d recommend the cover of Mystic Funnies No. 1. That should clear some of the steam off your mirror…
No, man. I get notifications when someone comments. It’s technology.
I’ve talked about Crumb’s limitations in other places about the blog too. Feel free to look them up and raise your blood pressure, if defending Crumb from random old blog posts is your thing.
I think Crumb’s “Summertime” image distills his opinion of the song, as a contrived, nostalgic, Hollywoodized memory of the racist South, its imagery of a “mammy” figure with a white infant derived from Gone With the Wind. That assumption is sensible from the lyrics themselves (cotton is high/your daddy’s rich)… OK, they don’t match the musical, but a catchy song has longer legs than the story of any musical it came from. Further, if the song is a repeated refrain in a story about a struggling black family in an urban setting, isn’t that suggesting that they’re nostalgic for the life of “picking cotton”? Or that, in the story, it might be intended to register as a traditional song the family inherited? (“Gershwin began composing the song in December 1933, attempting to create his own spiritual in the style of the African American folk music of the period…”) Your take on the song seems overly generous in comparison with your usual crabbed, vindictive style in dealing with alternative/underground comics, and is a strong endorsement considering that the opera (which, er, you have not seen) has not been unanimously embraced by black critics and artists.
““Summertime” is one of the great interracial collaborations in American song. Written by George Gershwin about the black experience, it was based on Eastern European folk melodies and adopted by many of the greatest American performers of various races. It’s a song whose history challenges the usual narrative of white appropriation of black music.”
Also, your perception that there is a “sacrilegious” image that “conflates Jesus with Eastern mysticism” somewhere on the cover is strange, and doesn’t inspire confidence in your grasp on the hippie culture of the period.
I’m really 100% ok with thinking that Summertime is more valuable than all of Crumb’s work and that of any number of underground cartoonists combined, really. I don’t even think this is a particularly controversial opinion.
The idea that Crumb is criticizing the racial implications would be a lot stronger if he didn’t use a random racist caricature elsewhere on the cover. Also, you know, if he didn’t put the black mammy holding a white baby, since the song is sung by a black woman to her black child. He’s introducing the stereotype, not critiquing it.
I’d be interested to see which critics have criticized Summertime’s racial politics and what they’ve said. Source?
I like too that I’m supposed to be the contrarian philistine, and you’re seriously arguing that that cover is somehow a greater and more racially thoughtful piece of art than Gershwin’s Summertime.
Hey, Noah, so good of you to have invented the internet and the pc. They’ve made my life so much richer. I always wondered who I should thank. Unfortunately your retorts are not challenging and you don’t understand when someone makes fun of you in a kindly way. I’m not inspired to read more of your stuff and be edjumacated further by ya, sonny. Defending Crumb isn’t my issue. You do his advertising for him. But I would like to express my thanks for giving me an opportunity to provide a clue to the essence of the Cheap Thrills cover, in case anyone who happens along is interested. Though its source may be mildewed, the clue remains fresh in the sense of how the images were viewed by humans at the time. There are three things about this cover that are truly funny. They are: (1) the audience, supposedly from the Fillmore, (2) the audience in Sam Andrew’s panel, (3) the pipe on the table. The pipe is best of all, but some things are practically incommunicable—people nowadays won’t understand them anymore.
John, you suggested I needed to be offended at different Crumb. I was just telling you I’d done that, and that you could read it if you liked. If you don’t that’s fine.
You seem to be suggesting that the cover is a period piece that doesn’t really resonate outside of its time. I guess I can see that; it was a commercial job, and I don’t think Crumb really transcended, or tried to transcend, the cramped hippie humor of the day. In most respects, it’s one of those, if you were there and identify with the scene you think it’s great, and if you don’t you can safely ignore it kind of things. The racist caricatures are actually offensive and stupid, unfortunately…but they’re also maybe the only reason anyone but Crumb partisans could possibly care about the cover one way or another at this point.
Oh, and it’s silly to say I’m advertising Crumb. He’s incredibly famous and successful. He certainly doesn’t need the marketing bump from my little blog.
Noah, I am not an analyst of Crumb, and have probably seen only a small part of his total output. Weren’t most of the blackface images employed early in his career, around the time of the Cheap Thrills cover? My point was that what’s on the CT cover is probably his least offensive use of said images. If you blogged about Angelfood McSpade, you’re correct, I missed it.
I’m not suggesting you need to be offended by anything. You don’t seem to need encouragement in that regard. I wouldn’t suggest that you not be offended either, but it might be helpful for you to realize the cost of being regularly offended–it causes you to miss things. As for suggesting the CT cover is a period piece, I don’t think I went that far. On the other hand, if I “translated” it for you I doubt you’d feel differently than you already do. That could just be your reaction, or it could be inflexibility. It could also be that the cover was a job, quickly turned out, local in character, and certainly produced without foreseeing that it would be discussed as Art and Social Commentary forty-five years later.
I’ll speak for myself. Although I don’t think my recollection is too distorted a representation of the general tenor of the time, this is, in fact, the way I looked at it. The blackface images used on Cheap Thrills reflected white attitudes of prior times, acknowledging that those attitudes were not completely dead. That’s what I thought Crumb’s intention was, and I considered those images the least striking aspect of the work. It’s a humorous cover that’s making fun of San Francisco at the time it was drawn. Gags explained are gags that aren’t funny, but without some effort to fathom context you’ll never be able to understand the humor of another time, or your own even. Everything appears flat, two-dimensional, mean.
From that flat point of view you could be tempted to refer to cramped hippie humor or say something like, “…if you were there and identify with the scene you think it’s great, and if you don’t you can safely ignore it kind of things.” That allows you to safely ignore Crumb’s point (he didn’t identify with the scene), as well as mine, which is that it’s more important to examine one’s own prejudices and bigotry than it is to declare what is Offensive. Because being offended is the path of least resistance–the easiest way out. It allows you to conveniently determine “the only reason” why a Crumb non-partisan such as myself might bother to speak with you.
Back then we naively thought, generally speaking and whether or not we identified with the San Francisco Scene (it pains me to write such words), racialist attitudes and motives were finished though not quite gone. I guarantee we never imagined being lectured to by two generations of the most privileged beneficiaries of human history about how racist we are. That’s a joke a person has to live long enough to appreciate. It’s what Voltaire meant when he called God a comedian.
Well, maybe we were asking for it…Are you certain, Noah, that you’ve identified all the racist caricatures on Cheap Thrills? Surely you don’t want to miss any.
Anybody can miss things, of course. Reverence and sycophancy can be blinding too.
“The blackface images used on Cheap Thrills reflected white attitudes of prior times, acknowledging that those attitudes were not completely dead. ”
Sure. But cheerfully retailing racist attitudes and iconography is still racist.
I’m really not convinced that Crumb’s mildly ironic take on the San Francisco scene constitutes distance from it in any real way. Hipsters and hippies aren’t all that far removed.
Also…the idea that finding racism offensive, or pointing it out, is somehow the path of least resistance seems pretty clearly refuted by most of my discussions about Crumb, including this one. People get really, really pissed off if you point out the really quite obvious fact that Crumb’s take on race is often stupid and kind of racist. The road of least resistance in these cases is actually generally to circle the wagons, call Crumb a genius, and let the fanboys rally to you.
I like the argument that I shouldn’t point out racism because hippies some decades ago thought they’d overcome it for all time and were therefore allowed to retail racist caricatures and slurs to their heart’s content. That goes beyond self-refutation and right on into self-parody.
And furthermore…I just ran across this really sweet anecdote about Crumb. So what the hey, thought I’d share it.
Thanks, that was a real sweet story!
Now, back to our usual comedy routine:
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Noah Berlatsky says:
“The blackface images used on Cheap Thrills reflected white attitudes of prior times, acknowledging that those attitudes were not completely dead. ”
Sure. But cheerfully retailing racist attitudes and iconography is still racist.
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How nice to be able to hand down moral condemnation from such lofty heights. With utterly clear-cut certainty, too; Mr. A would be proud!
There are a lot of African-Americans who enjoy collecting racist tchotchkes; were the antique store owners literally “retailing”them “racist,” the folks who bought and displayed them in their homes “racist” too?
A tale of the ultimate such collector, and the museum he filled:
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/04/new-racism-museum-reveals-the-ugly-truth-behind-aunt-jemima/256185/
“The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia”: http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/
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There are about fifty thousand collectors of “Black Memorabilia” — an umbrella term which includes any object related to the African American experience. Black memorabilia, especially the older artifacts, include a disproportionately large number of racist anti-black collectibles. Since the 1970s there has been an upsurge in interest in black collectibles, especially blatantly racist objects. The high demand has led to an escalation of prices…
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http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/newforms/
And, who says Crumb was simply being utterly, blithely “cheerful”? It was the 60s when he rendered that “Cheap Thrills” cover, not the 40s. Civil rights, protests against racism were hardly unheard-off. Thus, here and in his “Angelfood McSpade” stories, he was perfectly well aware of the troubling, forbidden, outrageous aspect of those stereotypically caricatured characters.
Indeed, wasn’t “outrageousness” of all manner, all manner of shocking sexual and violent stuff pretty standard in Crumb’s work?
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People get really, really pissed off if you point out the really quite obvious fact that Crumb’s take on race is often stupid and kind of racist.
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Consider the possibility that “Crumb’s take on race” is more complex than a “really quite obvious fact,” and therefore apt to be misconstrued — or not perceived at all — by those averse to such complexity, who see things with a Mr. A-like simplicity.
And other “non-racist” comics creators have featured “coon”-type characters; neither espousing racism nor condemning it, merely playing with “non-P.C.” imagery, or giving a nod to the stereotypes that were common at the time some of these stories are set in.
So, we are being told what are the “correct” attitudes for artists and their audiences to have; if your work is not utterly, properly P.C., if you’re not totally outraged and condemnatory towards anything which fails to be so “enlightened,” then you’re at the very least “kind of racist.”
I’ve a copy of the book mentioned below:
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Robert Crumb Help! #22 “Harlem Sketchbook” Illustration Original Art (Warren, 1965). Harvey Kurtzman’s first assignment for the young cartoonist who had submitted several Fritz the Cat pages to his Help! magazine was to send Robert Crumb down to Harlem, armed only with a sketchbook. In return, Crumb supplied Harvey with fifteen humorous drawings, including this charming one of two gentlemen strolling down Seventh Avenue, discussing a deep topic.
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From http://comics.ha.com/c/item.zx?saleNo=7059&lotIdNo=154002 ; the art in question:
http://dyn2.heritagestatic.com/lf?set=path%5B8/1/6/1/8161656%5D,sizedata%5B450x2000%5D&call=url%5Bfile:product.chain%5D
More from that book:
https://hoodedutilitarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Cr6.jpg
http://dyn3.heritagestatic.com/lf?set=path%5B6/7/8/0/6780704%5D,sizedata%5B450x2000%5D&call=url%5Bfile:product.chain%5D
http://dyn1.heritagestatic.com/lf?set=path%5B8/5/2/6/8526279%5D,sizedata%5B450x2000%5D&call=url%5Bfile:product.chain%5D
http://i.ebayimg.com/t/Help-Magazine-22-1965-Earliest-R-Crumb-Fritz-Proto-Harlem-S-B-Pre-Zap-/00/s/MTYwMFgxMjAw/$T2eC16VHJF8E9nnC7OHMBQ!GrqLkgg~~60_35.JPG
http://www.ebay.com/itm/ROBERT-CRUMB-HARLEM-1st-EDITION-1993-/290622126106
As one can tell from even these painfully small images, the blacks depicted therein are caricatured, but not in any “racist” fashion; nor is this old lady, here:
http://matsgus.com/discaholic_corner/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/crumb7AHunting-for-old-78s-page-1-775×1024.jpg
And… http://www.celticguitarmusic.com/patton1.htm ; that realistically-rendered rap-talking black kid who held up Mode O’Day and her friends…
Thus, Crumb shows he’s hardly stuck in a racist mindset; is able to render blacks in “stereotyped,” “caricatured but not stereotyped,” and fairly “realistic” fashions, as suitable for the work in question.