A Timeless Wavelength

The Gourds – Gin And Juice

Nina Gordon – Straight Outta Compton

I’ve remarked before about our culture’s unfortunate tendency to ridicule artists who violate its implicit musical Apartheid.  A side effect of this tendency is that one can get an easy laugh by performing a “white version” of a song by a black artist.  The most famous example in recent memory is the Gourds’ bluegrass cover of “Gin and Juice,” but Nina Gordon’s surprisingly mellow rendition of N.W.A.’s “Straight Outta Compton” is also worthy of mention.

One thing that I’ve noticed is that the joke only seems to work one way:  a hip-hop or R&B version of a Perry Como song wouldn’t elicit the same laughter as these whitened rap songs.  This is partly due, I’m sure, to the fact that one of the few remaining socially acceptable stereotypes of black people is that they have “more rhythm” than their paler counterparts.  But another factor is that rap music, particularly gangsta rap, represents a violent, dangerous lifestyle that suburban or rural whites aren’t supposed to be able to understand, and it’s laughably pretentious when they attempt to do so.  (The same premise, minus the racial subtext, is behind Pat Boone’s album of heavy metal covers:  a conservative middle-aged crooner shouldn’t be making “devil music.”  It’s probably no coincidence that, back in the 1950s, Pat Boone was famous for making safe-for-white-kids versions of R&B songs.)

These two tracks are entertaining to listen to in their own right:  the Gourds lay down some pretty decent fiddling and mandolin picking, and Nina Gordon makes Ice Cube’s threatening lyrics sound positively pretty.  But the main appeal of these songs is ultimately a cheap gag:  white people love to ridicule themselves as boring folks with no rhythm.  Meanwhile, fifteen or twenty years later, where are the artists behind the original versions of these gangsta tracks?  Ice Cube is making family-friendly comedy movies like Are We There Yet?, and Snoop Dogg is showcasing his parenting skills on reality TV.  It seems that when gangstas grow up, they turn into the same dull suburbanites who were supposedly too lame to understand them in the first place.