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Ripping Off Black Music (Singles Classic)
It is jarring and most distressing to walk into a room one has considered private and find it ringed with cameras, spotlights, and insistent strangers claiming long acquaintance and making plans to move in and redecorate without being invited. Black music and with it the private black self were suddenly grossly public—tossed onstage, dressed in clown white, and bandied about with a gleeful arrogance that just yesterday had chosen to ignore and condescend.
Blacks, it seemed, had lost the battle for mythological ownership of rock, as future events would prove.
Written more than 40 years ago with astonishing prescience, celebrated critic and memoirist Margo Jefferson’s Ripping Off Black Music—her first published essay—is at once unflinchingly honest and dead-on in its critique of appropriation in popular music, from Chuck Berry to Elvis, Jimi Hendrix to the Beatles.
Features an introduction by the author.
Ripping Off Black Music was originally published in Harper’s, January 1973.
