Word: minstrell
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...seminal work Harlem Renaissance, the late Professor Nathan Huggins made the following observation: "Whites have needed the blackface minstrel mask--a guise of alter ego. And blacks--sensing this psychic dependency--have been all too willing to join in the charade, hiding behind that minstrel mask, appearing to be what white men wanted them to be, and finding pleasure in the deception which too often was a trick on themselves...
...surely made for Bob Roberts, a right-wing minstrel running for the Senate against a liberal incumbent named Brickley Paiste (and played by Gore Vidal, whose 1960 drama, The Best Man, addressed similar campaign compromises). With the help of a Mephistophelian campaign boss (Alan Rickman) and a mostly fawning corps of TV anchors (James Spader, Peter Gallagher, Susan Sarandon, Pamela Reed), Bob will do anything to get elected. Power is something a fellow could nearly...
...songs range from winding country melodies to light folk numbers to blackface minstrel songs--a genre with a strange place in the history of popular American music. The arrangements of the songs vary, but are all thickly textured with instruments rarely present in popular music today such as fiddle, mandolin, banjo, "field snare" and "bones." Shocked Iyrics are clever and ironic, only sometimes focusing on traditional country and blues lyrical themes...
...Jump Jim Crow," one of the minstrel songs on the album, features a sparse arrangement of guitar and mandolin which complements Shocked's simple vocals. Towards the end of the song, Shocked signs "Zip-a-Dee-Doo Dah" in a soft, shrill voice reminiscent of early 20th century popular music. Moral and political implications of the blackface minstrelsy aside, "Jump Jim Crow" is one of the most successful songs on the album...
...ugly-sounding word for historians of history) are coming round to the view that history consists of little more than a series of consensual myths. It is not a nation's past that shapes its mythology but a nation's mythology that determines its past. History becomes a minstrel show glimpsed through a musty lens distorted by tradition, popular culture and wishful thinking...