The Minstrel Show Little Brother

[Merlino Riviere]

Hiphop sucks. It must. Otherwise, Little Brother's battle cry of returning the art form to its rightful place makes less sense than it did nearly 10 years ago, when artists who weren't signed to a major label proclaimed them. So what is Little Brother saving hip-hop from? According to them, commercial artists' focus on sex, guns, and accessories are the modern-day equivalent of Vaudevillian blackface performers, seizing upon the worst characteristics of black society and hyperbolizing them to entertain a non-black audience. The proposed minstrelsy of hip-hop doesn't explain how the #1 album and single in the country come from a guy whose lyrics are more introspective than Conor Oberst's, whose biggest hit to date is about Jesus, and whose name is in everyone's mouth from suburbia to the White House because of his nationally-televised political stance.

Is Kanye in blackface? Better yet, is Missy? Or Outkast? These aren't fringe performers. They are a few of the biggest selling pop artists of the last half-decade, all of whom enjoy widespread cultural influence and power. Little Brother imply that anyone who raps about anything other than "real life" [read: middle-class struggles] is a disgrace, a Pied Piper to the youth, a traitor to his or her culture who needs to be shown the path to redemption. Their stance also assumes that the listening audience isn't intelligent enough to distinguish between fact and fiction, reality from rented props. If Little Brother's product were as enticing as any of the artists they decry as sellouts, their message might carry more weight, but The Minstrel Show adds up to little more than a loose concept constructed on tiresome production so that the group can pound its ham-fisted homilies.

The album's Minstrel Show is a fictional Saturday Night Live-type program televised on the UBN (U Black Niggas-- a revealing bit of finger-pointing) network, which provides the basis for the bounty of skits and jokes throughout. Some of the skits are funny at first listen, but the skit long ago became the wanky guitar solo of hip-hop. Save the skits and one stab at soft targets, R. Kelly and Ronald Isley, Little Brother make no attempt to adhere to the concept. Lyrically, Phonte and Big Pooh offer a variety of "we're better than you" battle rhymes but aren't bold enough to say why. If they're on a higher plane, it seems they could come up with a few clever metaphors explaining such, but no. On "All For You" they tackle the difficulties of fatherhood, but it's an all-too-brief blip of social consciousness. To his credit, Phonte is an intelligent lyricist, and when he isn't married to bad ideas, he shines, as on his Foreign Exchange album with Nicolay.

And then there's 9th Wonder, whose production was supposed to change the game ever since the Roots' ?uestlove got a crush on Little Brother's early demos in 1999. The ever-graying cloud over 9th's beats is that they still sound like early demos. Despite being signed to a major and scoring scads of outside production work, 9th still sounds like he's tapping his fingers on a Best Buy synthesizer. His whispy snare hits have become so predictable you could sync your grandmother's treadmill to their rhythmic lethargy. And can we put an end to the neighborhood D'Angelo singing hooks on hip-hop records? 9th Wonder is proficient enough in selecting a soul sample and throttling the bassline that not everything is a dud (lead-single, "Lovin' It", "Hiding Place" featuring Elzhi, and "Say It Again").

Little Brother have good intentions. They want to sound like the groups they grew up enjoying, namely A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul, and Pete Rock & CL Smooth (they even homage ATCQ's "Oh My God" on "Still Lives Through"), but their songs sound more like signifiers of those groups, not their logical descendents. Unfortunately, the hype that floated Little Brother's careers over the last six years may have affirmed some bad habits (narrow content, homemade beats) and encouraged lofty aspirations not yet attainable. If they want to create an alternative to the types of hip-hop they don't respect, they would do well to study the lessons of their favorite records.

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The Minstrel Show is the second studio album by hip hop trio Little Brother, released on September 13, 2005.[1] It followed the critical success of their 2003 debut, The Listening. The album was highly anticipated and touted as a probable breakthrough for the group, even before its release. The title is a reference to the minstrel shows that were popular in the United States during the 19th century.

The album has a running concept based on a fictional television network called "UBN" (U Black Niggas Network), which is a satire of stereotypical programs and advertisements for African Americans. For example, on "Cheatin", Phonte (performing under his alter-ego "Percy Miracles"), spoofs the over-dramatic R&B sagas performed by singers such as R. Kelly and Ronald Isley. Many of the skits contain tongue-in-cheek references to black pop-culture in the United States.

The controversy surrounding The Minstrel Show release drew more attention than the music itself. On August 16, 2005, Editor-in-Chief of The Source magazine, Joshua "Fahiym" Ratcliffe, announced his resignation due to conflicting opinions on the rating The Minstrel Show was supposed to receive in the next issue of the publication. According to Ratcliffe, after the review was finalized and the album's score was set to 4.5 out of 5, the magazine's Chief Brand Executive Raymond "Benzino" Scott and CEO Dave Mays announced their plans to reduce the score to 4.[2] Benzino believed the album should not receive a higher score than Young Jeezy's Let's Get It: Thug Motivation 101, which received a rating of 4.[3] For his part, Benzino admitted at the time of questioning, that he had yet to listen to the album for himself and had no problem with Ratcliffe's original rating.[4] Little Brother's Phonte later remarked that the controversy brought more attention to the album than it could have received from the rating alone.[3]

Another controversy was regarding the entertainment network BET (Black Entertainment Television), which refused to play the group's video for the single "Lovin' It", allegedly because they deemed it "too intelligent".[5][6] Michael Lewellen, a publicist and program director for BET, responded, "It's not true, not in that context. BET reserves the right to show or not to show music videos of any type based on the network's own standards and decision-making processes."[4] In an interview with GQ magazine, Phonte explained that BET never told them about the ban and he only found out about it on the Internet.[7] In a portion of the video, the group lightly pokes fun at the different stylistic aspects of hip hop subgenres such as "gangsta", "backpack", "earthy" and "icy". The rest of it sees them performing to a zealous crowd.[5]

The Minstrel Show received praise from contemporary hip hop publications, such as XXL magazine, who gave the album an "XL" rating, and Scratch magazine, who gave it a perfect 10 out of 10 rating.[1] The Minstrel Show debuted at number 56 on the Billboard 200 chart,[18] selling 18,000 copies in its first week. As of 2010, the album sold slightly more than 100,000 copies.[19] A second official single and any further promotion of the album was abandoned by Atlantic Records, and although the group soon began recording their follow-up album, Getback, their relationship with the label drew to a close before its release.

The album was highly anticipated and touted as a probable breakthrough for the group, even before its release. The title is a reference to the minstrel shows that were popular in America during the 19th century.

Its features include Yahzarah, Elzhi, and singer Daren Brockington. The album charted at #56 on the Billboard top 200 and sold over 18,000 copies in its first week, which was a lower number than anticipated by both fans and critics.

I am a garbage collector, racist garbage. For three decades I have collected items that defame and belittle Africans and their American descendants. I have a parlor game, "72 Pictured Party Stunts," from the 1930s. One of the game's cards instructs players to, "Go through the motions of a colored boy eating watermelon." The card shows a dark black boy, with bulging eyes and blood red lips, eating a watermelon as large as he is. The card offends me, but I collected it and 4,000 similar items that portray black people as Coons, Toms, Sambos, Mammies, Picaninnies, and other dehumanizing racial caricatures. I collect this garbage because I believe, and know to be true, that items of intolerance can be used to teach tolerance.

I bought my first racist object when I was 12 or 13. My memory of that event is not perfect. It was the early 1970s in Mobile, Alabama, the home of my youth. The item was small, probably a Mammy saltshaker. It must have been cheap because I never had much money. And, it must have been ugly because after I paid the dealer I threw the item to the ground, shattering it. It was not a political act; I, simply, hated it, if you can hate an object. I do not know if he scolded me, he almost certainly did. I was what folks in Mobile, black and white people, indelicately referred to as a "Red Nigger." In those days, in that place, he could have thrown that name at me, without incident. I do not remember what he called me, but I am certain he called me something other than David Pilgrim.

I have a 1916 magazine advertisement that shows a little black boy, softly caricatured, drinking from an ink bottle. The bottom caption reads, "Nigger Milk." I bought the print in 1988 from an antique store in LaPorte, Indiana. It was framed and offered for sale at $20. The salesclerk wrote, "Black Print," on the receipt. I told her to write, "Nigger Milk Print."

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