The beauty of dark skin

[Rev. Rye]

This might not be the sort of post people Kit had in mind when starting this thread, but I figured I'd put this here.

I recently got into Seal:





How did this happen? Well, here comes another installment in the saga of "Rev won't shut up about this film from 1930." Despite being all about jazz, an art form that more or less owes its existence to black people, there's remarkably little black presence in King of Jazz for reasons that should be depressingly obvious for 1930; in film at the time, black people were either relegated to be servants to the white leads, or, maybe, as developed later in the decade, black performers performing their acts in such a way that they could be easily excised for Southern markets. The only exception I can think of at the time is the boxer with the rabbit's foot in Chaplin's City Lights; Chaplin being Chaplin, he was allowed to keep him. Since the film's structure didn't allow for servant characters, Universal hadn't thought of the idea of segregating the film with its own token black performance, and they were banking on this film being a huge hit, the black presence in the film ended up being limited (possibly by Paul Whiteman's lobbying, as the people doing the DVD commentary suggest) to a brief cameo by a little girl who was only on for less than 10 seconds and wasn't even credited with a name other than Snowdrop, possibly some of the arrangements used in the film were done by black musicians (who didn't play in the orchestra itself because the racist society had him by the balls), and this "African Voodoo Dance" used to introduce "Rhapsody in Blue."





Remarkably, though it is technically blackface, since Jacques Cartier wasn't actually black, and they put him in a ridiculous headdress that I highly doubt any of the 3,000 or so ethnicities of Africa use, it's not as bad as one might expect. It's not a minstrel show, and it's not exactly perpetuating any horrible stereotypes about the black people we left in Africa (although I'm fairly certain Voodoo is more a Carribean thing). It's some damn faint praise, but there is one thing I legitimately find fascinating: the composition and aesthetics of the dance are incredible. I found myself thinking about the Seal album cover  I posted above, and then, when looking further, I found this was the cover of his next album after that:





Yes, it looks like it could have been done for King of Jazz, if the makers of the film had any desire to be authentic, or were allowed to be so, in any case. Inspired by this, I decided that the next time I came to the library, I'd start getting whichever Seal CDs they had (so far, only a hits collection and the 1994 album). I also considered adding Seal to my list of Ravinia concerts, but, alas, it turned out I had pre-existing obligations the day he performed, so I had to give it a miss.