Motown’s polished pop was a deliberate anti-minstrelsy project

Evidence

Motown wanted, in its way, to obliterate this neurotic prison, to adjust the scope of the Black self-image. The company’s pageant of coordinated crispness was as resolutely anti-minstrelsy as the tradition of Black oratory. White people were forced to behold men and women looking as divine as they sounded. The music captured Black America’s hearts and opened white America’s minds, at the precise moment when that openness seemed vital for the country’s very sanity. Today, what Gordy pulled off tends to be reclassified as stodgy or uncool, closer to Brown’s assessment that it’s not simply evoking an ugly past but exploiting it. Not an unreasonable conclusion in the twenty-first century, during the reign of Drake and Megan Thee Stallion, of a dozen different Lils. Yet Motown remains an unmovable landmark. This, the company has proven, is how things should have been all along, with Black people captaining their artistic and commercial destinies, singing music they composed, cashing checks their music brought in. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1131

Categorization

• XREF: Relevant to the reader’s project of distinguishing reframing arguments from contested claims: Motown’s inversion of minstrelsy is a concrete case of ‘design vs deviation’ in cultural production, paralleling the origin-story framing.