I was working in the RAB office one day, and I was looking at the posters we have in there for all the artists we have had play at Rhodes. There is a big poster on the wall for James Cotton, a Grammy award-winning blues artist. The name not only struck me, but also what he is wearing in the picture: a simple shirt, overalls, and a hat. The dress definitely seemed to play into the name Cotton. It made me start thinking about black stereotyping and why musical artists play into them. I just wrote a research paper for my English class on a book called Darktown Strutters by Wesley Brown. It is about a man named Jim Crow who joins a traveling acting group that performs in blackface. While Jim refuses to perform in blackface, one of the actors justifies it by saying that he is able to do it as long as he knows what he is doing. I took that as to mean that as long as he can have control over the way he is acting he can behave that way. I started to think about whether or not this applied to hip hop artists trying to act like a “gangsta.” Do a majority of hip hop artists and rappers actually condone the way they are portrayed, or are they just putting on a face like African Americans who did blackface?

After doing some research on James Cotton, I found out that Cotton is just a nickname from his friends. Cotton was born in 1935, and the nickname is more understandable now that we have studied the kind of era he grew up in. People of Cotton’s generation grew up with Southern names like Cotton and Sonny Boy, who took him in after the death of his parents. People of color in my generation are growing up in a time where they have their own stereotypical nicknames, but it has changed to names like thug and G. Now the way to insult someone is to call him a degrading and offensive name for a woman.

Blues was an outlet for expression of hardship, but what is being made into songs has drastically changed as well. Cotton dealt with the death of his parents and being abandoned by Sonny Boy. Hip hop has become an expression for surviving shootings, drug deals gone wrong, and raunchy times with women. Even if the tough facade of hip hop artists is artificial, there is so much encouragement from white consumers and the industry that I do not seeing it changing any time soon.