February 20, 2015:White Panthers, Black Music: MC5 and the Politics of Appropriation, 1968

Guest Speaker 

Dr. Patrick Burke

Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology
Washington University in St. Louis

Location: Humanities 2441

This talk examines the MC5, a Michigan hard rock band of the late 1960s associated with the White Panthers, a radical group of white bohemians inspired by and sympathetic to the Black Power movement.  The MC5 were influenced by a variety of African American genres, from avant-garde jazz to blues to funk.  Although the band is often depicted as simply another link in a long chain of white minstrels and hipsters, I argue that we need to view their performances as self-conscious, reflexive translations of black music mobilized to serve a particular political agenda in a specific historical moment.  Such an approach reveals how the histories of white performers of black music constantly turn back on themselves, enabling layers of irony and intertextuality to accrue.