The “Horns and Strings” Metaphor
This is the second “pseudo intellectual” metaphor after the first one titled here, “The Iraqi Film Festival Metaphor.” Growing up with professional musicians, my uncles Roy and Grady Gains, I first internalized this phrase as “hones and strangs”—years later you can hear Teena Marie in a great song called “Square Biz” singing:
On a love oasis Joy upon our faces Sent from up above Bombs burst—fireworks Big production thing I’m talking Horns and Strings Orchestration in my love
For a young Black musician back in the day, desperate to “prove to the world” that they are a master of music, the privilege of using horns and strings in a composition meant these things (and more):
- You have an understanding of European orchestral music. This means you are “actually” smart.
- You have command over an orchestra and a studio. This meant that “vast” sums of money were being spent on you—which means you are important.
With the growing rise in popularity of Black music from its rural drums and strings, the ‘psychological positioning’ of horns and strings as a “prize of prestige” could be used as one of many ways to redirect funds for even more questionable white people making Black records. You can literally see this on YouTube.com in “Barry White Love’s Theme.” Finding a group of whites who know how to play violins and horns is cheaper than finding people of color—especially when your local, white-owned music studio already has them on the payroll.
I am not an expert on the history of the entertainment business (and the mafia) but it would never surprise me to find instance after instance of a Black artist having white infrastructure costs forced on them (through seduction, drug addiction and straight-up mob-style threats) as a kind of artist’s tax. Some examples:
- White backup singers: there are some Jackie Wilson songs with Pollyanna white backup singers that are poignantly funny.
- The Jazz standard: when John Coltrane performed “My Favorite Things” some entity related to Rodgers and Hammerstein got paid. Right? So when Miles Davis went electric, yes, he was hated for purely aesthetic reasons but there were business reasons to hate him as well…
- The digital sample: someone already has or eventually will make the documentary film that shows how astute business men like Sean Puffy Combs used the fees paid for music samples (among other ‘fees’) as a way to literally bribe targeted white powers in the entertainment business.
Remember when James Brown bought a radio station? Remember when Jim Brown tried to team up with Richard Pryor to build a film production company? Remember when Bill Cosby tried to buy NBC? Remember Tim Reid? Remember when someone made up the name “Black Entertainment Television” for a semantic reason? Remember when Chris Rock announced that he was opening something for Black comedy writers? All of these attempts (and many more) are Black people trying (and succeeding) to build infrastructure.
Too, too often, whenever these supposedly lowly and worthless Black people try to build long lasting infrastructure, you can always find a self-identifying white person (of any skin color) offended by it. When all of the rhetorical smoke clears, peace breaks out in this battle for Black independence, when groups of whites profit from the efforts of individualized creative people “of color.” It is not that hard to individualize a self-described “Black artist”—not that hard at all… When Black females and males actually see working together in powerful, intellectually diverse groups as valuable and default, the world will be transformed—and this is why it is important to keep egocentric Blackness going so we can collectively stay in the dark.
There is a powerful message in Downtown 81 in a scene that is almost thrown away. The character played by Jean Michel Basquiat opens a rented studio to find that all of his sound equipment is stolen. We eventually see some guy in a van hired by a record company to steal instruments from potential competitors. What you are seeing in this fictional portrayal, is a highly sophisticated form of barbarian warfare. This is why it’s so despicable to me when some idiot says some shit about letting the market “decide”—like it is controlled by no one. Assuming that the market is controlled by no one is like saying that the Christmas Holiday Season is controlled only by Santa Claus.
So, anyway, “horns and strings” represent unnecessary costs added to a project. The colored artistic genius is willing to participate in this project and demand the “horns and strings” for sad, physiological reasons, masquerading as refined aesthetics. The colored, artistic genius not willing to participate in this extortion may attract sabotage like that dramatized for a few seconds in Downtown 81. Anyone who is casually familiar with the current high technology scene knows very well that this “horns and strings” shit transcends “racial boundaries”—any Jim Morrison fans out there, remembering when The Doors went all horns and strings?