At Home He Feels Like A Tourist

Part 6 of 7

A canter through the history of luxury, consumption, and desire

The Co-option

Black music, the white industry, and a century of economic extraction dressed as cultural appreciation

There is a door. That is where the story begins.

The Cotton Club opened in Harlem in 1923. It booked exclusively Black performers. It served exclusively white audiences. Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Lena Horne — these are the artists who built their national reputations in its rooms, broadcast live on national radio, their music reaching millions of American homes. The club sat in the heart of the neighbourhood whose community had produced them. That community was not admitted.

The door is not a metaphor. It is an architectural fact. And it is the most precise image available for what this essay is about: not the theft of music, but the theft of the proceeds from music. The extraction of economic value from Black cultural innovation by white-controlled institutions, across a century, through mechanisms that are structural rather than conspiratorial, impersonal rather than individual, and therefore considerably harder to name, to prosecute, or to stop.

This is Part Six of a series about luxury, culture, and the political economy of desire. The earlier parts established the theoretical framework: Benjamin on aura and commodity fetishism, the long history of luxury as social distinction, the racial ideology embedded in Western aesthetics, the mechanics of the spectacle. This part applies that framework to what is, arguably, the most consequential cultural story of the twentieth century — the story of how Black American music became the primary commercial language of Western popular culture, and how that transformation was organised so that the people whose culture produced it were systematically last in the queue when the money was distributed.

It is not a story about individual racists, though individual racists appear in it. It is a story about a structure.

The theoretical frame: double consciousness, the Atlantic crossing, and recuperation

W.E.B. Du Bois gave us the foundational concept in 1903, in The Souls of Black Folk. Double consciousness: the condition of always seeing yourself through the eyes of others, of measuring your soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. The Black American, Du Bois argued, lives with two selves that never fully reconcile — and the effort to hold both, without losing either, is the defining psychological condition of that existence.

The musical consequence is immediate and profound. The spirituals — which Du Bois called the Sorrow Songs — are the first expression of double consciousness in cultural form. They say two things simultaneously: the authentic grief and longing of an oppressed people, and a coded communication within a system of total surveillance. They were songs for the enslaved community and, when required, songs that could be presented to the enslaver as harmless religious expression. The form contained the double consciousness it described. Saying two things at once because the situation demanded it — this is the formal origin of everything that follows.

Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993) takes Du Bois’s psychological insight and makes it geographical and historical. The Black Atlantic is not a place — it is a set of routes. The slave ship crossing. The return journeys of ideas, music, politics across the triangular geography of Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Gilroy’s central argument is that Black culture cannot be claimed by any nationalist project — it is neither African nor American nor British but something forged in the crossing, irreducibly hybrid, and that hybridity is the source of its cultural power rather than a dilution of it.

His second key move is a challenge to what he calls ethnic absolutism: the idea, held on both sides of the racial divide, that culture belongs to a people and should be kept pure. Black music has always been relational, always in dialogue with and against the dominant culture. That is not contamination. It is the condition of its existence.

Stuart Hall — Gilroy’s teacher and colleague at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham — provides the political economy that connects the theory to the industry. Race, in Hall’s framework, is not a free-floating prejudice but a mechanism: it organises social relations, distributes power and resources, and makes the resulting distribution seem natural. It is always articulated — always connected to class, gender, and nation in specific historical configurations. And it always does specific work. The work it does in the music industry, for most of the twentieth century, is to ensure that the people who create the value are not the people who capture it.

Guy Debord’s concept of recuperation — introduced in this series in Part Five — completes the framework. The spectacle intercepts radical critique and absorbs it as content. The music that says we are suffering and we are human and this world is organised to keep us down becomes, through the machinery of recuperation, the soundtrack to an advertisement. The protest becomes the product. The energy of dispossession is converted into the marketing of aspiration. This is not a conspiracy. It is the system working as designed.

The Delta to Chicago: the extraction template

The blues emerges from the Mississippi Delta in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Its geography is specific and its conditions are brutal: the flat agricultural land of the Deep South where the plantation economy had continued after emancipation under different legal arrangements. Sharecropping. Debt peonage. The Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery except as punishment for crime, with the criminal justice system immediately deployed as a labour supply mechanism.

The music is not a response to these conditions in the way that a political speech responds to injustice. It is something more fundamental: a technology for surviving the unsurvivable. The twelve-bar structure, the three-line stanza where the first line is stated and then restated before the third resolves or undercuts it, the blue notes that fall between the fixed pitches of the European scale — these are not arbitrary conventions. They are a form that holds a specific kind of emotional truth. The repetition of the first line is not laziness. It is the way you say something twice because once wasn’t enough. The blue note — that flattened third or seventh that no piano key exactly captures, that you bend on a guitar string or approach with a slide — is the sound of a person who doesn’t fit the available categories and plays that not-fitting as the truest thing they can say.

Robert Johnson is the mythological figure. His thirty-two recorded songs — made in a San Antonio hotel room in 1936 and 1937 — are among the most extraordinary recordings in the history of the form. The white critical apparatus, encountering music of this quality and strangeness, reached for supernatural explanation: he must have sold his soul at the crossroads. The alternative — that he was an extraordinarily gifted musician who had developed his technique through years of practice within a specific tradition — was less interesting to the myth-making apparatus, and also implicitly more threatening, because it suggested the achievement was human rather than magical.

He died at twenty-seven. The circumstances were disputed. The Delta kept its accounting.

When the blues moved north — to Chicago primarily, driven by the Great Migration — it met electricity. Muddy Waters arriving from the Delta in 1943 picks up an electric guitar because the clubs are loud. The amplification changes the music’s character entirely: the guitar can now sustain, can fill a room with a sound felt in the chest as much as heard with the ears. Little Walter cups a harmonica around a microphone and discovers the resulting distortion creates a new instrument essentially from scratch. Howlin’ Wolf finds a voice in the amplified room that is barely consonant with the idea of singing as European music understands it.

Chess Records, founded in Chicago in 1950 by Leonard and Phil Chess, captures this moment. The Chess brothers are businessmen who recognise a market. Their contribution is real — Leonard Chess had an ear, and the Chess Records sound is one of the great recorded sounds of the era. Their business practices are the template for what the industry will do to Black artists for the next three decades. They owned the publishing on almost everything recorded for the label. The artists received royalties, when paid at all, at rates negotiated from a position of complete power asymmetry.

Muddy Waters, who essentially invented the electric blues vocabulary that the entire subsequent history of rock and roll depends on, drove a Cadillac to his sessions. Leonard Chess drove a Rolls-Royce.

Then the records cross the Atlantic. Chess and other blues labels sell their back catalogues, at low prices, into the British market in the late 1950s and early 1960s — considered to have limited commercial value in America, where the mainstream has moved on. The records land in Britain and something unexpected happens. A generation of white British working-class young men — in London, Birmingham, Liverpool — hear them and are completely undone. Keith Richards hears Chuck Berry. Eric Clapton hears Robert Johnson. Mick Jagger hears Muddy Waters. They study these records with the intensity of scholars, learn the tunings and the structures, form bands.

The devotion is genuine. When the Rolling Stones appear on American television in 1964 and name-check their sources, they are directing white American audiences back to Black American originators who those audiences had never heard. Muddy Waters later credited the Stones with giving him a white audience he didn’t previously have.

This is true. And the Stones became considerably richer than Muddy Waters. The industry structures that gave them that advantage were racial in their operation even when the individuals involved were not racist in their intentions. When Muddy Waters opened for the Rolling Stones on their 1981 American tour — opened for — the injustice of that billing was clear to everyone including the Stones. The structure had produced it. Good intentions had not altered the structure.

Soul: the strategic assimilation and its limits

Soul is what happens when the blues meets the Black church and the result decides it has something urgent to say about the present moment.

Ray Charles is the person who puts his hand into the gospel tradition and pulls it into secular music, and the scandal this causes in 1954 is worth registering. He takes the structure, the feeling, the vocal technique, the piano style of gospel and applies them to songs about human love and desire rather than divine love. The Black church community is genuinely offended: you do not use the music of God to sing about your girlfriend. What Charles understood — and what the subsequent decades vindicated — is that the emotional technology is the same. The music does not know whether it is singing about God or a woman. The release is the release.

Berry Gordy founds Motown in Detroit in 1959 with an $800 family loan. What he builds over the next decade is one of the most remarkable cultural enterprises in American history and also one of the most carefully calibrated acts of strategic assimilation ever attempted. His explicit ambition — and he was not shy about stating it — was crossover: Black music in white homes, on white radio, in white mainstream culture. To achieve this, he understood he would have to manage not just the music but the complete presentation of his artists. The Artist Development department at Motown is the institutional expression of this philosophy: a finishing school that taught the Supremes how to walk, how to handle cutlery at formal dinners, how to give interviews. The Motown artist is a complete product, polished to a standard that white mainstream America would find legible and unthreatening.

The complexity lives here. On one reading this is internalised racism — the belief that Blackness as it actually presents itself is unacceptable to white America and must be disciplined into palatability. On another reading it is a precise and rational strategy for operating in a system designed to exclude you. On a third reading, it is both simultaneously, and the third reading is closest to the truth.

The music itself is extraordinary. The Funk Brothers — the house band who played on virtually every Motown record — are among the most gifted musicians in American history. James Jamerson’s bass playing on those records is a sustained masterclass in melodic invention within a rhythmic function. Their names were unknown outside Detroit until a documentary in 2002. The records that made their sound famous were credited to the artists out front.

The internal tension of the Motown model reaches its crisis point in 1971 when Marvin Gaye delivers What’s Going On and Gordy initially refuses to release it as uncommercial. The argument between them is a precise map of the contradiction. Gordy has built the machine on the premise that the music must not frighten the mainstream audience — must not be too political, too angry, too explicitly about what is actually happening to Black Americans. Gaye is making an album about Vietnam, about police violence, about ecological destruction, about the crisis in Black urban communities. The music that tells the truth about the present moment rather than the music that crosses over by not telling that truth.

Gaye wins the argument. What’s Going On is released, becomes the greatest artistic achievement in Motown’s history, and begins the end of the Motown model. Because once you have heard that album — the extraordinary orchestral and rhythmic landscape under lyrics that ask what is happening to his people — the finishing school and the choreography feel like a price that may have been too high.

Aretha Franklin at Atlantic Records represents the other pole. Respect, released in 1967, is a useful case study in what happens when a song passes from one community to another. The original is by Otis Redding — a good song, a man telling his woman what he expects when he comes home. Aretha takes it and reverses the power relation completely. The spelling out of R-E-S-P-E-C-T — the deliberate, emphatic, letter-by-letter insistence — is her addition. It is the sound of someone making absolutely certain they have been heard.

The song reaches number one in the summer of 1967, the summer of urban rebellions across American cities. It is simultaneously a pop song, a feminist statement, and a civil rights anthem — not because it is trying to be all of these things but because the moment it is made in makes it impossible for it to be otherwise. The music and the political moment are completely fused.

Curtis Mayfield traces the arc to its logical end. By 1970, with his solo debut Curtis and the Superfly soundtrack two years later, the register has shifted entirely from the earlier Motown calculation. Superfly uses the commercial occasion of a blaxploitation crime film to make a sustained argument about what the drug economy does to Black communities and why it exists. A score for a film about a drug dealer that is more morally complex than the film itself. The music’s political content is not attached as lyrical content — it is embedded in the formal choices, in the orchestration, in the way the beauty of the sound is in permanent tension with the darkness of what it describes.

Funk, disco, and the full corporate capture

James Brown is where funk begins and in some ways where it ends, because nobody else ever takes it as far.

The transformation is audible if you listen chronologically. Please Please Please in 1956 is still in the gospel-soul tradition. By Cold Sweat in 1967 and Sex Machine in 1970 the reordering is complete. What has moved to the centre — what has become the primary carrier of meaning and structure — is rhythm. Specifically, the relationship between instruments within the rhythm: what Brown calls the One, the explosive accent on the first beat of the bar that everything else is organised around and in tension with. He is famous for fining his musicians for missing the One. This is not tyranny. It is a precise musical philosophy.

The result is music that operates on the body differently from anything that had preceded it in the popular idiom. The guitar plays rhythmic stabs rather than chords. The bass — and this is the revolution — moves from being a harmonic instrument that outlines chord changes to being a rhythmic and melodic lead voice in its own right. The music seems to be already inside the body’s rhythmic systems, reorganising them from within.

George Clinton and Parliament-Funkadelic take everything Brown establishes and add a layer of conscious mythology and deliberate carnivalesque excess that turns funk into something closer to a total worldview. The Mothership. The Placebo Syndrome — the condition of a people given the placebo of consumerism instead of the real medicine of liberation. Star Child versus Sir Nose D’Voidoffunk — the cosmic battle between liberation through rhythm and the principle of uptight refusal. Clinton understood that after the Civil Rights movement’s explicit political demands had been met in law and not in life, after the Black Power movement had been surveilled and dismantled, the political ground had shifted. So he made the argument in code, in mythology, in a language of science fiction and cosmic absurdism. One Nation Under a Groove. Free your mind and your ass will follow. The political theory is in the bass line.

Clinton also understood the music industry better than almost any of his contemporaries, and was systematically defrauded by it anyway. He signed away publishing rights he didn’t fully understand he was signing away. He built a collective of extraordinary musicians whose economics eventually led to legal disputes and fragmentation. He spent years in poverty despite having made some of the most commercially successful and artistically important music of the decade. The industry’s capacity to extract value from Black musical innovation did not diminish as the musicians became more sophisticated. The contracts became more sophisticated to match.

Disco is what happens when the industry looks at funk and identifies what can be extracted and what needs to be left behind.

What can be extracted: the rhythm, the danceability, the physical energy, the sense of collective release.

What needs to be removed: the political content, the harmonic reduction that reads as a statement, the roughness, the specific community politics of funk — which are Black and Southern and working class and not easily assimilated into the mainstream market.

The addition that completes the transformation: orchestral strings and production values signalling sophistication and aspiration. The mirror ball. The VIP section. The velvet rope.

Disco’s origins are genuinely complex, because it emerges not just from funk but from the specific communities of gay Black and Latino New York in the early 1970s — the underground clubs, the DJ culture developing its own art form in real time, the dancefloor as a space of safety and freedom for people who had nowhere else. What the industry does is identify the energy of those spaces, extract the musical formula, remove the community context, apply production values and marketing, and sell the result to the mainstream. By 1977 and Saturday Night Fever — which grossed $94 million on a $3.5 million budget — the extraction is complete. The music of Black and Latino queer New York underground clubs is now the sound of John Travolta in a white suit.

Disco Demolition Night, July 1979. Comiskey Park, Chicago. A radio DJ named Steve Dahl organises an event in which crates of disco records are blown up on the outfield. Tens of thousands attend, mostly young white men. The records being destroyed are disproportionately by Black and gay artists. The rage being expressed is articulated as a defence of rock and roll against manufactured commercial music. The irony that rock and roll is itself a product of the same extraction process from Black music that produced disco is not available to the people doing the destroying.

The backlash works. Radio programmers pull disco from their playlists almost overnight. The mainstream market for the music collapses with extraordinary speed. The industry pivots. The communities that had created it — Black, Latino, queer, in the clubs of New York and Chicago and Detroit — are not consulted about the mainstream’s decision to move on. They continue. And what they develop, in the early 1980s, in specific rooms in specific cities, is house music and techno: the next chapter of the same story, beginning again from the community outward.

Hip hop: the rent party reborn, and the final irony

Hip hop begins in the South Bronx in 1973 at a party thrown by a Jamaican-American DJ named Clive Campbell — DJ Kool Herc — whose innovation is to use two copies of the same record on two turntables and extend the break, the percussion-only section, by switching between them before either one ends. The break extended indefinitely. You do not need a live band. You need two turntables and a collection of records. The music is made from other music — from the archive of everything that came before, the James Brown breaks, the funk basslines, the soul samples — recombined in real time by a person whose art is the selection and the timing and the mix.

The community it comes from is the South Bronx in the 1970s: one of the most comprehensively abandoned urban landscapes in American history. Robert Moses’s Cross Bronx Expressway has demolished established neighbourhoods. Landlords are burning their own buildings for insurance money. The city is functionally bankrupt. Hip hop — which in its origin is four elements, not just music: DJing, MCing, breakdancing, graffiti — emerges as the cultural response of a community with no resources and no institutional support, making art from what is available.

It is, in the purest sense, use value. It is not made for the market because there is no market for it yet. It is made for the community, in the community, by the community. The rent party in a new form — the function identical across fifty years: survival, release, identity, joy, under conditions designed to make all of those things impossible.

Between 1973 and approximately 1979, hip hop exists entirely outside the commodity form. This is the window — narrow, unrepeatable — in which the music is most completely itself, before the industry has identified the value and begun the process of extraction.

The industry arrives in 1979. The Sugarhill Gang‘s Rapper’s Delight is the first commercial breakthrough. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five‘s The Message in 1982 is the first hip hop record that makes the mainstream understand the music has something to say, not just a beat to sell. Run-DMC, LL Cool J, Public Enemy: the music develops through independent labels and then the majors arrive. The contracts are signed. The extraction begins in the now-familiar pattern.

But hip hop has something the previous genres didn’t quite have in the same form: a conscious, explicit, theorised understanding of the extraction dynamic built into the music itself. Public Enemy’s entire project is a critique of the system that is simultaneously selling them. Chuck D understands the political economy of the music industry and raps about it while operating within it. The contradiction is the content.

The white response follows the template. Vanilla Ice is the Pat Boone moment — the safely sanitised version for the mainstream, the energy without the context. The Beastie Boys are more complex — Jewish kids from New York who are genuinely inside the culture, who earn their credibility through proximity and commitment rather than simply taking the form. Eminem is the most commercially successful rapper in history, a white man from Detroit who is by most technical measures one of the great practitioners of the form, whose authenticity is grounded in a specific class and geographic experience rather than a racial claim — and who is still the beneficiary of a racial structure that gives white artists mainstream access that equally talented Black artists do not have. He knows this. He says so. The knowing does not change the structure.

And then something shifts. Hip hop becomes so commercially dominant — the best-selling genre in America by the late 2010s — that the extraction dynamic partially inverts. The Black artists at the top of the genre are among the wealthiest entertainers in the world. Jay-Z builds a business empire explicitly modelled on owning the means of cultural production. Beyoncé controls her masters. Kendrick Lamar wins the Pulitzer Prize and uses the acceptance of that validation to critique the system that is validating him.

The structure has not gone away. The industry is still organised to extract value from Black cultural innovation. But the scale of commercial success and the sophistication of the artists navigating it means the story is no longer simply one of extraction. It has become something more complicated. Which is, perhaps, progress of a kind — though a kind that Muddy Waters and Curtis Mayfield and George Clinton, who paid the full price of the simpler version, did not live to benefit from.

What the structure produces, and what survives it

Pull back from the specific instances and a pattern is visible across a century of Black musical innovation.

The music comes from the community. It is produced in conditions of economic constraint and social marginalisation, from cultural traditions that survived the Middle Passage fragmentarily but powerfully, and from the specific experiences of people navigating a society organised around their exclusion. The formal properties of the music — the rhythmic complexity, the blue notes, the call and response, the emotional directness — are not racial properties. They are the products of specific historical and cultural conditions transmitted through specific communities. They could not have been produced by the institutions — the conservatoires, the concert halls, the publishing houses — that excluded the people who made them. The exclusion, in this one specific sense, was also preservation.

The white industry identifies the formal properties that are commercially transferable, develops mechanisms — the record contract, the radio station, the publishing deal — to capture the value those properties generate, and organises those mechanisms in ways that consistently advantage white intermediaries over Black originators. This is not a conspiracy. Each individual contract is a private transaction. The systematic pattern is the product of a system, not of a plan.

Debord’s recuperation operates throughout. The music of dispossession becomes the marketing of aspiration. The sound of the rent party becomes the sound of the nightclub VIP section. The sonic language developed to express double consciousness — the condition of never being fully at home in a world that looks on with amused contempt — becomes the language through which luxury brands communicate their own supposed authenticity. The circle is complete: the music of exclusion becomes the soundtrack of the most exclusive spaces.

And yet. The music remains. Hoochie Coochie Man. What’s Going On. One Nation Under a Groove. The Message. These records are still doing the thing they do. Chess Records’ business model was exploitative. The British rock industry was structurally extractive. The disco industry absorbed and neutered a community’s music. And the recordings remain among the most complete expressions of human experience in the recorded form. Something persists in them that the extraction did not get. Whether that is use value untainted by exchange — the question this series keeps approaching and declining to fully answer — or whether it is simply that the exchange value has not yet found a way to capture all the use value, remains genuinely open.

What is not open is the history. The Cotton Club door was real. The Chess Records royalty statement was real. The Disco Demolition Night bonfire was real. The structural organisation of an industry to ensure that the people who create the value are not the people who capture it — this is not a metaphor and not an exaggeration. It is a documented, specific, century-long pattern that is as much a part of the history of luxury and culture as the gilded ballrooms and the Venetian merchants we examined in earlier parts of this series.

The difference is that this luxury was built on music that was made, in the first instance, to survive. The rent party was not trying to create art for posterity. It was trying to pay the rent. The spirituals were not trying to enter the Western musical canon. They were trying to say something true under conditions where the truth was dangerous. The blues was not trying to be recuperated into an advertising aesthetic. It was trying to hold something human together in inhuman conditions.

That the music did all of that, and became the dominant cultural language of the century besides, is not a vindication of the system that extracted its value. It is a testament to the people who made it despite the system. The distinction matters.

— — —

Part Seven, the final essay in this series, turns to Venice: empire, trade routes, ecological crisis, democratic experiment, and the most beautiful terminal case of the experience economy in the world. A city that has been a luxury destination for a thousand years, and is now deciding what it means to survive its own desirability.

A NOTE ON METHOD

This essay draws on conversations with Claude (Anthropic’s AI) as the research and synthesis engine, and on: W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (1993); Stuart Hall, ‘Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance’ (1980); Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944); Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967); Nelson George, The Death of Rhythm and Blues (1988); and the recorded work of the artists discussed. The thinking is collaborative; the voice, selection, and responsibility are the author’s own.