Blogger Kim Plaintive tells a good story about her experiences temping at the Houston Rodeo. People who attended the rodeo are given customer surveys where they rate various aspects of the rodeo, like parking, atmosphere, service, and so on.
One of the features the people got to rate was the quality of the entertainment. Kim’s job was to mine the surveys for data entry of codes into a database to track the responses from the customers. Not so surprisingly, she got the following results:
Respondents were asked to rate each artist on a 1-to-10 scale as well as complete a complicated check-box matrix indicating whether they attended the performance themselves, whether they knew someone who had attended, whether they gave tickets to someone else, and whether they wanted that artist to return next year. And of course there is room for freehand comments.
Country acts were the meat of the show. There were a handful of pop/rock groups (like Maroon 5). And then there was Alicia Keys (the only concert that Boyfriend and I attended — she was fantastic, by the way…woman can sing).
A disappointing pattern emerged early on. The country acts got varying scores in the high range. Opinions were split on the rock groups. But people were unanimously hating on Alicia Keys. Even people who marked that neither they nor someone they knew had been to the concert were rating her as a one (she also got a few zeroes and a handful of negative numbers). Freehand responses included, “Too many black performers,” “This is a rodeo, for God’s sake, no more black artists,” “Spanish artists are ok, but not blacks,” and, most apropos, “NO MORE RAP MUSIC!”
Wow, surprised that rodeo afficianados don’t like modern R&B? (Rap? Alicia Keys? Caucasians, please!) Of course not. You might get the same sort of responses to country music by attendees at Burning Man or to Mozart at the X-Games.
But what hit me is the underlying ignorance these people have about the history of black folks in the American West — the black cowboys and the Buffalo Soldiers, for example. I myself grew up going to the annual Snake River Stampede in my hometown of Nampa, Idaho, where rodeo clown Leon Coffey was an institution. There’s a very rich tradition of African-Americans in rodeo, like the legendary Jesse Stahl, not to mention the many modern black rodeo cowboys who still perform today.
“No more black artists”? Does that mean Charley Pride’s not on the invitation list? Should we not let Whitney Houston sing the National Anthem? (C’mon, her name is Houston… Houston Rodeo… hello?)
You don’t suppose the Houstonians saw Alicia in that “No Blood For Oil” shirt, do you?
