Political court jesters Jon Batiste and Questlove get their participation trophies.
It’s no accident that Jon Batiste and Questlove recently won Grammy and Oscar awards, the former for Album of the Year, the latter for Best Documentary Feature, within the same week. What looks like coincidence actually confirms how our completely politicized entertainment system works. Instead of citing systemic racism, call their wins “systemic recompense.”
Both musicians perform lookalike functions on television — as black band conductors backing up the white late-night hosts, respectively Stephen Colbert on CBS and Jimmy Fallon on NBC. Decades after the late-night wars that squeezed out Arsenio Hall, the first black late-night host, Batiste and Questlove maintain their subordinate place in media hierarchy: They’re the new Millennial minstrels.
This is a noteworthy function given that the late-night format isn’t escapist light entertainment anymore; it’s dedicated instead to partisan favor and barbed political commentary meant to sway national consensus. Humor has become acrid satire. Celebrity patter and bonhomie have been replaced by virtue-signaling guests, including shamelessly grinning political figures (especially Hillary and the Obamas). In the background, Batiste and Questlove’s musical mood-enhancement applied guilt-easing salve to this provocation of political anxiety.
Batiste’s Grammy-winning album, We Are — the multiskilled singer-musician’s collected reflections on current issues — boasts awareness of how his new role redefines the late-night TV talk-show genre. Many pop stars now confuse entertainment with activism, so the album effectively declares, We are political endorsement!
Just as 19th-century minstrels acted out America’s conflicted race awareness — self-exploitation and self-expression dancing on the razor’s edge of survival — Batiste displays the self-consciousness of pop stars caught between acknowledging today’s special privilege and enjoying it. The track “Tell Me How” gives the game away. It features backup by the British writer Zadie Smith, not a musician but a literary figure whose specialty is racialized discourse. This collaboration epitomizes the stepped-up alliance of middle-class black artists since the Black Lives Matter–George Floyd pageants. Yet it also reveals a strange loneliness (the music video shows Batiste playing b-ball by himself in a demonstration of singular upward mobility).
Note how Batiste’s image — retro haircut referring back to Kid ’N Play — presents a style of blackness that only a Colbert-liberal would comfortably recognize as genuine. But Batiste’s sense of himself is trapped in ethnic expression that’s become ersatz. The song “Tell Me How” name-drops cultural totems — Ella Fitzgerald, Wu-Tang Clan, Stevie Wonder, Hubert Laws, Thelonious Monk — as if announcing tribal solidarity. But the repeated lyric of “If I don’t know . . .” inadvertently evokes the vintage hip-hop rejoinder “You better ask somebody.”
To that point, the legendary Mavis Staples appears on the 21-second track “Mavis” to intone “Freedom to me is the ability for men and women, all created equal, to speak and do and not do what you want.” This elder’s fake-nostalgic advice is almost as vague as statements by the late, deluded Congressman John Lewis, Mavis evidently having lost the sense during the Covid era of what freedom’s absence means.
Some black artists who gain admittance into the mainstream disrespect their current license. Minstrelsy allows them to appease the public through their fame and status.
However, nothing that Batiste has so far recorded (or that Smith has written) will ever have the impact and beauty of Mavis Staple’s classic hits “Do It Again” or “Respect Yourself.” Batiste must know that even if the Grammy voters don’t.
Batiste is not a reprobate minstrel like late-night regular Lil Nas X; yet the weakness of both is held in equivalent esteem by the cultural mainstream.
This is how second-banana activist-entertainers like Batiste and Questlove (more on Questlove’s quest for relevancy later) stay on the pleasing side of their bosses’ vanity, never threatening their benefactors and never risking the kind of independent expression that Kanye West is known for.
Far from being innovative artists, Batiste and Questlove are not even extremely popular ones, but their ready supply of the latest, hippest, and happiest musical jingles and airs is deemed award-worthy as part of an automatic reflex in an era when the media constantly manipulate the electorate — and mediocrities such as Batiste, Questlove, and John Legend are enlisted to help. The biggest prizes in showbiz mislead consumers to think that all is right with the industry.