"Perhaps OutKast will be straight on the internet this morning, trying to be the first to get tickets for the 2007 Native American Music Awards ceremony, which go on sale today. The hip-hop duo have a record of embracing Native American culture, after a fashion. During the 2004 Grammy Awards, a teepee descended from outer space and out popped OutKast, dressed in fake American Indian outfits, performing their hit Hey Ya! in the most outrageous example of contemporary minstrelsy I've seen.
But there was nothing that new about it. Pop songs have been both ridiculing and venerating
Native Americans for well over a century now, doing everything but portraying them as real human beings. (OutKast's particular trope - Indians appearing from outer space in order to rescue a dying earth - had already shown up in places as diverse as Caetano Veloso's Um Indio in 1977 and Kansas's album Monolith in 1979.) [see Monolith cover to the right.]There were plenty of songs about Native Americans in the 19th century, but the earliest 20th-century example I've found is Navajo, from 1903, whose chorus runs, "Nava, Nava, my Navajo/ I have a love for you that will grow." Making love to Indians was a popular fantasy: it's the subject of old folk songs such as Little Mohee and Shenandoah; Tin Pan Alley numbers including Mineola (or the Wedding of the Indian and the Coon) and Arrah Wanna (An Indian Irish Matrimonial Venture), and Yiddish comedienne Fanny Brice's 1921 I'm an Indian, a fantasy about marrying one. But it didn't stop when most other racial attitudes from that era became unacceptable. Even that most bleeding-heart of songwriters, Neil Young, sang: "I would give a thousand pelts to sleep with Pocahontas"; and Slick Rick devoted not one, but two jaw-droppingly explicit songs to sex with squaws.
There's an opposing tradition: the Indian as martyr. Again, you find this in old cowboy, Tin Pan Alley and country songs, but it became much more common in the 1960s and 70s, when we were treated to Johnny Horton's The Vanishing Race, the Raiders' No 1 Indian Reservation, Elton John's overblown Indian Sunset, Cher's No 1 Half Breed, and, of course, at least four Neil Young songs. The protagonists of these songs aren't fierce warriors: they're all Christ-like. A typical example is Joe Ely's much-covered Indian Cowboy, who saves the circus from burning down but dies in the process. The death doesn't seem necessary - why couldn't he have been a living hero? I guess things don't work out that way for Indians.
Brits liked their Native Americans fiercer. In the early 1980s they gave us Siouxsie and the Banshees; Adam and the Ants' stirring Kings of the Wild Frontier; the Cult, who devoted their career to the idea of the martyred savage; and Iron Maiden's galvanic Run to the Hills, the angriest Indian massacre song of all.
What about real Native Americans? Plenty of them have made music, from appalling acts such as the southern rock band Blackfoot to terrific performers such as Link Wray and Buffy Sainte-Marie, but none of them had hits with Indian-themed songs. The one exception was an intensely charismatic rodeo cowboy named Peter LaFarge, who wrote more than half of Johnny Cash's astonishing and gut-wrenching hit album Bitter Tears (1964) and made four records of Indian protest songs before his death in 1965, at the age of 34, most likely from a mixture of booze and pills. LaFarge wrote the only hit song about American Indian life that avoids romanticisation, ridicule, and hyperbole - Cash's The Ballad of Ira Hayes. Moreover, he was an Indian himself, who had been adopted at the age of nine by the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Oliver LaFarge, president of the Association on American Indian Affairs.
At least, that's what people think. In fact, I've ascertained that the greatest advocate for American Indians in pop music history was only pretending to be an Indian: he was actually LaFarge's natural son, with at best less than one percent Indian blood.
But in order to get his message across, didn't Peter LaFarge have to pretend to be an Indian? After all, in the pop-music world, real Native Americans don't exist. Which is why you won't be seeing the winners of the Native American Music Awards crashing the charts any day soon."
taylor elaborates on this discussion in a four-part series of posts at his co-authored (with hugh barker) blog http://www.fakingit.typepad.com/ (in reference to their 2007 book Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music) ... "Here Comes the Indians, Part One" available at http://fakingit.typepad.com/fakingit/2007/05/here_come_the_i.html ...
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