Art and Popular Culture
The terminology and its cultural aspects were explored in Dael Orlandersmith's play Yellowman, a 2002 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in drama. The play depicts a dark-skinned girl whose own mother "inadvertently teaches her the pain of rejection and the importance of being accepted by the 'high yellow' boys." One reviewer described the term as having "the inherent, unwieldy power to incite black Americans with such intense divisiveness and fervor" as few others.
The phrase survives in folk songs such as "The Yellow Rose of Texas," which originally referred to Emily West Morgan, a "mulatto" indentured servant apocryphally associated with the Battle of San Jacinto. Blind Willie McTell's song "Lord, Send Me an Angel" has its protagonist forced to choose between three women, described as "Atlanta yellow," "Macon brown," and a "Statesboro blackskin". Bessie Smith's song "I've Got What It Takes", by Clarence Williams, refers to "a slick high yeller" boyfriend who "turned real pale" when she wouldn't wait for him to get out of jail.
As recently as 2004, white R&B singer-songwriter Teena Marie released a song titled "High Yellow Girl," said to be about her daughter Alia Rose, who is biracial. The related phrase "high brown" was used in Irving Berlin's original lyrics for "Puttin' on the Ritz". Rapper Jay-Z refers to his wife, singer Beyoncé Knowles, as "my high yellow broad," in his 2009 song "Off That," from the The Blueprint 3 album.
Read more about this topic: High Yellow
Famous quotes containing the words art and, art, popular and/or culture:
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“You and your spouse should consider the arguments you have, not as calamities in the history of your child’s development, but as opportunities for learning. Take the opportunity to teach your children the art of and value in negotiation, and to demonstrate your ability to empathize, your willingness to compromise, and your readiness to apologize for hurt you have inflicted on others.”
—Lawrence Balter (20th century)
“The best of us would rather be popular than right.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life—its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness—conjoin to dull our sensory faculties.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)