If I’m listening in class, I think, on one level, what we are talking about when talking about minstrelsy, is a cultural “performance,” maybe even an art, that on one hand, lifted elements of African culture to the level of public art, a national pastime. On the other hand, it dictated that this art must be an appropriation. Paradoxically, art could not come from its authentic birth place. then it would be something different.
Too ignorant of its own transcendence? This sounds like a racist justification?
Too painful, being the songs of enslaved people? This seems unlikely, considering the garishness of the caricatures of black people they relied on.
Either way, it is clear that blackness was imagined as an entirely different set of characteristics, a set of characteristics that could be inhabited only by people who were not black, and could not be removed by people who were.
So rationalization: like makeshift birth certificates, the ability to “put on” blackface delineated who was not black.
Embedded in that are he roots of an argument: art is intentionally created and self-aware. People “as they are” (black-ness) isn’t art.
I think there is a statement about authenticity in there. We think we want to live the opposite art theory today. Feeling must be “real” somehow in the music we listen to.
even though we know that that isn’t how the music industry works. The brazen pretending of the minstrel show is still buried in the radio, even along racial lines.

No the question for me isn’t whether commodified music, especially as it relates to race, is new, but if there has been any time in American music when it was not the case.
The ability to study music and re-create what black people didn’t have to “learn” was considered more “impressive” or acceptable than the authentic act. Probably for many different reasons. But those reasons are never expressed clearly. It’s like they were internalized in the consciousness of the period.
Is it possible that resistance to commodified music is a protest against a state of society?