Lady A, a blues singer from Seattle, has been performing since she turned five in 1963. Born Anita White, she started singing in a Motown revue band called Lady A in the ’80s, and would later carry the name into her solo career. Lady A now has five studio albums to her name, with a new live album dropping tomorrow. Like many of her songs, “The Ride,” off her last album, melds adversity and hope in a way that keeps the themes relevant always and particularly poignant when times are tough. “Got to keep the faith in everything you do,” she sings. “Ain’t always fair, the road can turn on you.” If you’re into these tunes, you can tune in tomorrow to her livestream release party for “Lady A: Live in New Orleans” at 7:00 PT.
Lady A, eh?
July 17, 2020
What’s in a name
On that note, perhaps you’ve been following the misadventures of the country band Lady Antebellum. Last month, the group suddenly realized their name evoked a racist past and, in the spirit of performative wokeness, made a huge statement about doing better, changing their name to “Lady A,” which some fans use as a nickname for them. “We are committed to examining our individual and collective impact and marking the necessary changes to practice antiracism,” the band said— a commitment that extended precisely as far as their path remained unobstructed.
Shortly after the announcement, they were alerted to the existence of the original Lady A via a Rolling Stone article, and they reached out to see if they could “work something out.” Now, you’d think if you were a white band who had just professed their commitment to anti-racism, and you discovered that you were inadvertently steamrolling a Black artist who predated you, you might step aside and change your name to literally anything else. That is… not what they did. The band insisted that they retain the name, disregarding White’s feeling that it’s not possible for the two bands to perform under the same moniker (to be clear, Lady Antebellum already owned the trademark to the name “Lady A”— they filed it in 2010). White ultimately offered to change her own name in exchange for $10 million, half of which she would donate to Black advocacy organizations and community groups, but the ask for the wildly successful country band to share its resources was evidently too much, and in response, they filed a lawsuit against her.
“We can be better allies to those suffering from spoken and unspoken injustices,” Antebellum’s statement continues. Can or will?
Spoken injustices
I presume you’ve also seen all the museums‘ commitments to anti-racism? While we’re talking racial power imbalances in the arts, let me recommend an instagram follow in @changethemuseum, a text-only handle full of anonymous accounts of museum employees’ experiences with racism in their workplaces. As cited by Vulture, among the many unchecked examples of bigotry are “a senior curator at Guggenheim referring to a Japanese artist as “her sensei.” A manager touching her report’s hair while “saying random words in Spanish.” A director at the Whitney remarking that an exhibition of Latinx artists made him “thirsty for a margarita.”” So far, the account is putting contributors’ safety first by keeping everything anonymous. But at least one museum has already reached out to look into a claim, and given how many eyes the account is getting in the art world, that institution probably won’t be the last. We’ll be following along.