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Essentialist arguments with regard to cultures and even with respect to some genderrelated issues are beginning to make a comeback. Despite the postmodern insistence on lack of cultural homogeneity for any given culture, some cultures because of cultural construction, factors of oppression, or strength of worldviewcan make a better claim to having essentialist elements than others. Many authors, including Jose Vasconcelos and Octavio Paz, for example, have created essentialist arguments about the Mexican culture and at least one well-known Mexican artist of the twentieth century, Diego Rivera, might have been thought to have espoused a similar view.1 For purposes of this paper, we are employing the notion of essentialism with respect to a given cultural view as the notion that many or most of the members of a given culture can find agreement or familiarity with certain key components of the culture. In previous pieces we have tried to adumbrate the core elements of a Black essentialist view for an aesthetics of music.2 Although no view is constitutive of a set of necessary and sufficient conditions, a strong model of essentialist elements for African-derived musical compositions can be formed. At a minimum, such models possess elements of call-and-response, importance of rhythm and percussion, attributes of African vocality, and so forth. Interestingly enough, a case can be made for much of the newer and more contemporary Black urban musical expression (rap and jazz rap) along the same lines. That is to say that any argument that proceeds from an essentialist aesthetic with respect to Black music as a whole will be able to sustain itself with regard to these more contemporary, and in some cases less standardly musical, products. Theodore Gracyk, in Rhythm and Noise, has recently made an intriguing case for the notion that the musical genre of is one that is defined by recorded, rather than live, performances.3 Claiming that some works are ontologically thin (meaning that they are susceptible of cover and still count as the same work), Gracyk notes Employing recording as their primary medium, musicians have become painterly.4 For those unfamiliar with the recondite controversies of philosophy of music, it is worth pointing out that this is still another version of the frequently encountered debate about what counts as a given musical work the composer's original conception of it, the first transcription of it, and so forth. But Gracyk is writing here of actual rock, a genre that he, and others, trace to around 1965 and that most commentators consider a derivation from the more canonical rock and roll. Subsidiary to our main essentialist line of argument in this paper, we plan to argue that, despite its sometime reliance on recording, jazz rap and its analogues are defined by actual, rather than recorded, performance. Thus, they are ontologically thick each instance of a performance of a work may be considered in some way definitive.
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