20 Years Later: Little Brother, “The Minstrel Show“
September 11, 2025 at 03:30PM
Hanif Abdurraqib | Longreads | September 11, 2025 | 2,818 words (10 minutes)
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Over the coming weeks and months, Hanif Abdurraqib will contend with major anniversaries of some of his favorite underconsidered albums. First up: The sophomore release from North Carolina rap trio Little Brother.
In one of the most famous photos of him, Bert Williams is as dark as the shadow of himself that lines the wall, set off slightly from his physical frame. His face is darkened, and though the photo is in black and white, his lips are clearly brightened, stretched into a somewhat tense half-smile. He’s wearing a wig of tight, coiled, kinky black hair to cover up his naturally wavy hair. Atop the wig, a top hat tilts. He holds a lit cigarette in one of his white-gloved hands, less like he’s preparing to smoke it, and more like he just happened to find it on the ground, the light of it glowing as it protrudes from the hand of his shadow self.
My central fascination with blackface, specifically as it was used and applied on Black people, is how unsettling it is, aesthetically. Bert Williams was a fairly light-skinned man, but was certainly Black to the eye of anyone who may have encountered him walking down any street. With the burnt cork applied to his face to make him even darker, there is something jarring, even alarming, about the brightness of his other features. His eyes, which rested naturally within his natural complexion, seem to leap from his corked-up face, and here look both surprised and heavy.
Williams rose to prominence for his very real abilities: impeccable comedic timing; conveying large, humorous gestures without words; a commanding presence. In other words, an effective use of his body on stage and on screen. In the 1916 silent film A Natural Born Gambler, Williams pantomimes a stunning routine as a poker player who has an uncertain hand, though he must convince everyone else that he’s deeply certain of what he’s got. The camera rests only on Williams, but his performance is so rich, even with no cards in his hands at all, that the full poker table comes to life, hitting a crescendo at the end, when he pushes all of his chips in and lays out his hand, eyes offering a squint of satisfaction, like he knows something you don’t.
And then, he loses everything.
The act of minstrelsy is, in some ways, hiding one thing behind another, grander, more visibly striking thing. Not just in a physical sense, not just in the already dark face made darker, the already thick and coiled hair made thicker, not just in the eyes, beaming out from the manufactured darkness, wide, carrying a presence of joy but also anguish.
Minstrelsy got white folks in the room. To a not insignificant degree, it still does. My friend shows me a video of a large Black man who is a “content creator,” though the content is mostly just him dancing and grinning wide while eating food; after each bite, he gets up and dances again. When I start to ask “who is this for, exactly?” I don’t finish the question.
And so, it becomes a question of what to do with the room, what to do with the stage. Who benefits from a mockery of the self, and how might that serve a mockery of the world beyond the self? The cover of Little Brother’s The Minstrel Show is black, and the faces on it—rappers Big Pooh and Phonte, and producer 9th Wonder—are also Black, and they are aligned on the album cover by shade of complexion, the third in the row, 9th Wonder, so dark he blends into the background of the album cover itself. They are side-eyeing. They are smiling. The design brings to mind TV Guide, still a viable trope in the pre-streaming days of 2005; a bright yellow logo reads LB WEEKLY, with thick white text beneath their faces trumpeting THE MINSTREL SHOW.
Little Brother’s 2003 debut, The Listening, had been so well-regarded critically that the Durham, North Carolina, trio had signed with Atlantic Records; The Minstrel Show would be their first major-label outing. Yet, Little Brother still seemed to be operating from the fringes of a genre that was undergoing a commercial swell the group didn’t quite align with—sonically or stylistically. The Listening had contended with the struggle of making meaningful music in a culture that rewarded the catchy and disposable. At the time, it was difficult to imagine what would change, even with the backing of a company like Atlantic.
Someone in the crowd has already done the work for you. In an ideal scenario, all you have to do is step out on stage and drown in the laughter.
Still, one could imagine a viable pathway to success. Hip-hop’s commercial binary, with the “mainstream” industry on one side and the “underground” on the other, had its tensions but also its marriage points. Kanye West, for example, could dance between big radio hits while also producing for groups like Dilated Peoples. So, many expected The Minstrel Show to maintain its underground bonafides while still gaining favor with radio, at least enough for a hit single or two to put the group further on the map.
But The Minstrel Show functions at least partly as a genre critique, which is always more scathing when it comes from practitioners of the genre. As the album neared release, two early controversies arose surrounding it, both of which had less to do with the album itself and more to do with some vague idea of what the album may have been suggesting about the industry and the people in it. (Both also happened upon platforms that purported to love rap music and/or Black people.) At The Source, the album’s rating was lowered from 4.5 mics to 4, because (allegedly) the magazine’s CEO and “chief brand executive” did not think the album deserved to have a higher rating than Jeezy’s Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101. Meanwhile, BET banned the music video for the single, “Lovin’ It,” from its airwaves because (allegedly) the visuals were seen as “too intelligent” when pressed up against the visuals of the day, at least according to the network (again, allegedly).
This created a self-fulfilling prophecy before The Minstrel Show even came out. This album, which people vaguely believed was taking aim at the binaries ascribed within the industry, found itself a victim of those binaries on its way into the world. If you were Little Brother, it would be impossible to write a better joke than this. Someone in the crowd has already done the work for you. In an ideal scenario, all you have to do is step out on stage and drown in the laughter.
As much as Bert Williams is hailed for being a singular stage and screen performer, I love him most as a singer. There are a handful of recordings of Bert Williams performing songs, mainly in the 1910s, by which point he was at the height of his fame. He’d gotten a lucrative record deal with Columbia in 1911, and began to record songs at a slightly higher clip than he had previously. Williams had a singular vocal delivery: He would speak, sometimes drawl through the verses, at times stumbling upon words as if they were revelations, like he’d just found the language poking up from the grass while wandering through a field. In the chorus, if one existed, his drone would give way to a vocal that soared, momentarily, before returning to earth.
His most notable song is his 1905 recording of “Nobody,” which became a theme of his, a song he was made to sing at every public appearance for the rest of his career. Lyrically, it is a devastating tune, a lament, an ode to the multitude of heartbreaks endured by the singer, and an ode to all of those who do not show up to offer any relief from the breaking. I think people most love this song because it is, in many ways, beneficial to imagine Bert Williams as tragic. As someone who had little and longed for much.
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The recording I return to the most, though, is Williams’s 1919 recording of the song “Somebody Else, Not Me,” which I love for how it balances the two primary tones of a Bert Williams performance. Its primary hue is humor, but through the harsh light of the primary, there is a rich, deep melancholy. It is a talky song, Williams meandering about, laying out situations: Someone needs to wrangle the tigers, who have gotten out of their cage, because the zookeeper is too out of sorts to do it, and the person who gets this done will surely be a hero! And then, with a voice half-anchored by a laugh fighting to not slip out, Williams says, “well, that will be great for somebody. Somebody else, not me.”
The song goes on like this, the speaker offering up a scenario in which he might rise to an occasion, and then choosing, at the last minute, to retreat, and leave it to someone else. It is a genuinely funny song structure, uplifted by Williams’s iconic delivery. But at the end, there’s another conclusion to be drawn: The speaker in the song has, for any number of unknown reasons, convinced himself that he is not equipped for any task beyond the task of knowing what he will not, or cannot do. He’s watching the heroics of everyone else from the outside, longing and laughing at the same time.
*A play on UPN, at the time a hub for the mid-tier (and occasionally low-tier) Black sitcom.
For all of the preemptive strikes leveled against it, and even for the loose thematic container the album sets itself in—arranging itself around skits and song intros and outros taking place within the universe of UBN, the “U Black Niggas” network*—The Minstrel Show is more interested in self-assessment than aiming outward. The industry is a target, but that target is ornamented with a sense of exhaustion, a sense of frustration. The Minstrel Show is an album made by three people who knew how good they were, and how good they had been, and yet found themselves in the sometimes unbearable position of being deeply respected but not beloved.
The Minstrel Show is an album made by three people who knew how good they were, and how good they had been, and yet found themselves in the sometimes unbearable position of being deeply respected but not beloved.
The sole architect of Little Brother’s sound, 9th Wonder had already risen from releasing unsanctioned remix albums to producing for Jay-Z and Destiny’s Child. Here, he laces the soundscape with perfectly flipped samples of ’70s soul music: The Stylistics, The Floaters. Chaka Khan and Rufus. At the heart of the album, amid all of that people perceived it to be, was an undertone of melancholy, of exhaustion. The realization that there is sometimes no grand reward for your hard work or your innovation, or your offering something against the grain. The album is more heartbroken than malicious or bitter. On “Not Enough,” Pooh and Phonte lament their lack of radio support, those alongside them who don’t match their hustle. These laments reach a breaking point, or at least a point of direct address, within Darien Brockington’s chorus:
Seems like whatever I do
It’s not enough for you
I paid the cost and gave you my all
But you still want more
I’m still standing right here
But it seems so unfair
And the “you” in question is direct, as a form of address. It is not necessarily you, the listener, who the artists need to keep showing up. It is the broad scope of many embodiments of a “you”: The Industry is you, the managers and program directors are you, the magazine editors and television producers are you. The road is a type of you, a you who puts the body through hell and the mind through worse, and none of this is petulant because the three of them have walked out of it and lived to make a joke that everyone laughed at too soon, and within the cacophonous laughter, there’s a vulnerability in The Minstrel Show that many missed.
Minstrelsy shows you one hand, convinces you of one thing—the thing you can see most vividly—while something else works behind the scenes. That something is something only those who are tapped into a specific kind of pain, a specific kind of quest for freedom that has failed before but is not worth abandoning, might understand.
It is actually not entirely accurate to say that Bert Williams loses everything in the pantomimed poker routine. That’s a failure of my own imagination, I suppose. It is suggested that, maybe, he loses. The scene doesn’t exactly resolve itself. Let’s try it from another angle: Bert Williams pushes his cards in, and his eyes grow wide with anticipation. I think I believed what happens next is a look of disappointment, because in my failing, I, too, have decided that the story is more romantic if Williams loses. But you don’t actually know. The scene fades with him gesturing with his hands, as if he’s waiting for the other player to show what he has, to see if what he has might be enough to take him out. As the shot grows dark, we still can’t see anyone else, just Williams, eager for the possibility of a victory.
The Minstrel Show works so well because in order to make a statement, one has to put their cards on the table even if the hand they’ve got is shit, or not what they’d like it to be, or if it is sometimes embarrassing. It is hard to critique the culture from so far outside of it that you pretend you aren’t a part of it. For example, while it might have been easiest to finger-wag about what they saw The Culture doing to Black men, to use some Fox News-lite approach of presenting a generational crisis with no solution, “All For You” is a song where Pooh comes to the listener, arms extended, and says my pops and I are fucked up, and I’m working on it, but I’m not sure how it’s gonna go.
And it is also boastful. After all, one cannot feel critically and commercially slighted if they don’t, first, believe in everything everyone is missing out on. And so, there are songs like “The Becoming,” an origin story to implant the realities of hard work into the mind of the listener, as a reminder that LB didn’t just arrive through luck, or through the miracle of the right door opening. And it is also funny—one cannot build a satirical universe without themselves surrendering to all the comedic opportunities within it. So: “Cheatin’,” a hilarious and intentionally overwrought performance by Phonte as R&B alter ego Percy Miracles, groaning about a cheating spouse (a highlight of the performance working Lil Jon’s “Get Low” into the lyric “I caught you creepin’ / to the window, to the wall, skeet skeetin’”).
In retrospect, it is funny that so much of the dust kicked up around the album before its actual release was kicked up due to fear that Little Brother might tell the truth about what they saw, internally—the pillars collapsing on a kind of rap that offered an audience very little beyond the party. And what the world got with The Minstrel Show, instead, was two rappers and a producer who largely turned away from the expected critique, and offered another, more scathing one: You don’t understand us, so you don’t get to have us. Not in the way you want.
Fellow vaudeville performer W.C. Handy once said of his close friend Bert Williams, “He’s the funniest man I’ve ever known. And he’s the saddest man I’ve ever known.”
Bert Williams died three times. He died the first time at the turn of the 1920s, when racial politics changed just enough for Williams to fall out of favor with the white crowds who once accepted him, and also with Black crowds, who looked at the performer with a renewed disdain. His shows suffered commercially and critically, and he spent much of his final years wrecked by insomnia and alcoholism.
Bert Williams died the final time on March 4, 1922, at the age of 47. His body simply failed him. He had been suffering from pneumonia, as well as other ailments. He died at his home, in Manhattan.
But it is the second time that haunts me. On February 27, days before his final death, he collapsed onstage during a bit while performing in Detroit, and laid motionless for several moments while the audience laughed and cheered. They thought it was a joke, a part of his routine. He was unwell, and fighting to give a performance all he had, and upon his collapse, an audience couldn’t tell the difference. They didn’t know what the joke was, or wasn’t, but they laughed.
When he was helped to his dressing room, Williams took in the sound, and said that’s a nice way to die. They was laughing while I made my last exit.
The Minstrel Show sold 18,000 copies in its first week. Plans for a second single were shelved, and the group’s relationship with Atlantic Records was irreversibly fractured. The joke writes itself.
Hanif Abdurraqib is a writer from the east side of Columbus, Ohio.
Editor: Peter Rubin
Copyeditor: Krista Stevens
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/09/11/little-brother-minstrel-show-20/
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