In 2004, the beverage manufacturer Glacéau signed rapper 50 Cent to an endorsement contract for Vitamin Water, its line of sugary, vitamin-infused beverages in color-coded bottles. A hip-hop star with a lurid criminal backstory marketing a health drink might seem a little strange. At the time, 50 Cent set off a vogue for well-toned hip-hop torsos by featuring his “jailhouse” body prominently in videos and album artwork. The video for his massive crossover hit “In Da Club” (2003) intersperses scenes of the rapper partying with scenes of him exercising in an high-security medical testing facility. The end of the clip reveals that the club is also in the facility, and the viewer is left to surmise that 50 Cent represents a new technological synthesis of nightlife and health science. The song's hedonistic address pays no lip service to vitamins or exercise, but it does take a kind of salesman-like approach to nightlife courtship: “You can find me in the club, bottle full of bub,/Look mami, I got the X if you into takin’ drugs/I'm into havin’ sex I ain't into makin’ love.”Footnote ¹ In spite of these promises, the rapper himself purportedly does not drink, and his audience has few qualms about the contradictions in his image. 50 Cent's compensation in the deal with Glacéau involved an ownership stake in the company, and ended up making him more money than he has ever made rapping, reportedly hundreds of millions of dollars.

Many of the most surprising features of this story date back to the late nineteenth century, when traveling medicine shows toured the country selling snake oil with elaborate pitches built around black music. The “doctors” in these shows promised a range of cures, but usually mixed their remedies with alcohol or narcotics – using the promise of health to evade religious authorities and law enforcement, even in otherwise dry counties.Footnote ² Medicine shows could range in size from one to twenty performers on average – with the smallest comprising a black musician, often performing in blackface, and a white “doctor,” who would alternate comic sketches, songs, and sales pitches. Many of the most talented black performers of the period toured with medicine shows, including a number of artists later associated with the blues. In this essay, I argue that the conspiratorial context of the medicine show prompted some important aspects of the notorious suggestiveness of the blues.

Scholars have interpreted the role of black music in early twentieth-century American health culture in widely divergent ways. Kathy J. Ogren's The Jazz Revolution (1992), for instance, details the ways mainstream periodical editorializing stigmatized Black music as pathological, while Joel Dinerstein's Swinging the Machine (2003) finds an equally copious archive making the case for black music's therapeutic effect on the pathologies associated with the mechanization of everyday life. Rather than focussing on white professionals' response to black music, I show how the blues borrows from the medicine show its lawless appeal to ailments uncategorized and ignored by sanctioned experts.Footnote ³ I argue that the medicine show thus helped shape the blues as a commodity form and as a mode of social critique, with what Marshall Stearns calls a “lean matter-of-fact skepticism that penetrates the florid façade of our culture like a knife.”Footnote ⁴ I survey reports by musicians who worked on the medicine shows, and who often characterize the experience as formative, both as training in performance and as a site for apprehending the psychological effects of American capitalism. I then turn to a close reading of a selection of songs, and demonstrate the medicine shows' influence on blues lyric encoding. By returning to the medicine show as a point of origin for the blues, this paper finds the music developing out of a performance context that played on popular forms of faith healing and begs skepticism at turns.Footnote ⁵

The medicine shows drew on a longer history of what Neil Harris, in his study of P. T. Barnum, terms “the operational aesthetic.”Footnote ⁶ Harris noticed that nineteenth-century audiences reveled in debating the workings of Barnum's humbug, and that detecting the mechanics of his scams formed a large part of their attraction. The operational aesthetic suggests that American audiences enjoyed a scam by being in on it as well as being taken in by it. The medicine shows drew audiences into a complex of interpretive ambiguities; the contents of the medicines and the ethnic identity of the performers alike encouraged amateur discernment and argument. Some audience members might have known the inebriant contents of the medicine and some might not. Medical historians tend to cast the audience of medicine shows as dupes, and the shows as the most embarrassing feature of American medicine before the advent of the Food and Drug Administration and the American Medical Association. They emphasize the shows' success in small rural towns cut off from scientific modernity. The medicine shows did rely on nostalgic antimodernism as a part of their charm; they borrowed anachronistic iconography from medieval Europe, the antebellum South, and Native American as well as African American culture. Historian James Harvey Young notes that patent medicine shows were modern in one key respect, however: their sales techniques. The snake oil pitchman “was the first promoter to test out a multitude of psychological lures by which people might be enticed to buy his wares.”Footnote ⁷

The ethnic caricature which pitchmen incorporated into their “operational aesthetic” comprised a crucial aspect of the shows' modernism; it allowed quackery (a centuries-old tradition) to play on the anxieties particular to postbellum America. Redface and blackface had overlapping functions in medicine shows. Both suggested a complex mixture of exoticism, nostalgia, and antiauthoritarianism. Native American redface performers pointed to the supposedly transhistorical and local authority of folk remedies. Some pitches used blithe assurances framed by American power: “The Indian gave you America and now he gives you the magic secret of health and happiness with long life, the greatest blessing of all.”Footnote ⁸ Many patent medicines drew on Native American traditional medicines, even if their “fortifications” might offset the potential benefits.Footnote ⁹ In smaller shows, the “doctor” himself might wear a Plains Indian war bonnet to signal his connection to indigenous racial knowledge. Audiences that associated Native Americans with alcoholism would have taken the redface performance and potted iconography as hints at the alcoholic content of the nostrums. Redface performance thus had the double effect of supporting the pitch with the authority of Native American medicine, and flattering the audiences' sense of their own (implicitly white) modernity.Footnote ¹⁰

Reports from participants and viewers of medicine shows testify to the ways claims of racial authenticity worked to both agitate and reassure audiences. William D. Naylor, a white blackface performer on a medicine show, told a Federal Writer's Project interviewer in 1938,

Naylor depicts Porter as a conflicted individual who believes both in the ancient Native American provenance of his formulae and in the trickster function of his “psychology of suggestion.” The hypnotic double-talk of patent medicine salesmen played on audiences' hypochondria, but also their belief in the pseudoscience of race. A disproportionate number of patent medicines promised “blood purification.” By contrast, the shows' extravagant complex of cultural traditions and ethnic caricatures offered anything but “pure” entertainments. A journalist described the intensity of this multiethnic spectacle pruriently in Reader's Digest: “All of this time the Indians kept chanting monotonously and beating their tom-toms, the doctor himself roaring like a bull, while the minstrels kept up a furious ragtime dancing until the sweat rolled down their black faces.”Footnote ¹²

Like redface, blackface performance hinted at the piquant dangers associated with alcohol – temperance reform in the late nineteenth century still referred to alcoholism as a form of enslavement. Eric Lott's account of minstrelsy's effect on white working-class masculinity holds true for its postbellum second act in the medicine show.Footnote ¹³ Minstrelsy soothed economic tension in the unevenly industrializing New South with anachronistic fantasies of the leisurely life of the antebellum master class. Not only did white audiences feel physically better after a few slugs of narcotic lineaments, they also took in a spectacle designed around black inferiority. At the same time, medicine shows relied on black performers to agitate white men's anxieties about sexual potency. Many medicine shows played to all-male audiences, and kicked up anxieties about impotence by promising snake oil that restored “vigor” and “vitality.” W. T. Lhamon Jr. points to the etymology of the word “minstrelsy … from minister, as in minister to,” claiming that the form has a “curative genealogy.”Footnote ¹⁴ Minstrelsy in the medicine show confirms Lhamon's suspicions – customers went away from medicine shows drunk and happy, convinced that their complaints had been cured. In the absence of real scientific authority, the medicine show used ethnic caricature to effect a kind of multicultural faith healing. At the same time, the shows' “cure” worked by getting the audience tuned up into states of intense anxiety cut with boozy, druggy, and sugary placebos. Like other forms of burgeoning commodity culture, the medicine shows used African Americans to embody the admixture of health and dissipation that characterized the capitalist good life.Footnote ¹⁵

The figure of “Jake,” the standard name for the black character in medicine show performance, allowed audiences to feel superior even as they were being conned by the medicine show pitchman. Some sketches even had the doctor scam Jake at making change, a game that some doctors ran moments later on drunken audience members. Minstrel comedies had often joked on the unreliability of patent medicine and quack doctors: Charles White's The Sham Doctor (c.1870), John Smith's The Quack Doctor (c.1850), and George Coes's The Faith Cure (1895) all involve bogus medical authorities in interracial farce.Footnote ¹⁶ Medicine show repertoires, rather than arguing against this popular culture of critique, incorporated it, as it also did set pieces from temperance drama. Far from indicating the folk authenticity of the patent medicine, minstrel performance indicated to the audience the fakery of the proceedings.

The medicine shows, in spite of their obvious racism, attracted African American audiences as well. Since white physicians often refused to treat black patients, and the few black doctors were frequently overworked, African Americans often turned to patent medicines for relief.Footnote ¹⁷ The medicine show offered an alternative to African American consumers rightly skeptical of white professionalism. Moreover, the broad promises of potted “folk” patent medicines appealed to African Americans invested in the medical aspects of the conjure tradition. Like patent medicine, conjure appealed to people resistant to the particularistic focus of professional Western medicine. Zora Neale Hurston noted that conjure workers were “always referred to as ‘two-headed doctors,’ i.e. twice as much sense.”Footnote ¹⁸ John Mbiti elaborates a definition of traditional medical practice in Africa that accounts for this doubleness: “the medicine man applies both physical and ‘spiritual’ (or psychological) treatment, which assures the sufferer that all is and will be well. The medicine man is in effect both doctor and pastor to the sick person.”Footnote ¹⁹ Since lack of access to medical care was a part of the much broader alienation wreaked by Jim Crow, the root workers' broad promises held significant appeal. Some African American entrepreneurs even used the techniques of the medicine show to market the sale of African diasporic materia medica known variously as gris-gris, tobies, mojo bags, mojo hands, or conjure bags.Footnote ²⁰

Folklorist Harry Middleton Hyatt interviewed an African American “medicine show man” in Sumter, South Carolina, in the late 1930s, for his vast ethnography entitled Hoodoo – Conjuration – Witchcraft – Rootwork (1970). This unnamed individual testifies to having traveled on a two-man show, performing magic tricks and giving consultations on psychological or physical complaints. He offers a host of traditional remedies, and a heavy dose of medicine show humbug. Perhaps his most intriguing suggestion has to do with the “black cat bone,” which he claims is the “most lucky bone in the world.” He recommends the use of black cat bone in rituals designed for the un-medical purpose of “keepin’ de law out yore place.”Footnote ²¹ The informant, with a mocking conspiratorial tone, acknowledges the difficulty of acquiring an authentically black cat's bone:

Here the magician appears to give away his tricks, suggesting that he has used differently colored cats to substitute for black cats when producing ritual bones. This routine jokes on the minstrel tradition and white preoccupations with black authenticity. He undercuts the mystique of professional authority with a vernacular pragmatism, and plays on the dynamic with Hyatt, the white ethnographer, whom he pretends to take into his confidence. The scene rings with the humbuggery of patent medicine shows. After describing the traditional ritual of boiling the cat in a pot over a fire in the woods, the informant returns to a more conventional logic of professional authority, emphasizing that only a “real ole-class root doctor” can “pick out” which bone is lucky, “an’ dat's worth a thousan’ dollahs to any man.”Footnote ²³ This attitude, equal parts authority and trickery, was born out in the commercialization of conjure practice; Carolyn Morrow Long attests that packaged replicas of “black cat bones” are often just chicken bones, or even plastic.Footnote ²⁴ As a result of their unscientific claims, conjurers were subject to the same regulations as medicine showmen, and likewise forced to work outside the law.Footnote ²⁵ Samuel Hopkins Adams, the most vocal muckraking opponent of patent medicines, railed against such fakery. Writing in Collier's Magazine in 1906 of a nostrum claiming to cure kidney disease and rheumatism, Adams fulminated, “There is practically nothing about it that isn't a fake. It possesses that rounded completeness, that realization of every opportunity for knavery, which suggests a truly artistic insight joyously bent on fulfilling itself.”Footnote ²⁶ These lines are fine polemic; they might also provide a starting point for reevaluating assumptions about the blues as a form for the authentic expression of deep feeling.

Commercial considerations structured the “truly artistic insight” of the blues as it developed out of medicine show performance. Amiri Baraka associates the medicine show with “the Negro's entrance into the world of professional entertainment and the assumption of the psychological imperatives that must accompany such a phenomenon.”Footnote ²⁷ For Baraka, playing in front of white audiences in racist theatrical contexts gave the blues its individualist ethos (as distinct from the racial-uplift-oriented needs of the “group”). It also required a formal reproducibility of what had been the spontaneous, sincere, and passionate community feeling of “folk” music. The context of the medicine show as I have described it so far framed the “psychological imperatives” that Baraka mentions here; the musicians on the medicine show circuit entered into a public space in which activist journalists, medical professionals, patent medicine makers, and vernacular religious practitioners competed for cultural authority. This complex cultural field found its way into the blues.

Some musicians recall primal scenes of instruction at the hands of experienced medicine show pitchmen. In an interview with Samuel Charters, Pink Anderson testifies to learning the tricks of his trade in Dr. W. R. Kerr's Indian Remedy Company:

This old performers' trick likely had special implications for young African Americans performing in front of white audiences for the first time. More experienced black performers often took responsibility for “producing” medicine shows. They saw that performers were “up in all the acts and bits,” reconciled the performers' remembered versions of sketches, and arranged a coherent evening's bill.Footnote ²⁹ In taking on this role, the musicians often learned diverse regional styles and songs.

As a form of Great Migration-era mobility, the medicine show circuit also allowed musicians to make valuable contacts. In his classic account The Country Blues, Charters lays out the role of the medicine show in linking musicians in 1920s Memphis, where many of the medicine shows “made up”:

This sketch also points to the proximity of medicine show performance to larger networks of nascent mass culture. Race record companies used medicine show pitchmen as contacts for musicians, especially “hamfat” jug bands, which were particularly popular with both white and black audiences.Footnote ³¹

Most medicine show performers' careers did not lead to fame, however. The responsibilities and opportunities offered by the medicine shows often came with more menial tasks: mixing the snake oil lineaments, selling the product when not onstage, loading trucks, and dealing with the inventory. In 1920, a Dr. Heber Becker advertised ominously for “Blackface Singing Dancing Comedians; must play banjo and guitar. Lady Performer; must sing and dance. Lady to handle and take care of snakes.”Footnote ³² Medicine show doctors often paid miserably or unreliably. Another musician, Joe Williams, testifies that the “crooked” medicine show he worked on would withhold wages altogether:

Medicine show touring came with the myriad hardships of traveling through small rural towns on a semi-criminal enterprise with a shoestring budget. For all the pain associated with stasis in the Jim Crow South, Mississippi John Hurt refused to join the medicine show circuit: “One of them wanted me, but I said no because I just never wanted to get away from home.”Footnote ³⁴

Among the “psychological imperatives” that Baraka notes in the emergence of black cultural professionalism was the impetus to perform racist stereotypes for white audiences. W. C. Handy describes African American culture's acute ambivalence about blackface in his autobiography, Father of the Blues:

Handy distinguishes his “disreputable lot” from “upper-crust Negroes,” and his flamboyant figuration of minstrelsy as a “drain” has an unsanitary darkness. He presents his decision to black up as pragmatic, setting aside its political implications. This detachment could be emotionally draining. Black musicians sometimes turned to alcohol to cope. Gus Cannon recalled drinking before shows to steel himself:

Cannon's shot of courage carries him into a deeply compromising social and ethical situation. And yet his sacrifice is transformative – the audience became “one.”

Cannon later went on to fame as the leader of the Jug Stompers, and their most famous song, “Walk Right In” (1929), subtly recalls and reconstructs a medicine show pitch:

Starting from the pitchman's conventional opener – ”Walk right in” – Cannon proceeds to set into motion all the elliptical promises of the medicine show. Delivered in falsetto, and alternating its address to “Daddy” and “baby,” the song plays on the anxious masculinity that sought renewed vigor in patent medicines. In a late recording session for Stax Records in 1963, Cannon introduces the song by recalling its origins in a romantic scene:

Even in light of this explanation setting the scene against the background of the unstable sexual marketplace of the Great Migration, the song still disorients the listener's expectations. Cannon suggests a new dance, “a new way of walking,” after inviting the listener to “sit right down.” He balances references to physical mobility with psychological wandering – ”Do you want to lose your mind?” – hinting that his “new way of walking” might be a euphemism for narcotic inebriation. Like a patent medicine pitch, the lyric conceit of “Walk Right In” relies on ambiguous suggestion for its excitement; it pushes medicine show hucksterism into a hermetic inaccessibility that the blues would make distinctively black.

As the blues became a distinct musical form, musicians incorporated medical concerns into its definition. The blues have a homeopathic effect – blues music should cure the blues as a set of complaints. Albert Murray came up with the pseudoscientific phrase “blues counteragent” to describe this aspect of the music.Footnote ³⁹ Folk-song collector Newman Ivey White recorded lyrics from anonymous singers of Monroe, Alabama in the 1910s, attesting to the medical aesthetic theory of the blues. One song claims, “De blues ain't nuthin/But a poor man's heart disease,” while another wonders about the duration of his illness: “Some folks say them four day blues ain't bad; it must not have been them four day blues I had.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Blues musicians took on medical personae, and made outrageous claims about the curative properties of the music.Footnote ⁴¹ They explicitly conceived their work as medical and thought of themselves as “music physicianers.” Roosevelt Sykes, for instance, claimed,

Sykes makes an argument, like Baraka's, for the objectivity of musicianship: a “player” should produce the effects of the blues with a clinical detachment. He draws the distinction that blues professionalism “works … on the insides of the inside,” on the spiritual and psychological registers of the listener. The popular audiences of the medicine show demonstrated to blues musicians that their work could be just as effective as doctors' remedies.

The conceits of blues lyrics balance professionalism with the confidence tricks of the medicine show and the spiritual claims of African diasporic tradition. In “Snake Doctor Blues” (1932), J. D. “Jelly Jaw” Short sings, “I know many of you mens wondering what the snake doctor man got in his hand/He's got roots and herbs, steals a woman, man, every where he land.”Footnote ⁴³ Short makes the snake that plays a key figurative role in both patent medical advertising and voodoo iconography over into a jokey phallic metaphor. Short's role as a snake doctor has a conventionally bluesy mobility: “I'm a snake doctor man, everybody's trying to find out my name/And when I fly by easy, mama I'm gonna fly low low distant land.”Footnote ⁴⁴ He comes up against charges of fraud but backs up his romantic tall-talk with the pitchman's bogus guarantee: “I mean to be a real snake doctor man, and you know I don't mean to be no quack.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Other instances of the medical-authority-as-erotic-attraction conceit are equally rich. Doctor Clayton's postwar “Root Doctor Blues” (1946) again incorporates these resonances into a romantic solicitation:

Like Short, Clayton bolsters his erotic entreaty by anticipating accusations of quackery – his “remedy is guaranteed to cure you.” He compares the merely physical rejuvenation offered by the addressee's “regular doctor” with the psycho-spiritual benefits of his own cure that “makes you feel like an angel flyin’ round in another world.” The lyric scene is rife with competition – Clayton's women race to get to his office, while he tries to convince them of the superiority of his treatments. Paul Oliver claims that the song features “a studied disrespect for the beliefs of the older generation,” presumably the Victorian sexual mores of uplift culture and the superstitions of conjure.Footnote ⁴⁷ Like medicine show pitches, both Short's and Clayton's lyric arguments offer new superstitions about health, the market, and sexual prowess. They have taken Cannon's conceit and incorporated the “operational aesthetic” of the medicine show – hinting throughout their lyrics at the listeners' doubts and suspicions. The dialectic of the conventional blues stanza (its repeated proposition and emphatic resolution) abets a series of puns that intensify the songs' eroticism but also play on the listeners' receptivity to braggadocio.

The best-known blues musician associated with the medicine show is Blind Willie McTell, a Georgia-based singer active from the late 1920s until the late 1950s. As a young man, McTell travelled with medicine shows as a part of his musical apprenticeship. He incorporated a rich variety of Mississippi Delta and Piedmont blues styles into his twelve-string guitar playing, and mastered the shows' broad repertoire of rags, hymns, and other traditionals.Footnote ⁴⁸ As the popularity of the race records grew during the later 1920s, McTell graduated from small-time country shows to produce a series of sides under a few different aliases that made him one of the most distinctive male voices in the prewar blues. He never mentions the medicine show directly in his lyrics, and never uses the conceit of the doctor's pitch, yet his music everywhere embodies the hard-bitten spirit of the medicine show. Between Cannon's countrified jug band music and the conventional blues of Short and Clayton, McTell articulates a blues lyric interiority that maximizes the effects of the music's “operational aesthetic.” Like a medicine show pitch, his blues suggests a range of possible etiologies: poverty, disease, romantic dejection or lust, other more vague forms of ennui. In his compression of the historical concerns of the Jim Crow South, McTell's music turns the medicine shows' dubious rhetoric of cure into an ironic and critical poetics.

McTell's “Talking to Myself” draws on the dynamics of quackery and authenticity. Recorded in Atlanta in 1930, and released later that year under the name “Blind Sammie,” “Talking to Myself” is in every respect a dazzling side – done apparently in one take, with a harmony tripping and ambling through inverted chords on McTell's solo guitar. It opens with a strange yodel-scat that sounds both country and jazz at once. The lines are not arranged into traditional blues stanzas and there is no refrain; instead, the lyrics unfold in a series of couplets. The song does not sustain a consistent narrative or metaphorical conceit. Instead, the couplets ring with the frenetic syncopation of self-confidence and anxiety that characterizes American nervousness.

The lyrics, in full, are as follows:

The singer begins by asking God for an angel, and God replies by promising that he will send a live woman. Then the song turns to a perhaps spiritually inspired “new way of loving,” and the speaker becomes a sensation, driving a crowd of small-town women mad. These lines play on the conventions begun in Cannon and later consolidated in Short and Clayton, of a modernized sexuality causing spontaneous public expressions of collective desire.

McTell then recalls a childhood memory of playing “mumblepeg“ – a game of chance in which two boys throw their pocket knives at one another's feet, stepping closer until the game's ominous end. His mother interrupts to deliver him conjure-related superstitions about the color symbolism of food animals (“Don't drink no black cow's milk”). McTell projects this memory onto a taxonomy of skin-color phenotype in relation to honesty and generosity in economic transactions (“Black man give you a dollar mama, he won't think its nothin’ strange”). The lyric address then turns again, this time to intimidate a male listener with an extravagantly violent boast: “I'll gnaw your backbone half in two.” The erotic jubilation of the early lines transforms, through a memory of corrupted racial innocence, into an angry exchange of threats suffused with market racism. In a kind of ring composition, McTell ends the lyric with women chasing him, but this time hearing a more devilish “rumblin’ deep down in the ground.”

The kaleidoscope of images juxtaposes the psychodynamics of black life in the era of Jim Crow and the Great Migration. McTell finds the fraudulence that I have associated with the medicine show bleeding across a wide swath of everyday life in the South, corrupting the emotional truths of love, family, and community. Recall Joe Williams's assertion that he “had to be slick like the show” – McTell as well imbibes the shows' trickery, and has become a part of the snaky atmosphere of mobile modern America. His clear falsetto moves through moods, from confident to anxious, seductive to violent, and spiritual to earthy, that indicate a trickster persona, but also the transformative character of his virtuosity, and the curative powers of the blues. Jelly Jaw Short argues that the solitary blues singer seeks “to make hisself confident” through song; McTell takes blues boasting to metaphysical dimensions.Footnote ⁵⁰ Cannon, Clayton, and Short's takes on the erotic entreaty as a kind of medicine show pitch turns, in McTell, to a nightmare of possessive individualism. The “operational aesthetic” of Barnum and the medicine shows demonstrated to blues musicians that audiences enjoyed negotiating lies and authenticity. McTell's blues, with their extraordinary violence and jubilant hedonism enmeshed in contradictory signals of fraudulence and authenticity, turns this dynamic to an aesthetic critique of racial capitalism.

The Pure Drug and Food Act of 1906 and the more stringent Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 augured the end of the medicine show by requiring that products explicitly advertise their content, but the shows lumbered on past World War II, ducking spotty regulatory authority. Medicine show historians customarily point out that quackery has simply taken up residence elsewhere. The blues fared much better through the second half of the twentieth century through various revivals, often as not by white critics and musicians. Robert Palmer famously asked about the blues, “How much history can be transmitted by pressure on a guitar string?”Footnote ⁵¹ The medicine shows beg that this question be read in terms of the music's obliquity – its relation to history read as a winking code. In spite of the death of the embarrassing spectacle of the medicine show itself, and the consignment of the blues to a residual role, American culture continues to rely on African American music to reconceive the body, its complaints, and its cure. 50 Cent's humbuggery for Vitamin Water offers an exemplary instance of post-medicine show aesthetics. In one memorable ad for Vitamin Water, he conducted an orchestra in a rousing version of “In Da Club,” only later to admit cheekily that he doesn't know how to conduct. His stunts represent a fairly innocuous variation on the complex dynamic between African American music, American health culture, and American drug culture. Other instances of this intersection have had much more pernicious historical effects. The disproportionate consequences of the “war on drugs” on African American communities have long relied on racist associations first deployed in the medicine show. How hip-hop musicians have turned that ideological trap to their own ends is a story for another day.