The Long-Time-Coming MUSIC AND RACE Thread

Secondly: I recently gave notice at the record shop I’ve worked weekend evenings for the last 10 months, and during my time there, I’ve noticed the buying patterns of the customers map out a lot less neatly than I might have expected. Not just “black people bought white music and vice versa,” but probably 20% of the clientele (and I’d wager that’s a much higher percentage than usual--it’s an East Village shop with a loyal base, not a Tower-type conglomerate) bought across the board, or at least further across it than you’d likely stereotype them as. (I was surprised to learn how many “hard” hip-hop heads love the Avalanches, for instance, not to mention ZZ Top--early ZZ Top.) I hope this doesn’t sound too simplistic (which it undoubtedly will), but only a small percentage of people go out of their way to listen adventurously, to many types of pop and nonpop alike. That’s not a value judgment; it’s a fact. Well, maybe not scientifically provable, but I think the combined anecdotal evidence is in my favor here. Hope I haven’t strayed too far from the subject here.

I don't think it's just a music thing. If an Asian in Australia is busted for drug-dealing, it's half-consciously held up as an example of the untrustworthiness of the Asian community. If a priest is caught molesting a child, it's an indictment on all priests everywhere. But if a white person murders someone, no- one considers the possibility that his or her race was a decisive factor, because white people have the luxury of not considering their skin colour to be a decisive factor within their lives (although it is, obviously). Likewise, I don't need to think of myself as an extension of Kid Rock because our shared skin colour never becomes an issue *until* it's contrasted with someone who isn't white, and since I'm within a white majority why should it come up? Whereas when you're talking about a black artist the contrast is always there because the society he or she moves within has an opposing psychological skin colour (the whiteness of Kid Rock and Eminem and Bubba Sparxxx becomes an issue precisely because they are involved within or contiguous to a specific black majority - hip hop).

trans: "real ppl don't read books"? "real ppl are comfortable with who they are"?

Well, bnw, I'm thinking of a specific type of person one runs into who doesn't really bother to criticize black hip-hop beyond just a statement of disinterest or ignorance or a distanced outsider observation of the trends involved (e.g. "So what does 'fo shizzle' mean?" "It means 'for sure.'" "Oh, I just don't get rap stuff.") -- but are far more elaborate in their criticisms of it when white people are involved. The basis of this isn't necessarily terribly poisonous insofar as it can be equally based on an attitude that runs "I really don't know anything about black people or their communities or lives so I'm in no position to do anything but just casually observe" (though there's a seriously poisonous racial groupthink implicit when that's not extended to whites whose backgrounds aren't necessarily any more knowable).

Angie Stone's first single was called "Brotha" and is basically all about how much she loves Black men. India.Arie's first single "Video" is all about how she is the antithesis of the "rap video girl". Jill Scott... I don't know, this is probably being filtered through my own experiences, but every song she's put out has SCREAMED "'Love Jones' neo-Bohemian" to me, particularly "A Long Walk" and "Getting In The Way". It boggles my mind that people could disassociate race from these singers in particular because a large portion of their artistic remit seems to stem from discussing racial issues.

As far as watching BET, I don't watch Tavis Smiley just like I don't watch Larry King, I don't watch "106 & Park" just like I don't watch "TRL", and I don't watch BET Tonight just like I don't watch Dateline. If they made an Osbournes type show with Snoop or something I'd sure as hell watch it, but BET doesn't seem to be about entertainment (might cut into Dionne Warwick's Psychic Friends time). Also, why is the sound on RapCity so muted and crappy sounding?

This thread makes me extremely proud of the fact that Indians have no media presence whatsoever (other than as an elephant-worshipping convenience store owner on a cartoon! I think there should be nothing but racist cartoons on TV all the time; I think I'd never leave the house...)

This might be me, but it suggests the whole question of listening to the lyrics or not. If someone thinks, "I am going to put on some new tasteful soul stuff" and does so, what are they listening for? Alternately, if they hear said music in a place like, say, Ikea, geared towards a comfortable capitalist/home furnishing aesthetic, would the lyrics ever be noticed directly anyway? There are questions here about *how* one hears music which are important...

I'm going to dodge the entire thrust of your point (which is a good one that I actually have to think about before I answer) and just say a quick "AAAAAAAAAAAARGH" at the description of these artists as "new tasteful soul". That bugs the shit out of me every time I see it, largely because of the deep levels of presumption inherent in the statement. I listen to these artists because they've got phenomenal voices. Jill Scott can BLOW. Angie Stone can BLOW. D'Angelo can BLOW. Maxwell can BLOW (but he's a cockfarmer, so I don't actually listen to him). Raphael Saddiq can BLOW. India.Arie... well I don't really listen to her. The entire "tasteful soul" angle doesn't come into it at all and I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of these artists would blow a gasket if you told them their music was "tasteful". It's about two steps away from "house Negro music" in terms of how it resonates in my head.

If the style is too mannered or conservative for you, that's fine (although I have no idea how anyone could hear Jill Scott live and call her a "conservative" singer), but describing the entire genre in terms that make sound like a polite version of contemporary music for delicate (implied White) ears is deeply WRONG.

I have *no* answers to any of these questions -- which is why I ask them.

It does make me wonder, though: when I listen to records whose listener base is primarily African-American, even records I love, to what extent might I be misunderstanding them because of a transcultural gap? (I'm not suggesting that my experience of them is wrong or invalid, just that there might be important stuff that I'm deaf to.)

I remember, as an undergrad, spending an afternoon playing records with a black classmate of mine who knew and loved Aretha's "Eleanor Rigby" but had never heard the Beatles' version. "Wow," she said when I played it for her, "I'm amazed that she heard that and figured out that there was a great song in there."

Also notable: that current jazz/"new music" is way, way more colorblind than any other American genre of the moment.

That’s just it, Ned, there IS no such thing as a "generic casual listener". (No doubt you would be offended, if someone called you that.) I’ve always approached music as "if it pleases my senses, I’ll listen/dance to it." In the end, tis all it comes down to: what does the person like to hear?

It’s disturbing once an overall label gets attached to a group of artists. Regardless of the musician, they create their albums out of emotion....and hope that their potential listeners approach it the same way. CeCe Winans, for example, has been making albums for years based on her Christian beliefs. In the 80’s, she decided to work with pop artists like Whitney Houston to widen her fan base. In the beginning, she was written off as purely a “Christian” artist. She had to work hard to display her pedigree, and get past the supposed stigma.

Ideally, music is supposed to be colour-blind. I suppose it is unavoidable that, despite best intentions, culture will always make a difference.

Yeah, I was thinking that was a bad phrase after I typed it. I'm a wonder on this thread, I am! The CeCe Winans example is a good one indeed.

Ned: I've never heard anyone who liked nu- soul describe it in terms of being "tasteful" or "conservative". It's always been detractors and it's always been in an extraordinarily condescending manner.

swoods: Your point about the link to 70s soul is acknowledged, but whenever it's brought up I can't help but think that criticizing nu-soul for having strong ties to the 70s is like criticizing punk rock for having vocalists that can't carry a tune.

There's another point I want to make about nu- soul fans rejecting modern pop more than they are rejecting modern hip-hop, but I don't know how to frame it. There's also a point in me somewhere about many of the people I've talked to rejecting things like Destiny's Child more on lyrical content than musical and that there are pop records that they still go gonzo for (my brother, for example, has been on the Jill Scott since before her first album, but was also one of the biggest boosters for Timbaland, The Neptunes, Ludacris and Jay-Z that I knew). I don't know how to work them into the current conversation beyond stating that, in my exprience, the simple stereotypes ILM likes to work with bear little resemblance to the people who actually listen to the music. This isn't a race issue; enough indie kids have googled the forum and gotten annoyed by the attitudes ascribed to them to show that no genre is immune to this type of stereotyping. The race issue comes into play in that people seem more willing to acknowledge that the "indie kid" stereotype is a stereotype and isn't necessarily representative of what it means to be an "indie kid". People don't seem to be as willing to do that with the "nu-soul bohemian" stereotype. This may be because there are many more former "indie kids" on this forum than "nu-soul bohemians", but the end result goes right back to nabisco's "fetishization of the other" point.

One of my favorite memories from this period. . . I had an African-American female friend in her 40's over and the three of us, my room-mate, my friend from graduate school, and me, were watching videos on TV. Anyway I think it was a P.E. video (unless it was that Terminator X solo thingy that came out around this time, which was quite good) and on cue my room-mate and I both yelled out "That's Sistah Soulja!!!" when she appeared in the video. She had been showing up in some of P.E.'s songs, but we weren't sure who she was. Meanwhile, my friend looked at us like, "what the fuck?"

Conservative, no (and again, I think it's a kinda useless term...which I used anyway, note), but tasteful...I'm not so sure. I think I have heard that word (or some very close equivalent) used to describe the stuff, certainly from (thanks for reminding my Jess) older r&b-buying (b & w) customers at the record store. I don't think that's only used by condescending detractors--it's a point that many of its fans *do* make. (It's also all over the advertising of the stuff, and reviews in *Vibe*.)

swoods: Your point about the link to 70s soul is acknowledged, but whenever it's brought up I can't help but think that criticizing nu-soul for having strong ties to the 70s is like criticizing punk rock for having vocalists that can't carry a tune.

Not criticizing it for this, really, just pointing it out, but I don't think the analogy totally works anyway. I wouldn't say punk vocalists (I assume you mean extreme caterwauling punks) can't carry a tune so much as I'd say they carry a tune in their own unorthodox way. Hell, *I* have strong ties to the '70s! (And to early '70s soul, definitely...and as I said, I like some of the music we're talking about.)

Don't know if you're referring to my post, Dan, but I hope when I talk about people I work with I'm not pushing "simple stereotypes"--I mean, I hope it doesn't come across that way. I acknowledged that I was making generalizations, but I'm really just drawing on conversations I have at work all the time.

the only jill scott song i've ever liked was for the production (the dubbed-up ar kaney drums...i forget the name of the song)...whereas much of the rest of the album sounded like those luther vandross albums i listened to as a kid in the car with my mother. even though i was seduced by the "newness" of the production it still felt older to me. a good song is a good song, and i wouldn't care if these guys were recording on all analogue equipment they stole from motowns dumpsters. but the marketing of "acoustic soul" (to steal phrase re. india arie) does seem to posit this stuff as an adjunct (if not in opposition) to the slicker, shinier stuff.

Also I hated the lyrics of that a womans worth song. I mean the phrase a woman's worth is like something from a skincare ad or some kind of vaguely anti-male self help group.

Err I think the root is that black (musical) culture even more than mainstream culture over the past 50 years has a quick level of danger- removal. When people have feared black music in recent decades it's typically been because of making mental connections to new and feared black cultures: people connecting 60s "race music" to civil rights "troublemakers" or urban riots; people connecting 70s funk to the growing emergence and influence of black culture; most notably people connecting 80s rap to gang culture or urban crime. The root, for white audiences, is not knowing precisely what the music associates with: the black audience knows, because it in a symbolic sense "knows" the black performers -- the white audience has less context, doesn't know what these types of performers and fans "are really like." Often it attaches its fears about What Is Going On With Black People to What Is Going On In Black Music.

But white people still listen to and enjoy and find meaning in the music, and so as soon as the immediate cultural fear tied to them vanishes they become completely regularized and quaint, and the fears get transferred to the vanguard of black music. Another way of putting this: I don't doubt that there were many, many people for whom the initial exposure to rap -- say, by Run DMC -- seemed bold and threatening in the same way that Snoop or NWA may have, later (by which point Run DMC seemed basically cute and avuncular) (and look at Snoop or Dre or "cop killer" Ice T now: the threat has evaporated in a way that's never been paralleled in any "white" genre except maybe metal). It's not so much that the culture has racheted up the levels of the material people find threatening or disorienting, but that the smallest passage of time makes clear how a lot of what seemed threatening or disorienting isn't really, not as much as you thought in the first place.

So there might be a mental dialectic set up that goes "black people before = good black people" versus "black people now = unknown and possibly bad black people." ("Black people as they were" aren't necessarily all that much more known, but it matters not as they're not around to be defamed.)

NB the same process has most certainly gone on with metal (and NB obviously part of this is just new fan bases growing up with something and having no concept of it as threatening), and but so if there were an "old-school metal" movement don't you think it would get the same "safe-metal" tags and insults? ("Safe-metal" meaning "it's been long enough that we're comfortable and convinced that people who listen to metal like this are perfectly normal and not evil?") (versus "what is this new type of metal that I don't know anything about -- this could be the type that is actually somehow risky and involves eating hearts").

Two questions: what's the difference between usher or ginuwine and "nu-soul" and which shares a set of VALUES more similar "old-soul"?

Oh I don't mean to dance all over AK Dan, and I'm sure there are good reasons for liking her, but I just really dislike her music. Very much a pet hate. Also after bigging up your taste yesterday it's funny how today Alicia Keys comes up and I'm doing the opposite.

This is a tangent of course, proceed.

Funkadelic - the first three albums owe as much to heavy metal as they do to "soul". "Super Stupid" is one of the hardest rocking songs I have EVER heard. Chuck Berry - watch his performance at the '58 Newport Jazz Festival and tell me he doesn't "rock". Little Richard Prince

allow me to call bullshit on that: ever heard of Frankie Beverley & Maze? Spice-1? the "5" Royales?