The Long-Time-Coming MUSIC AND RACE Thread

This is actually the key critical shift in mainstream thinking about black music - a movement from black=automatically authentic (blacks create, whites steal and develop, the model in the 60s for rock) to black=automatically progressive (blacks constantly innovate, whites steal and blandify, the critical model since the 60s for almost every other genre). So critics who dislike nu-soul need to be cautious that they're not just buying into the (absurd) idea that a black audience only wants rawness and constant invention.

To draw a more contentious issue out of this, actually: I would suggest that there are white audiences in the U.S. that, consciously or not, interpret any sort of "nice" black music or culture as being "false," based on a rigid viewing of the very existence of black culture as being all about thread and provocation -- which has, after all, historically been a root impulse of white audiences observing black culture. Thus these audiences can be comfortable with the images of, say, thugs and gangstas -- even if they actively despise the music connected to them -- but they lack a framework to interpret the non-threatening, non-"exotic," BET-primetime elements of black culture, except to assume that these "nice" black people are obviously "faking it." They've been shown "black culture" as a point of intriguing difference so many times that they have difficulty processing the bits of black culture that are conventional or conservative or subscribe to basically the same values as the white mainstream.

(I'm overstating the case for clarity, but I do think this is a major part of why the white mainstream consumes loads of the same black culture it rails against as evil or dangerous or immoral, but very little of the black culture the subscribes to dominant values.)

I think that being a white man makes me feel relatively comfortable in this Western society, which in turn has (maybe) made me more relaxed about loving music which is not derived from my cultural experience, i.e. hip-hop. This could be part of the reason why white people (in general) tend to be more into black music than the other way round.

I'm not sure I agree with this. It's certainly true with regard to pulling out individuals like the ones you mentioned, but on the other hand most writing about black music today has a gigantic consolidating effect, most notably with mainstream hip-hop being discussed as this immense lumpen single-minded thing. Part of this is probably due to not engaging with the genres enough to start making nuanced distinctions, which I think plays into the singling- out element you're discussing: you have to pick out a few individuals to pin your appreciation of the genre on.

The "space-case" element I'd also take back to "how white people see black people." The main schism people want to see in black versus white music is that the black musical tradition is somehow more human and intuitive and "soulful," whereas what we now think of as primarily white musics are considered and intellectualized or academic. Music criticism tends to lionize individuals who have some sort of considered-intellectualized-visionary quality ("he/she has brilliantly created X"); the "space-case" ethos for black musicians preserves the "visionary" part but puts the creation down to not intellectual creation but rather the sort of "from the soul" vision everyone always wants to pin on black musics. (Sometimes there are elements of truth in this but sometimes I feel innovators in black music find credit being given to their "souls" where white innovators would find it being given to their brains; black people are just as guilty of feeding this distinction as white).

it's not true. i think bipolarizing the brain vs. the beat is gonna get you nowhere. is metal brain or beat? is dance brain or beat? is soul (the genre) brain or beat? is punk brain or beat? any band can be classified as more towards one end or the other, but ultimately, many artists can sit heavily on both ends and that negates the usefulness of a 1-dimensional approach.

sounds like he's got other issues.

i personally really don't like the whole white music vs. black music axes. i see it as more leftovers from more culturally segregationist times. why is one type of music inherently one culture's anymore? this seems quite true in america where pop music seems to be fairly diverse ethnically. j-lo, jay-z, and the jayhawks all makin hits in different ways. american kids growing up young today are gonna have been raised on an even more mixed diet.

the past notions of white vs. black are being superceded more by rich vs. poor ...or rather....the information rich vs. the information poor.

m.

1. Being sensitive to race is often frustrating, despite it being important. I very much dislike the Jill Scott CD we have in the changer at the cafe where I work, but when I try to figure out why, I inevitably end up at the question: am I a racist or something? Sometimes the path is direct: "You don't like this particular black artist -> you don't like black people" (stupid, but a move sometimes made in arguments); sometimes it's considerably more circuitous: "You don't like the strident soulfulness of the vocals, or the laid-back cafe-funk rhythms -> you don't like to hear black people express emotion / you don't like black funk that isn't really *funky* -> you don't like black people." This drives me crazy, but I really can't help doing it.

2. I was in a crappy mall record store the other day, when a black woman in her early 30s came up to me and asked me a question (why? because I'm a young white guy with tattered jeans on, I *must* work there, right? - n.b., not really what I thought at the moment; it just occured to me as I was typing): Which CD did I prefer (out of the two she was holding in her hands), Linkin Park or Puddle of Mudd? Unhesitatingly, I told her Linkin Park and explained why. I thought this was interesting, partly for the reasons discussed above (whites liking black music more so than the other way 'round); but then I worried that it was racist to be surprised at her question, because hey can't black people like nu-metal too? And of course they *can*, it's just not what I was expecting.

But Nabisco's point about racism/race still being a big flashpoint even while demographic factors are steadily eroding their classical origins is very pertinent. I can easily foresee a culture where these petty distinctions between skin color have completely evaporated. I see it happening all around me faster and faster - and I think in some ways this is an excellent, necessary evolutionary step for humanity. On the other hand, there's still all these cultural leftovers that are very much with us - I guess you have to acknowledge one while working towards the other. It's important to identify and confront racism/racial issues when they arise, but keep in mind that the point is to move past a culture where any of those things matter.

So, I guess what I'm saying is don't bother second guessing your or other people's music tastes (are they "black" enough, are they "white" enough?), but deal openly and honestly with when confronted by racism/racial questions/race relations. For example, it doesn't matter if Clarke thought it was curious that a black woman was buying Puddle of Mudd vs Linkin Park (hey, there are all sorts of possible reasons she was buying it...), but he should've answered honestly if the woman had asked "why is all the music by black people in this section over here, and all the music by white people is over here?" I don't know if that example makes any sense...

The only conscious effects I can think of:
1) While I never find myself saying "damn, I really need to get me into that white American music", I do feel the need to culturally expand. ie "I need to get me into that Arab/African/Asian/British (even) music.
2) Not being Christian, I find myself uncomfortable listening a lot of of Xian r0><0r, while black christian music (lots of soul, and most rappers are very religious) is completely fine with me.

Ultimately, though, I find race doesn't affect how I listen to music as much as I discover music.

I would historically disagree on the ideological basis for that being similar to this ("reverse racism" was not an au-currant concept, or even "racism" for that matter), tho I see where you're coming from.

When I was listening to a lot of "edgy" hip-hop (notably P.E., Ice-T, NWA, BDP, but also a lot of 5%er stuff like King Sun, Tribe of Shabaz, Brand Nubian, Poor But Righteous Teachers), I was also listening to "edgy" white indie like, well, mostly a lot of Throbbing Gristle and Pyschic TV actually, plus some leftover punk. (Not that I wasn't listening to some other things as well, but when I think of a certain period in my 20's, this music dominates my recollection of what I played. I did like some quieter hip-hop like De La Soul and Tribe Called Quest. Also remember listening to a lot of SoulIISoul.)

As I've said elsewhere, I lost interest in hip-hop in large part because of content I found offensive, and because I was getting tired of the overall confrontational stance of the artists I had been listening to (and didn't find some of the alternatives like Disposable Heroes or what's that guy KRS-1 punched? all that appealing). To some extent, yes, it was a reaction to certain aspects of African-American culture that I didn't like, and I might say more about that later but I want to think through what I'm going to say before venturing any comments. In general, my experience of living at the edge of a poor urban neighborhood (mostly Latino in this case), tended to make me less patient with celebrations of the anti-social and of randomly directed rebellion. (On the other hand, I could relate more to "Night of the Living Baseheads.") But this also affected my interest in a lot of those people in the RE/Search "Industrial Culture Handbook." SPK with their comment about wars being cool, or some such. Boyd Rice posing with leading members of the American Front. Maybe even P-Orridge and crew hanging around Spahn Ranch.

Which is not to say that I have stopped finding artistic value in any of this, or that I've totally stopped listening to it, or sworn it off completely, but for the most part I don't feel like dealing with it. (I do see nuances, too: as ideologically misguided as the 5%ers seem to me to be, at least what they had to say wasn't particularly nihilistic.) I hope this response hasn't drifted too far from the subject of the question.

And now, if I listen to African-American pop music it's mostly from a much earlier period, the stuff I grew up with in the 70's. Salsa does some of the same tings for me now that Soul and disco did in the 70's. (Salsa clubs are intersting here as a "neutral" meeting ground for non-Latino blacks and whites, who I think can share of sense of being outsiders.)

from some perspective, i do agree, these things need to be talked about, because it is ok on some level for people to feel culturally connected to their familial traditions and that aspect of indentity is going to never completely remove divisions between people.

it still bothers me though. people shouldn't have to stick to their inherited cultural identity. to me, as an american male born in the mid 70's, my heroes and the music i listened to, is comprised of all kinds of cultures. none of them are any less brilliant or less authentic.

for people to assign brilliancy and/or authenticity based upon outward signs is lame and more importantly, untruthful. i know it's done, and so it is a subject worth talking about, but for the record, it should be seen as poor reasoning. m.

Aye! But while this was stupid, everyone accepted that this was at least the judges' interpretation of what was album of the year, while Talvin Singh's victory was greeted with accusations of tokenism. Were these criticisms over-analysing racial agendas, or exposing them?

Dave, it isn't fair to generalise how white people may feel about black music, since it isn't possible to ask a large section of the country. If they choose to buy chart stuff, their preference has little to do with their skin colour.

As an American Black gal (with English family ties), I can't deny that my music tastes are different from many other fellow Black folks. However, I think that was influenced more by my English relatives, than my race. Though I spent my early years in a (mostly) Black/Hispanic neighborhood, I could never sink my teeth into rap or Caribbean music---though "culture" dictated I should have. Growing up listening to the Pet Shop Boys, Depeche Mode and U2 were more my style.

As for (B), I don't truly think race affects other people's listening habits any more: where there are white kids that love hip-hop, there are black and hispanic ones that enjoy bubblegum pop. Sure, you can say that it is due to peer pressure (if they are teens). However, as these kids get older, they can decide whether to change their musical tastes...or not.

[Slightly rambling, but I hope my point came across....]

Also I started the thread because race does get introduced into so many ILM threads as a hidden subtext to why people do or do not feel certain ways about certain things -- people meaning not ILMers but portions of the public as well -- and I'd like to see some uncovering and expansion of that.

Oh and see funnily the last part of this response gets at what I was talking about earlier, about music and particularly hip-hop trumping culture-at-large. Which I'm not necessarily complaining about, just noting that mainstream perceptions of black culture are influenced more by Snoop of Ja Rule than by Tavis Smiley or CeCe Winans or even Kim Coles. Both sides are valid representations of parts of African-American culture but an exclusive focus on the former can cause skewing, and thus cause some people to view the latter as somehow "false."

Jet is, so far as I know, still extant, although I haven't used the bathroom in my aunt's house for quite a while so I can't verify this from personal experience.

I don't know about this "true"/"false" dichotomy though - to me CeCe is just as "real" as Ja Rule, they're both produced by the same corporate mechanism, both mediated by the same structures, etc. If you want "real" culture (of any kind), just take yourself on down to the corner and talk to people who don't have billion dollar marketing campaigns behind them.

of course part of the argt here is surely that what appeals from "cross the tracks" = what you aren't getting on YOUR side of the tracks

corollary of attraction to "cross-tracks" appeal is that, in order for your tastes to carry on being sppealed to, you require the tracks to stay pretty much where they are...?

I was under the impression Def Jam was less a "corporate mechanism" than most.

I don't get BET here, but every time I've ever turned it on (also everytime I get the chance), it's been rap videos or blaxploitation films. Serious Question: What else do they play?

Keiko: they have lots of mainstream family programming and news and such. Although yeah, they run a lot of music because that tends to be what everyone wants to see from black people (see above).

What you call "nu-soul" here I call "Ikea soul"--one can listen to it without perceiving those pesky matters of race, class, or economic differences that mainstream America would rather ignore. Therefore, it makes nice background music for the current white middle-class ideal.

The white commentators who sneer at these artists for supposedly watering themselves down to appeal to a middle-class white audience seem to assume that "authentic" [1] soul should be rawer, socially conscious, and confrontational. These sneerers are a variant on the suburban white kids who embrace some version of hiphop culture because they're bored with their parents' New Country and their peers' nu-metal.

[1] Given that music has everything to do with perception and interpretation--by both the artist and the listener--is it possible to usefully speak of authenticity in regard to music?

"A complete dissolution of art into life is present in such a point of view: the poor are art because they sing their lives without mediation and without reflection, without the false consciousness of capitalism and the false desires of advertising. As they live in organic community -- buttressed, almost to the present day, from the corrupt outside world -- any song belongs to all and none belongs to any in particular."

I think this is what's at the heart of the tendency to view hiphop "as this immense lumpen single-minded thing," as Nabisco put it.

The tendency amongst people in some rock circles to redescribe certain black musicians as "space cases" is meant to work against this. It's also meant to make them more punk rock -- avatars of the antinomian, the negating, and the creatively destructive that no community could ever contain. Of course, if you reach down into the flabby rotten guts of this idea, you'll probably find the Beats and Mailer's "White Negro" somewhere in the intestinal tract. And they sure had some sorry-ass ideas about black people as well.

basically: haters of white musicians who incorporate black musical ideas in their work (limp bizkit was the example used) have found a 'safe' target for their ridicule. it is more acceptable for them to deride a white artist who 'pretends to be black' than to directly criticize the black artists directly.

alex SF argued against this theory, perhaps he could take the other side...

That one Mos Def song (hahaha). But yeah, I actually think Ethan is very very right on that point: the bad side of the underlying thinking seems to be "black musicians can do all of these things and I won't complain because that's 'black music' but I'd rather that white people didn't try" -- the bad sometimes-underlying thing there being that "that's just what black people are like."

Race goes so deep in America, I think, that it is impossible to discuss a black artist without dealing with it, which is a crisis of the black artist as much as of the critical mindset (required reading: Spike Lee's Bamboozled [not that I agree with it]).

Attitude towards race is near impossible to seperate out for most -- connecting what you SHOULD like with what you DO like (eventually the difference is meaningless).

This is particularly the case with rap which historically has represented itself, as earlier said, as the "black CNN" and thus asked to be treated in this framework. The modern generation is disavowing this (one aspect of the KRS-One/Nelly dispute) particularly in the case of Jay-Z for example whose Blueprint restorts to a radical solopsism of the artist.

Also those "backpack" friendly artists seem to open themselves to such an audience not only musically but thematically -- downplaying what Dyson calls ghettocentrism (the 5% nation varient of nationalism) in favor of race-uplift liberal integration.

Where does futurism fit in? I'd argue it's the most implicitly nationalist of all the abstract thematic content, while simultaneously distancing itself enough from "reality" as to move towards a purely incorporative form at once with an undercurrent of strong race-identity but a face absent any of the racial reality of America.

Non-overtly colorblind "futurism" tends to become "pastism" linking into Egypt, etc.

The most recent crisis of "black" music is the outcome of gangsta rap -- a form rooted in an "authenticity" which sought to become unassimilable (just as black youth themselves are treated as unassimilable) found itself transformed into another coveted commodity. The dirty south which has come to the fore is, ironically, very futurist in essence -- everybody can be TAUGHT to move their body, and everybody SHOULD be. So, while BET may not present Reed himself, the core narrative of his novel "Mumbo Jumbo" is recapitulated in three-minute segments constantly.

Of course, all of this is the opposite of the question -- not how does race affect music, but how do racial perceptions of music (and anxiety of such [THUD!]) influence music. But then, I never tried to understand people, only social representations of people.

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?

Hmm...I almost wonder if they're due for a return too.

Nits brough up an interesting point earlier, about people being quick to jump on white musicians doing black music things - with the implication that it's a way for them to attack black music (black people?) indirectly and safely. There's also a strongly held if underlying assumption among many people of not being able to "get it" if you aren't the same race as the musicians - thus, perhaps a criticism of black rap as "tuneless; it's just talking" could be countered with "you just don't get it; it's a black thing"; whereas that tack couldn't be taken with a white person attacking Limp Bizkit. (Although, to take up one of Jess' points about nu-soul, an age-based counter-argument can be made: "it's music for the kids; you don't get it cuz you're old".)

Still, it's not as if Limp Bizkit and, I don't know, Nelly are pretty much the same - I don't even think it's fair to conflate them for the purpose of argument, which you have to do in order to make the "indirect attack of black music/people" claim outlined earlier. Nelly is a black musician participating in a historically black form of music; his relationship to rap is hugely and unignorably different from Limp Bizkit's. One can observe this difference without having to say that "that rap stuff is just what black people do" and refuse to engage with it critically.

Yeah, I was actually thinking about this a moment ago and trying to think up a good way to draw it out as a question. If we pretend for a moment that it's true that rock'n'roll was essentially a black- music invention, then what happened? The knee-jerk conclusions here, depending on what you think of rock, would be either (a) that black music moved on to something else entirely but white audiences stayed within the circle of rock traditionalism, or (b) that rock'n'roll was a meeting point of black and white performers, from which two ever- more-separate musical cultures developed outward.

Neither of those really ring true, though, I don't think -- beyond which I've always argued that "rock" as its been practiced since the 60s on really isn't a black-invented form. This requires that we think of the rock lineage as being centrally Beatles and not centrally Stones -- which is to say "rock/pop," really, with the generalities of early rock'n'roll reconstituted into a much more colorless popular-song tradition. There's also the issue of punk, a rock development that may have had a little bit of conceptual impact on blacks but had basically no sonic impact on black music. Perhaps what I'm arguing here is, in sum, that the Beatles and punk were the two major points of rupture in the development of a non- black rock world.

And but so another thing that sometimes baffles me is that while it's often claimed with regard to rap-rock and such that those two lineages are coming together I think they sort of indicate the opposite: that collisions between the two are now so noticeably difficult that they come across as big special tasks. But on the other hand we are starting to see those crossovers cease to be about racial and musical divisions and more about attitudes, and this probably thanks to what we think of as black musics developing broader genres and divisions and shadows within themselves: yeah yeah Method Man teams up with Fred Durst but on the other side cLOUDDEAD (not black but for the sake of argument) team up with Tortoise and Hood. The more we expect artists to have wide conceptual ranges the more approach starts to trump genre or "sound."

(Dance music is really a weird one in this context, though.)

Oh...hmm...well, I know, I know. I just wanted an opportunity to say that Bo Diddley rocks so viciously, is all. There's this circa-'69 film I caught only the tail-end of on cable that showed him going through chorus after chorus of "Bo Diddley" in such a flabbergastingly right and good way that I feel like a dolt for not remembering what the name of the film was.

Both of the first two have plenty of white fans (I don't know the 5 royales); Spice 1 gets played all the time on the Clear Channel urban radio station out here (the biggest Spice 1 fan I know is a Persian kid from a very rich, asian neighborhood actually), and the only time I ever hear about Maze is from this local white sports radio host who is likely their biggest fan on earth. Late 70s/early 80's soul (Jeffrey Osborne, Donnie Hathaway, Luther Vandross, Deniece Williams etc) SEEMS very much FUBU (the black analog to the somebody-done-someone wrong country songs?), but is anything like this still happening? Blacks in their 30s and 40s grew up with hip hop. I just read this article about how Patti Austin is now singing chinese pop songs with Frances Yip and is huge in Hong Kong. It was hyperbolic statement but I was just trying to indulge the N*tsuh.

This reminds me of the part of Kings of Comedy where Steve Harvey is singing all those soul "classics" and the crowd is going apeshit and singing along and I'm just sitting there trying to figure out what the hell songs he's singing.

o.t.- Representation has a lot to do with familiarity with race. I feel incredibly guilty that I have no conception of indigenous Australian music other than, I dunno, (traditional) coroborees or else something naff and middle Australian like Yothu Yindi, or else some Aboriginal nu-metal bands. But I suppose Aboriginals are a far less numerous minority than African Americans

I'd dispute this, though, in terms of effect: the Stones' traditionalism meant they basically curated and preserved the "black" part of rock, whereas the Beatles a lot more visibly mashed it up with a (specifically English) non-rock popular-song vocabulary. I think we just learned on another thread that the White Album is the top-selling Beatles record of all, the same White Album that could be claimed to be "ripping off" Tin Pan Alley as much as "black music" -- beyond which most of the work that defines "what the Beatles in particular were all about" is hugely divorced from the blues- based "black" rock idiom (and even their early straight-rock'n'roll stuff seemed to replace swagger with sprightliness in subtle ways, or is at the very least remembered and has become historicized that way).

(Actually surely this is a large part of the Beatles being considered so central to rock in its present "white" form; they did the pioneering work of taking rock in the black, American sense and reconstituting and adapting it into a template for a new, different audience and mode of expression.)

Ha! Just last year I wrote a Judith Butler-quoting essay on Lil' Kim!

grandson: i learnt this song at my grandpappy's knee
grandpappy: YOU STOLE IT YOU MEAN!!

NB: also hip-hop ranked lowest in their poll asking "favorite music" losing mainly to Rhythm and Blues, but also Gospel, then Motown, and even Easy Listening!

All I know is I got made fun of for liking "nigger music" when I was in 8th grade (the first Run-DMC album, for the record), and now every damn white kid on the island thinks Eminem is God, and IT MAKES ME MAD!!! The only black guy my age that I've ever met here, btw, thinks Eminem is overrated and gets most of his fame because he's white.

Other interesting tidbits:

In 8th grade someone once asked me who the black guy in Limp Bizkit's "Break Stuff" video was ; I answered it was Snoop or Dre, can't even remember who it was; to which he replied "that guy has NO STYLE at all!". What the fuck?

The most inteligent guy my age I know on this island once went into a diatribe about how "white people are trying to be black these days", citing some female friends dancing to Ja Rule as an example (this kid is white, mind you, but has lived in Angola for three years); when I asked him what HE liked, he answered "Rock...and Blues and Jazz, which is black music, but it's not DUMB".

Go figure.

read this; 2pac