The Long-Time-Coming MUSIC AND RACE Thread

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?

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