Should Craig David's Guitarist perform in Blackface.

Yes it is de facto segregation and yes it is just business. If by having a white guitar player Craig does not get on black radio, black TV shows then he will not reach what is supposedly his target demographic.

But are you willing to be the one to lose out to challenge it (as CD seems to say he is). And I can stand his music (though What's Your Flava ain't much cop).

What about Eternal getting rid of Louise, then? Was that to do with a forlorn attempt to break in the States? I can't remember offhand.

Having a white guitarist didn't seem to hurt Stax records. It's always struck me as odd, this relative lack of 'two-tone' acts and scenes in the US, which in a lot of other ways I think is more sophisticated in its understanding of race issues and relations than Britain.

Marcello - it's just as likely to be a result of UK record execs discovering Louise was a very marketable solo artist.

Eternal did get rid of Louise for this reason (foolishly?). I'm not sure if I would agree with you about race relations in the states Tom, with regards to the ring fencing of Black culture but I'm not in any way an extport comentator so...

I think by virtue of having black charts and black radio suggests that someone along the line is going to want you to define blackness - and hence we get Mariah Carey's 1/8th origin and rules about artists of bands be predominantly, or wholly black. But then you also get Fatboy Slim winning MOBO awards year after year in the UK and ask is that solution equally hypocritical.

MOBO = Music Of Black Origin - with the emphasis on Origin. That it winds up in the hands of a man who wears dodgy Rat Pack shirts is one of life's mysteries, but hey.

'Black charts' are actually R&B although they are 'for' black artists.

If CD unwilling to fuck over best friend to get on in USA, hooray for him. If I were him I'd say 'my best friend is white, if you've got a problem with that, you might have a racism problem and no way is that 'just business'. I've always found the specialisation of the US charts somewhat suspect, as there is assumption of marginality of 'non-pop', and top-selling artists within chart might in fact be outselling the Top 40 artists they're not allowed to compete against.

Emmett Miller to thread!

But if you go down the Music Of Black Origin route Suzy, where is their rock catagory (find me a strain of popular music without at least some black origin). This therefore turns the thing into a watered down version of the Brits. (The MOBO's used to be a lot stricter, but had troubled with the mixed ethnicity of so many UK dance acts - and had to bite the bullet. If you could win a MOBO with just one black member did it follow you could win with none, especially if the award was supposedly being given upon musical merit).

Pete, it's not *my* rationalisation (nobody I know with a MOBO vote would have wasted it on Norman) but it's what MOBO does stand for, ask the organisers why they do it that way (I think the ans. might well be 'advertising revenue' but I always say that).

From the Mobo website:
mobo n. = term recognised to mean all types of music from urban culture
By who?

(On self same website I found out that 90% of the winners have indeed been black, Fatboy Slim has been oft nominated but has never won and that it is awfully hard to find the definition Music Of Black Origin on the site - which is interesting).

Does Black = Urban? Its a strange way of changing the language to fudge the issue.

Urban = Black in the US, cf Urban Comedies like House Party, Next Friday etc.

I think Suzy's OTM about it being about advertising revenue (and about this always being a good first guess). This also applies to the main question, but is no excuse.

I was just saying over on the ILM thread: there's less racism involved here than the label's cynical expectation of racism -- they've got a cute half-white British guy on their hands and evidently want to do everything possible to shore up his blackness-factor. I do not believe that black American audiences much care. I also do not believe that black American audiences constitute the bulk of potential record sales for Craig David, whose music is not hugely removed from, let's say, that of the all-white Justin Timberlake. I also do not believe that anyone has ever stopped to think about the existence of Craig David's touring guitarist at all, much less his color.

The R&B charts have not been exactly 'black music' charts for a long while. They were originally the 'race chart' (renamed by someone like Ahmet Ertegun), a ghetto for black acts only, but they've changed a bit. I believe George Michael has had an R&B Chart #1 or two, for instance.

And for the record, Stax had a white bassist (Donald 'Duck' Dunn) as well as guitarist on most of their great records.