Black Music

Geir,
Good and bad are taste related. While taste can be discussed, it will always remain arbitrary and mutable.

Tom,
Taste, politics and sociology cannot be separated.

http://www.jahsonic.com/Taste.html

at all.

i've always found the term 'black music' a little alienating and i dont like it but thats mainly because i'm aware of the circumstances in which it came about and thats where the hatred stems from. the effect it has had in strengthening the cultural identity/idea of a black race has been for good and bad, bad because of the stereotyping that inadvertently occurs and causes people to make assumptions e.g. someone might be shocked if Dan Perry told them he was as much a fan of The Cure as Prince (has that actually happened to you Dan?), why would this person be shocked? i admit i'd be surprised to meet someone who happened to be black and happened to be a fan of a band like The Cure and thats an example of the inevitable stereotypes that have occurred partly as a result of segregating music as such.

Heh heh! Not so much now, but MAN people in high school (and to some degree college) never ceased to be amazed. The high school thing was especially pitiful because it was essentially the same group of kids I'd known since 7th grade (some since PRE-SCHOOL) and even when I was at my most chart-centric I was always talking up some random left-field band, like Men Without Hats, Tupelo Chain Sex or Skatemaster Tate (THANKS OLDER BRO!).

One or maybe two of these feature Anthony Kiedis from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, even smugger than usual, and sounding unconfortable in his minstrel-like affect, saying things like "black is . . . funky. black is . . . the root of all music." It's really grotesque.

The other ads seem to equate various black musicians with some of political militancy. With some stentorian black poet in Def Poetry Slam mode spitting righteousness in front of a blown-up photo of Marvin Gaye or Billie Holiday, as "Inner City Blues" or "Strange Fruit" plays on the soundtrack (enough with those songs already!).

It's like a Ken Burns special, dumbed down even further.

In the course of "celebrating" "black music," MTV has in fact done the opposite by caricaturing it.

poor old Craig David tho eh?

Is that possible?

I'm not sure whether I admire or look down on his stance re. the jazz series: that he didn't know anything about jazz coming in to the project, and didn't feel any special knowledge of the genre was necessary to putting together an authoritative documentary on the subject.

This is not totally irrelevant to this thread: one of the things Jazz was trying to do was locate the "essence" of jazz in one dimension of another of the African-American "experience." I thought the show's efforts toward this were fumbling and unseemly much of the time, but I'm not sure at this moment if they were necessarily misguided.

Charles Burnett is involved, so this is worth looking forward to in addition to dreading.

*collapses*

I sat and listened to it from beginning to end 2 days ago (admittedly, while smoking a gigantic blunt). I listened again yesterday (this time whilst cleaning & drinking coffee)...and, lo and behold, what is this? WOW. I really like it. Not just because of how sonically adventurous it is (although that's a nice bonus)...but because it's the first Common album that was this consistent all the way through. A very good, tight and focused album (although very loosely structured in a good way), if I may say so.

I think Questlove is far underappreciated as a producer; he deserves just as much respect as the Neptunes get, that much I feel very confident in saying. I know how much Zack de la Rocha is disliked up in here, but I honestly think the Questlove/Zack tracks, when FINALLY released, will be something definitely worth listening to.

"Black metal", as a term, does NOT refer to metal bands composed of black musicians (such as Living Colour or Sound Barrier), but refers to a subset of "death metal". 99.9% of "black metal" musicians are white people. Should we just refer to this as the Metal-Subset-Switcheroo?

The term "black music" defines ignorance.

For instance, I was very surprised to find my friend Juannel (a black dude) to be a gigantic fan of Brian Eno, and NOT a fan of P-Funk AT ALL; thus, my own stereotypes exposed before my eyes. I wondered briefly if he was as surprised to find that I'm a big fan of Fela Kuti while I don't like a great many other groups-I'm-"supposed-to"-like such as The Pixies and Husker Du and whatnot.

The thing is, PROBABLY NOT, because no one uses the term "white music"; even when they're talking about They Might Be Giants.

I wonder if this is why modern black rock acts such as Fishbone and Cody Chestnut have a harder time finding commercial success; is it because, even though they are "black" artists making "music", they aren't doing it in a style that falls under the "black music" umbrella? WTF?

I agree that the term may not be the best one . . . maybe it's even a little antiquated . .. probably not very useful in the present . . . but it had a very specific utility in a certain time and place.

You mean Living Color? :-)

some other whines:
1. ya know, just because sterotypes are positive doesn't mean that the reductionist attitude behind them isn't just as unfair. I accept the inevitability of sterotypes, and they have their uses, but the underlying logicical framework, whether the "flesh" is positive or negative, is still similar. I tend to have a very neutral definition of racism. I tend to think that it occurs when any purely social aspects of a racial group are ascribed to racial genetics instead. but maybe I am wrong. If so, can I please have the "funk" gene injected?
2. if "authentic" (used as a synonym for "good") music is only made by poor black people, does that mean that a certain segment of the black population must be kept in poverty in order to satisfy the music critics who use the word?

Grounds for execution.