people who say rock is black music - C or D?

Might was well say its blue music cause they mostly wear denim, or something...

I just don't "get" this reductive urge to color-code an entire genre of music. Is there some point here beyond stirring up a fight?

why do so many people do it then?

The whole black/white thing was first expressed as classical vs 'pop', so if we're going to even bother with any of this, that's the one we should start with.

The history of music is one of miscegenation, which we should celebrate, without forgetting where stuff came from. I think.

Western Swing is a sub-category of the Western in C&W. I think there's a couple of tunes on the Harry Smith anthology.

If you take a bunch of soul records made by black people explicitly addressing the experience of being a black man or woman in a viciously racist country and say 'This is just music, this isn't black or white' aren't you missing the point?

That's a particular case, but generally music is created by and listened to in communities, and those communities are often riven by divisions over race. While music can act as a bridge etc. , it's also naive not to expect communities to express ownership of 'their' music, innit?

or techno either? probably cos most of the artists making it arent black anymore, thats why.

(The other reason I thought it odd is that they do play drum & bass, which is mostly listened to by white people, if not made by them. And house is pretty 'black' still, isn't it? Derrick Carter, Moodyman? Gets played on all the pirates? In terms of audience?)

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000026XUU.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

i dont necessarily think thats what it is, but if they were sticking to this 'station for black music' thing, then they would play rock too, or some of it at least, no? that started off as much a music made by black artists as white ones. i think their qualifier is whether music still holds currency with black masses and if its still made my majority black artists.

The coded language of today 'street music' 'urban' I find a little weird. What exactly are they saying? I think I'd rather they said what they meant. MOBO is at least upfront, although logically weird.

critics and audiences have a hand in coding genres racially and socially - most rock fans have a snobbish attitude to 'black music' i find. they think of it as beneath them and inferior.

granted, many have the equally bad fetish that all black music is 'real' and 'authentic' and a social commentary even if its just a party song. i still LOL at all the people who had to treat dancing in the street as a civil rights anthem just so they could feel okay with liking a brilliant soul song about dancing.

"asserting that rock is "black music" is griping about the fact that black people once got almost no credit for the music."

right.

yeah it's more complex. mostly they hate non-'black' black music like house and techno, can admire some hip-hop (run dmc, public enemy), and respect marvin gaye, curtis mayfield etc.

MOPO? (Music of Punjabi Origin)

So, there are at least two different 'Bhangra's which are obviously totally connected (I think the word has been used to describe a dance since the 1400s) but totally different. So it's miscegenation again - between cultures, races, generations, musical styles. This is fabulous, but the word Bhangra is also contested between generations, between countries. Now, you could just say 'music is music' or 'banging tune!' or claim it as 'English' and forget about its origins.

But isn't it interesting to know a little bit about all of this? Or is that not allowed?

'English' And what the hell does that mean? 'I'm 45th generation Roman' as Mike Skinner would say.

using a racial term (badly concealed or not) just takes the process of genre classification to an even dirtier level of alienating the art, the tradition, and the audience(including the opportunity audience).

ignoring the traditions that lead into something is pretty revolting (theres history to deal with..and lessons of a large variety to learn) but focusing on history stymies growth. i'm tempted to agree that we should really get down to calling music music, but i am now remembering a conversation with a classmate back in college. someone told her "race doesn't matter..it should be ignored." but then theres always the fact that when someone looked at her, it was pretty hard to "ignore". As long as race is a factor in how we run the day to day its a factor. at the same time we have to focuson the music itself.

the moral, as always in such issues: don't be cheap. im sorry, but you have to be thoughtful. this is a big world...ain't nothing so easy

ppp: OTM on the fetish issue! who was it that has a piece on alien music? talking about how forcing black artists to be soulful and "real" is completely effed up...its included in that recent "audio culture" book. fetishizing is the b-side of identity politics. the whole mess is a damn mess

Yes, and ironically the attitude toward a lot of this music in the black community is probably more mixed and ambivalent. For example, I heard Keb Mo (not that I'm much of a fan) talk about the crazy looks he used to get from people when he said he wanted to learn blues -- it was too associated with bad times and oppression. And I'd guess that attitudes have probably shifted even since then.

yeah i agree. it's interesting because it's not all projection, is it? there's an 'authenticity' vibe running through 'what's going on'. not so on 'survivor'.

i laughed btw!

But I have to admit I'm a little guilty on this one -- there's something I like better about the music coming out of Memphis, Motown, and Muscle Shoals. I just think it was a confluence of a variety of musical factors -- great songwriting, skilled arrangers, a golden age of giften studio musicians, distinctive voices. I'm not uniformly against contemporary R&B, but more often than not I feel the urge to flip the dial from hot97 when they play stuff with *singing* in it.

all terms have implications. derida said that.

ill let you be in my dreams if you let me be in yr dreams. dylan said that.

styles keep changing...and technically that should allow us to get away from all sorts of cliches and stereotypes. but people love to cling.

i said that

(just havent had enough coffee to make it snappy)

last night's 'rip it up' panel to thread!

Maybe other people will feel differently, but I don't think Eminem or (to use Edd's example) Steve Cropper would have problem saying they play black music. My band is mostly white, but we would never, ever say that the style that we play is not black music, and I think it would be insulting to the musicians that we look up to if we did.

all that said, i would say black and white musics have always had a back and forth interplay between them as long as black people have been in the western world. this idea that theyre 'purely' one or the other is pretty tricky ground.

*steps sheepishly off soapbox*

"xxxxpost- i know stax was multi racial, but this whole idea that all memphis music (soul in particular) was ALL harmoniously multi-racial smacks of ebony and ivory white-washing (no pun intended) idealism to me. its like that article on memphis soul in the new mojo - it says 'soul is about the marriage of black and white' or something to that effect. i was like WTF? where were the white workers in the motown factory? or PIL? or Hi? someone find them for me please. i give endless respect and props to sam phillips, and always will, but part of the sun success story relied on him essentially turfing out the black bluesmen so he could record white guys who didnt have the bane of being black working against them in the marketplace. im sure the racial tensions in memphis added to what was made there a great deal, but it wasnt all a great bit love in as some like to make out. half the time, i think writers like guralnick just stress the multiracial aspect so they can feel more at home commenting on soul music as white fans. "

no, this is totally right. I mean the whole thing about Memphis--a town I know really well, I don't mean to say the same thing I've probably said before here, go with what ya know--is that it's based on racial *envy* and even hatred. Stax was indeed a white-owned company at the beginning with Stewart and his sister, and you had white people recording there, obviously. But yeah, at Hi, that's a black thing. Hip people in that town know what's up, musically and politically, but even they get infected by some kind of South-Africa-like mentality, I've heard otherwise enlightened people refer to "niggers" and I go, what the fuck? It's a bit complex and plays into that city's identity crisis and sense of inferiority, that "no one understands what it's like." Which is true, but so fucking what? Robert Gordon is a good writer but that Mojo piece just recycles stuff he's said for years, like his line about "donut shops and churches," which I've read three or four times now. He has turned into a younger version of Guralnick, even though his insights are pretty on the money. I share the skepticism about Sam Phillips, what a shtick he had. Again, he *did* it, but it's about half hucksterism. But remember--it took a lot of balls/desire for the folding green to do what he did, in 1953, down there, so take the good with the bad and be grateful he got all them into his studio. He did it.

the racial interplay has been what has kept music interesting. and trying to focus on "the music" can also be idealistic white-washing in a bad bad way. but i think the idealism has to be followed up on as we continue to talk about music. that takes more reasonable and thoughtful work than most people care to do.

And, sure, white people have incorporated Tin Pan Alley elements into rock music since the heyday of Brill Building pop, but the R&B elements were always there in the base of the music, even if it may have been more in the background than in the original black R&B songs from the 40s and 50s. I mean, to take a typical "white" example from today's music. If Coldplay hadn't had any "black" elements at the base of their music (bass and drums - sure, they are a bit in the background, but they are still present), then they would have sounded like Bing Crosby.

And those elements were among the elements that were considered so "white" that black musicians wouldn't touch them during the late 60s/early 70s.

You mean black musicians like John Coltrane, maybe (who most obviously did the song "India")? And the vast number of black jazz musicians who practiced Islam during the 60s?

I don't know Geir, some of the stuff on "Puzzle People" or "Psychedelic Shack" would sit pretty comfortably next to "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)"... Harrison was clearly more serious about the Indian influence than 99% of the rest of those twee psych folks (Tomorrow, Ray Davies, etc.) The Ravi Shankar and Friends album he produced has some totally bizarre western pop+indian raga moments, I love it....

A couple of the songs on "Village Green Preservation Society" prove that they weren't as non-psychedelic as some people claimed, but I don't think they did ever use sitars.

It's not a question of whether Indian (or Greek, Arabic, Balinese, etc etc) influences were taken up more by white or black musicians, but of seeing that rock music is not the sole creation and preserve of these two cultures.

On a related subject, how I hate it when people say psytrance is white simply because there's no Detroit groove in there. How pig ignorant. Psyctrance would not even have been conceived of without the Indian classical scale and the Australian indigenous influence (primarily the didgeridoo).

?

you have probably never heard Eddie Floyd and Booker T. Jones's "Big Bird," which would fit nicely on "Revolver."

Plenty of black acts picked up on psychedelica. "Strawberry Letter 23." Junior Parker did "Tomorrow Never Knows." Sly Stone *began* his career producing San Francisco acts.

And anyway, why would Stax worry with sitars (the Box Tops used one on "Cry Like a Baby," and they did "Whiter Shade of Pale" and "Neon Rainbow" is psychedelic, if the Bee Gees are...) when they had their own thing to begin with? English twee psychedelic did not define the era, either--like, the Yardbirds, Geir? What about Roky Erickson, the Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape...all a bit more muscular than what you're talking about.

-- Jordan (jordan...), April 28th, 2005 9:38 AM. (Jordan)

I'd say it's about 50% black, 50% white, with a certain margin of error.

What is BLACK music? What is WHITE music?