Bob Dylan lays down what killed rock n roll (2016)
medium.com
medium.com
And if you look at what is happening on Bandcamp or Soundcloud or YouTube or wherever else young people are trying new things you see a tremendous heterogeneity of inspiration and not a lot of concern for where the sound fits in.
The parallel trend of course is the power migration from labels and producers to artists, and these are intrinsically related. The artist wants to experiment and find their own path, the label is always trying to replicate success (to radically oversimplify on both counts). Labels have a role to play in supporting artists, but the power dynamic is different when the artist brings the audience they've been building independently for years.
The direct connection between artist and audience shows how much more open to new ideas we can all be. It is the same receptivity that powered the integration Dylan describes taking place in the 1950s, and I think its great.
> Lil Nas X and The Weeknd, neither of whom fits comfortably in the genre they are assigned to by the RIAA.
For me, this is generic and formulaic music that could have come out any time in the last thirty years (except for the ubiquitous "autotune/overcompress" sound I suppose).
"Not fitting comfortable into a genre" is so bland a compliment!
But I agree with this - all the action is in Bandcamp and similar.
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A composer named Steve Reich wrote several pieces of tape music (processed tape recordings) back in the 70s that were a huge hit (in avant circles), but then he went to study in Ghana and decided that this was a mistake. He felt that the purpose of music was for humans to play and sing together as a group activity, and that pre-recorded music did not fulfill this very deep human need.
I was skeptical when I first read this, but time has proven him entirely right.
Lil Nas X and The Weeknd are placed in R&B almost exclusively because they are black. In your eyes, sung by a white person in 1986, would be synth pop.
Did Billy Ray Cyrus make Old Town Road suddenly country? Is Montero (call me by your name) rap or a gay dance anthem?
But to how many people younger than me does this really register?
Genres like synth/vapor wave are very conscious remixes of periods of time many of us were barely alive during, and their popularity comes in part, I think, from the tenuousness of their connection to the time period from which those genres draw their audiovisual cues. For me, at least, my earliest memories are a dream half-remembered, and music that draws from but does not emulate music from that time period can be a way for my imagination to fill in the blanks.
And great points: > "Not fitting comfortable into a genre" is so bland a compliment!"
> Steve Reich wrote several pieces of tape music (processed tape recordings) back in the 70s that were a huge hit (in avant circles), but then he went to study in Ghana and decided that this was a mistake. He felt that the purpose of music was for humans to play and sing together as a group activity, and that pre-recorded music did not fulfill this very deep human need.
That is very interesting. (Also, I've only heard Reich's music live, but I've never played along.) In folk music, it is a core belief (long ignored): It's music for folks. Woody Guthrie's songs were written so anyone could play or sing them, as I understand the story. His successors often played more complicated and challenging stuff, much that ordinary people couldn't hope to perform or isn't singalong music. It's hard to imagine sitting around a bar or a living room or out under the stars, singing 'Like a Rolling Stone' together.
But I completely and utterly disagree with his view that "the purpose of music was for humans to play and sing together as a group activity"
Music, and any other complex human activity (like visual art, or literature) is just way too rich and varied to have any one or definitive purpose.
What might make sense or be the purpose of music for one person might not for another. Someone (like myself) might enjoy making music alone, and who is Reich to presume to tell me that we're doing it wrong?
Of course, he's welcome to make music in groups if he wants. I'm not going to tell him he's doing it wrong either.
Parenthetically, I enjoy making music in groups too, but that's just not the only way I enjoy making music, and don't think I'm missing "the purpose of music" when I'm working alone.
This statement looks intelligent and interest but upon reading carefully says absolutely nothing. I don't even get what you are trying to say. Music is a group activity. Mozart played with orchestras, beyonce has scores of musicians to bounce off ideas of, Fela Kuti played with many bands - what does making music alone mean?
Reich's view was at the very least based on an observation, a learned and studied observation as a practioner and scholar.
Sure, some musicians clearly make music with others.
But some do not.
And for someone, no matter how learned or studied, even if they're a famous practitioner or a scholar, to dictate what music is for everyone is absurdly arrogant and myopic, to say the least.
If Reich has an argument to support his claim, he should state it, and his supporters should produce that argument, not point to him being a scholar, etc, as supposed evidence that he's right. That's an argument from authority and is a logical fallacy.
Different people have different goals and different aims. What meaning any particular person finds in an activity varies from person to person, and the wider and richer the activity is, the harder it is to make the case that there's only one right way to do it or that it means only one thing to everyone. Music and other arts are examples of such rich, wide-ranging activities.
True. And I should rightly retract and accept that shortcoming but you've provided me with no real argument other than negating mine. No examples of what you're talking about, not data point to chew on, fuck all.
It still an empty statement in and of itself.
> Different people have different goals and different aims. What meaning any particular person finds in an activity varies from person to person, and the wider and richer the activity is, the harder it is to make the case that there's only one right way to do it or that it means only one thing to everyone. Music and other arts are examples of such rich, wide-ranging activities.
Another completely empty statement. If I had a few days to live, I'd learn nothing from it. T'would be a waste of precious time and energy. Blanket statements, without form, without focus, without context are more meaningless than a false truth. Looks intelligent, but ultimately meaningless.
I vehemently disagree. that's like writing when you don't know how to read. Possible, but meaningless.
I can't read sheet music. The condition to understanding Bach's music on your own is to first understand sheet music. So to make his music you must read and understand his language. Is that music? It's subject to whoever interprets it. If we go nearly extinct what would be a more useful piece of evidence of what music is, Bach's Sheets or Madonna's "LIKE A VIRGIN" MTV special?
I think when you had to buy a record or CD people would consider themselves a “punk rock” person or whatever for any genre and they’d tend to buy and listen to/show their friends that music.
With streaming services, and easy access to wide variety there’s not much need for this kind of thing so tastes blend more on the consumption side. They then start to blend more on the creation side too.
One thing I’ve noticed is that music has gone from an activity (listen to this record I got) to entirely personal and mostly ambient.
Maybe that’s a factor of my age, but I think it’s mostly related to higher stimulus activities now available on the internet.
He charts the patterns in how his students engaged with music over his career and comes to the same conclusions you do, shifting from a very highly engaged relationship with bands and acts to a relationship with music as more of an aural thing. Often he finds people don't even necessarily know the names of the songs they enjoy, while in the past people would read liner notes and learn a whole origin story for their favorite acts.
He attributes it largely to the neverending algorithmic feed. You don't need to know anything about the music you like to find more music like it, the feed does it for you. Not always for the best of course. I recently started listening to the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack and really enjoy it, but algorithmic feeds seem to associate it with a lot of anime soundtracks and Jpop rather than associating it with jazz and funk, the actual musical genres the soundtrack is in.
That's totally separate from the algorithm/genre issue though. The genres have never ever really perfectly matched up with the music but it doesn't matter. If the algorithm perfectly selected more music you like you still wouldn't be more likely to look up the name of the track I don't think.
Anyway that soundtrack is... not jpop per se but it is heavily influenced by it. The format and aesthetics are very jazz-like but the rhythms and harmonizations are very jpop. That might not be the most _useful_ association in this context of finding music that sounds similar, but it is there. And in its way as accurate as calling it jazz. Saying it's "actually" jazz or funk is... that's just not really how this works. It's not wrong to say it's jazz but it's wrong to say anything really is ONLY jazz, and can't also be other things too.
The causation goes the other way. People are more likely to want to learn about the background behind the music in order to more deeply immerse themselves into a scene where they can be exposed to more music like this. It's why if you go into the record store looking for a recommendation one of the first questions is "What kind of music do you like?" But if nobody ever asks you that question, and you never have to stop and think about it in order to articulate your answer to that question, you wouldn't really know off the top of your head.
They really did claim to have written "Killing Floor" with a stupid title of "The Lemon Song." Howlin' Wolf had been to london and recorded with Clapton. Hendrix had played a scorching version of it on BBC Radio One. No way they could have missed just that one. Then all the Willie Dixon. It's embarrassing how often Page/Plant claimed to have written classic blues and robbed working folk artists. Lowered my opinion of them significantly to see it so if you want to hero-worship them maybe skip compilations like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiiY4ciKFQA
And that's just some of it. When they stopped doing it the quality of their output fell off a cliff.
One way I have heard to mentally categorize things: What is the stereotypical musical instrument of that generation/genre?
For jazz and the silent generation it was the saxophone, maybe others though.
For rock-n-roll it's the electric guitar, no question.
The 80's was the electric keyboard and synths, kinda.
Today? The laptop.
The VR "EXA: The Infinite Instrument"[1] seemed one intriguing window on the future. Development looks stalled.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/606920/EXA_The_Infinite_I...
edit: It was Eye Drops on TechTV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlM2LFPjS5k
However, for the keyboard, mic, headphone, software, etc you're in the ~$500+ range. But, a Silvertone Stratotone in 1960 was ~$55. That's ~$500 today when adjusting for inflation, so right in the ballpark.
The laptop is really just a tool to host different virtual instruments.
The "instrument" most easily associated with the past 15-20 years of electronic/pop music making have been Wave Table synthesizers like NI Massive and Serum.
Remember Skrillex? Those screeching sounds and basses are using Wavetable synthesis (from NI Massive in particular).
A big part of the reason it's harder to associate a particular instrument with newer electronic genres is because it's FAR easier (and more common) now to program your own patches (essentially a preset instrument) for your songs.
The DX-80 mentioned in the next section was VERY difficult to create patches for (even for it's time) so when you hear it in a song, it's almost always the included stock patches.
>The 80's was the electric keyboard and synths, kinda.
You'd associate a few types of instruments (and synthesis types) with the 80s but the reigning one was FM Synthesis, in particular the Yamaha DX-80.
Give a listen to some stick DX-80 patches and you'll immediately go "Yep, that's the 80's"
When I started going to Midwestern raves in the 1990s they were literally some of the first fully integrated places I hung out in. Definitely some of the Detroit techno parties we went too, some of the first places where it was a majority Black space.
EDM now is thought of as this totally white music, all electronic music really, by everyone. Oh some rappers might flirt with some electronic beats, but the whole genre has just been whitewashed basically.
But for some of those years in the 1990s it really felt like we were living in the future. Hopped up on smart drinks (and LSD), gay and straight, black and white, talking about this new thing called the internet and dancing all night together.
We were it - the New Humans…
This pattern repeats itself in music over and over. Jungle to DNB. Dubstep was like two tone, then it got destroyed by the US market takeover.
Garage, grime, dancehall, hip hop all stay mainly black (with some white artists accepted) to defend their scene. Precisely to stop the take over from happening again.
Remembering as well that these musical styles live on and elevated above their once-upon a time rave/club scenes. So this is commentary specifically about the club scenes in the UK at their time of provenance.
They don't understand what EDM is: the superset of most electronic music.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_dance_music
In my opinion, the phylogeny of EDM and related genres looks like this:
Funk beget disco and boogie.
Funk and boogie beget electro.
Disco and boogie beget house.
Electro beget techno.
Electro and funk beget breakbeat.
House and techno beget trance.
(Trance and its subgenres (like acid trance) and deep progressive house are/were what raves were made of.)
Calypso beget ska.
Ska beget reggae.
Reggae beget dub.
Dub and breakbeat beget dubstep.
Dubstep != brostep. (Brostep is crapstep.)
Reggae, rock, and rockabilly beget punk.
Funk, disco, jazz, and punk beget hip hop.
Hip hop beget trap.
Dubstep and trap beget EDM trap.
---
DigitallyImported had zillions of genres, subgenres, and maybe genres of EDM.
Edit: "Despite the industry's attempt to create a specific EDM brand, the initialism remains in use as an umbrella term for multiple genres, including dance-pop, house, techno and electro, as well as their respective subgenres." - Wikipedia. Wikipedia being right for a change, this is industry BS. Don't buy it like a willing consumer.
I see in another comment they mention that's how their friends understand it, so maybe it's a regional thing.
It's not surprising to me that there are different interpretations of the term and I am not particularly worried about that. It's all muddied up across the globe, across time and across the internet, music is as colloquial as it is worldwide.
There are so many genre placement disagreements all across music, slotting everything into discrete groupings is only useful in a shallow and practical way, not a meaningful one.
Not that Wikipedia is an authority, but note that this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_dance_music
correctly covers the whole fields of music for dancing that is made electronically. I am perfectly content to be in the wider field of Electronic Dance Music.
But this specific initialism of EDM came out of the US music industry, and was never in use prior to that.
Wikipedia notes that the specific term "EDM": > By the early 2010s, the term "electronic dance music" and the initialism "EDM" was being pushed by the American music industry and music press in an effort to rebrand American rave culture.[3]
which is where us ornery old techno bastards come in. We will not be rebranded and renamed. Everybody is welcome to come up with new things and new styles, but you cannot rename a past culture.
Imagine if some industry press decided to rename Rock and Roll to "RNR" and back date all usages to 1959, editing Wikipedia to insert their new term in there and push their newly branded marketing channels (eg. https://edm.com/ )
Underground dance music has been fiercely against the mainstream music industry. We had different distributors, different press, different rules. This EDM term and this AOR (Adult Oriented Rock) over replicas of classic 909 house beats is the kind of thing that what we spent our whole lives fighting against.
So I hope that explains why we object to that particular the term, as strange and as petty as it may sound. It's political.
Remain Underground https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5t0l2aOW2o
Fuck the mainstream music industry, their playola extortion monopoly on attention, underpaying creators, and crowning of lesser artists while thousands better go undiscovered.
I think there is a split between commercialized EDM and "real" EDM. The true culture and heritage of house and techno definitely live on in the greater electronic music scene in general, especially online and in clubs. I call that scene EDM because it is easier than trying list all the dozens of subgenres it has grown to include, and commercialised EDM used to be referred to as Top40 during the late 2000s, as a way to differentiate it from the "real" EDM scene. Not sure if that term lives on.
It is usually pretty easy to tell when a song exists in the commercial realm. House is unique in that it has had more than one era of commercial success, but I think there has always been a delineation between commercialised house (stuff on the radio and in adverts) and the culture of house music (in the clubs and mixes)
This could be a locale thing, but in the UK what you call "real" EDM is often known as the underground electronic music scene (at least in my circles). I.e. the long tail of folks pissing about with machines in their bedroom.
Note the lack of "dance" as not all underground electronic music needs to be danced to. Autechre is a good example of this.
In the UK at least, EDM as a whole is often viewed as a commercialisation that started over in the USA (e.g. with Skrillex) and spread. What the EDM term generally refers to has changed over the years, and is now closer to "pop trance with super saw synths EVERYWHERE" these days.
So, at least for us Brits, it's a catch all term for a specific type of electronic music (and most of the time a disparaging term).
I think we mostly agree on the differing content, and in disagreeing with the parent, but it's the general "lumping in" with the same terminology that is often protested by the underground folks over here.
Personally, I would hate for my tracks to be called EDM (I'd rather stab myself repeatedly in the eye with a spoon).
Disclaimer: I'm just one UK dude who has spent a lot of time around electronic music. Other UK residents may have other opinions or nomenclature that they prefer to use.
I agree regarding EDM being a bit of a misnomer, I had always thought it was a weird term to use for everything. Another specific sub-genre in electronic music is IDM, Intelligent Dance Music, which occasionally doesn't even have a stable time signature, so it's not alone in that!
Ultimately it's just a label that people can apply to certain things to lump stuff into a category for them to conceptualise what "thing in category" is.
In the UK (at least in my experience), we had an existing label to call this "thing". Then Skrillex, Steve Aoki etc happened and everyone tried to tell us it was called something different (EDM).
We were like, no. Piss off. It's not that. What you're doing is not what we're doing.
And it's sort of stuck as this "definitely not what we're doing" labelling category.
Tomato, tomaaato.
--
IDM is an awful term. And I say that as someone who buys a lot of IDM.
My friend has a different (arguably better) name for it: "hurty brain music".
"You could sit down and listen to it like you would a Kraftwerk or Pink Floyd album. That's why we put those sleeves on the cover of Artificial Intelligence – to get it into people's minds that you weren't supposed to dance to it!"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_Intelligence_(compi...
That's not a knock on the USA as a whole (a lot of garage/acid can be traced back to Detroit house and techno), but it is mostly an American genre.
EDM is pure garbage and rife with narcissism.
FTR I've adored techno my entire life - from back when synth, industrial and underground were more common labels.
eg: Eno, Cluster, Tim Blake, Sensation's Fix, Klaus Schulz, anything produced by Conny Plank
...i'd be interested to know what term you use for the latter?
My preferred umbrella term for electronic dance music is simply "electronic music". This helps make room under the umbrella for all manner of experimental and sometimes undanceable music as well. Death to the over-(sub)-genre-fication of electronic music!
Thanks for the perspective though!
Not denying it can't be fun if you're fucked up enough, but it has completely and utterly lost any semblance of being a counterculture or challenging or underground. Not my vibe at all.
I know "EDM" has a literal definition but this is what I mean when I'm talking about it, hope that helps :)
It certainly felt like it. But people were quickly put back in their place.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gL2K-KrtBNs
Edit: while I'm on it, if you'd like expert rock history, Alan Cross is your man. Check into all those 900+ 'Ongoing History of New Music' casts, about 25m each. The man's accurate and thorough.
I think this is not giving the article enough credit. It's not just that people are "newbs" to music history, it's also that real music history is buried under manufactured-consent style industry narrative, which the article explicitly points out halfway through:
> the rest is music industry history — something we need to make an discerned effort to divorce from actual music history.
By the time I write this comment, the article has received 1.8k "likes" (or whatever they are called on Medium), and has probably been read by an order of magnitude more people. It pushes back against this narrative.
The fact that you already knew this as a music superfan (or whatever the reason might be) does not reduce the article's value in this regard.
Thanks for the links though!
As for the 'music industry history' quote ... couldn't agree more. The industry did and does a great deal of damage to popular music since it popped up in the 1930s to decide what songs appeared on 'Your Hit Parade'. I also wanted to take this chance to promote Montgomery's overlooked film; it gets so much right with so much heart.
And for the record: it was clear either way that your comment was motivated by sincere love for music and the people who make it.
Thanks again for the links, I did not know the film
I'm in my 30s and would say I have an above-average knowledge of rock history and still learned a decent amount.
Yes Payola is nothing new or unheard of, but how that played into segregation in music is something that's rarely discussed in tandem at least in popular contexts.
People get older and young people want to differentiate themselves from older people, so they just do different things, including listening to different music.
This even happened with what we consider classical music, from Beethoven Eroica to Stravinski Rite of Spring and specially Operas.
Old people will consider a new style an "scandal", specially established musicians and young people will adopt it.
It is not different from Einstein being a revolutionary against the Elders and then being the Elder against Heisenberg.
It's been popular for multiple generations now.
The Martians and the Belters will have their own music.
What passes for rap (or hip hop) in 2020 is far removed from the golden era of the 80s and 90s.
(I don't know why though? I hear Rap everywhere. Well a year ago.)
That seem unsurprising lol. This is why proof reading is so important.
I think it is more about what gets played on the radio. The music is good and new. That tricks our brain into pursuing it.
Eventually each genre finds its own classics that basically capture most of the attention.
Also, re streaming, I have a throttled cell phone service, so my data usage isn't unlimited.
That's the classical music that I enjoy that my mom can't stand. And that is the difference this is talking about.
I can't consider anything so recent to be "classical" -- it might imitate the style of older music, but to call that 'classical' makes the word basically meaningless, or that it's only a style (however that would be defined). To me, 'classical' means that it has survived and thrived across _many_ years.
Classical is either all of Western art music or a particular style within that body whose original heyday was between that of Baroque and Romantic; creating a third definition doesn’t aid in communication.
I believe that would normally be referred to as a classic.
Yes.
Classical music?
No!
There is a radio show with some interesting modern classical I check out weekly. (They archive the shows on the wmbr site for 2 weeks.
But is it good?
That's a matter of taste.
As a gloss on what Dylan is saying about race and the music business, this clip where David Bowie turns the tables on an MTV interviewer in 1983 is worth watching, in a high-tension sort of way. He's pretty impressive as an investigative journalist: cool as steel, conceding nothing, and charming even as he drives the knife in deeper:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3i53rjh-PA#t=11m3s
(Edit: As a performer, at least,) the man ages well. (If you watch to the very end, he makes the same point as Dylan: "yeah but let's face it, somebody laid the ground rules down in the beginning".)
As you say, he ages well, except for his molesting young girls in the '70s. There's at least two 15 year olds that admit having sex with him.
I'm a Bowie fan but it's difficult to separate those unacceptable acts from the great things he did.
Generally though, I don't think it's that hard to separate. Everyone is a combo of good and bad–that's how humans are. It's childish to expect otherwise. The fashion of denouncing historical figures by anachronistic standards is especially lame. No one who ever lived would pass such a test.
The related internet habit of saving the worst thing one can say about anybody in a big hash table [1] and then looking it up and repeating it every time the name is mentioned, is also a bit silly. What are we doing when we do that? certainly nothing interesting. But I rant. I take your point that "ages well" needs a qualifier!
Edit: I noticed something else that's mildly interesting—calling this "woke" is also an anachronism. The word that Bowie uses in the interview is "integration". That places him ideologically as a civil rights moderate, and of course wokeness (whatever it may mean) didn't exist yet.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Using your fame to exploit young, impressionable women is pretty awful and was awful 50 years ago. Even if "everyone did it!"
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Where is this evidence he molested girls?
> There's at least two 15 year olds that admit having sex with him.
That in and of itself isn't molestation. Love the hyperbole though.
He raped two 15 year old girls. And likely many more that haven't came out publicly.
Great job HN!
If you review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html to (almost) the end, you'll see that comments like this are explicitly off topic.
In the beginning
Back in nineteen fifty five
Man didn't know 'bout a rock 'n' roll show
And all that jive
The white man had the schmaltz
The black man had the blues
No one knew what they was gonna do
But Tchaikovsky had the news
What I want to know is why young black Americans, do not, in their majority, do rock anymore. I get that the music industry always tries to control what gets airtime, but who needs the music industry today, and who needed the music industry in the past? If it was for the music industry, nobody would have heard of Jimi Hendrix- a black man with a guitar? That'll never sell!
Look at metal and how it took hold. Growing up in Athens, Greece, it seemed like every neighbourhood had a metal band and you would never know by looking at billboards, or even coverage in the metal press (a lackey of the music industry, if there ever was one). Euro kids took Rock from the Americans and ran with it and made something new, all ours, and all working class (see the early years of Sabbath and Priest in Manchester; remember the apocryphal story of Ozzy and Tony having one pair of good shoes between them and wearing them on alternate days to go out). Metal quickly became the authentic popular music of entire generations, without ever any need of mainstream acceptance. Metal grew from below, with no help from above and despite the disdainful snorts of mainstream music critics.
So why didn't the black grasroots ever sprout an analogous new rock scene, instead of turning towards the mainstream, big stage, light show, for-profit music that comes from black artists for the last few decades?
Why Rihana and Beyonce, rather than a new Jimi Hendrix? Female, even. Why is Rock 'n' Roll pretty much dead to black kids, nowadays?
It's no one's job here to educate the others, thankfully. But learning from each other is the point of this place, and that only works if we don't get stuck in ideological tropes and internet putdowns.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
If you mean anything more than that, I'd like to know who. It doesn't describe the community as a whole. If you mean the moderators, it is deeply untrue.
Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? It leads to extremely poor-quality, indeed vicious discussion, which does zero good and only contributes to destroying this place. You don't need swipes, putdowns, snark, or personal attacks to make your substantive points.
As a sound, it pretty consistently stays there, though perhaps not as crisply defined. Prince, Michael Jackson, and later Run DMC et al. But for a very long time, those artists are explicitly not given space on Rock n Roll stations. Later on, these same stations would go on to explicitly and openly denounce hip-hop, but the play Beastie Boys, and even EMINEM.
What's really interesting is early Hip-Hop on this; how it very consistently both sampled Rock-n-Roll, but also frequently explicitly "hated" it. Not too hard to see why this division happens, given the disparate treatment (i.e. hip-hop comes out a little after most of the Satanic Panic has died down. Rappers get treated as "scary" for basically just being black, RIGHT AFTER and in the face of rumored blood rituals etc etc.)
(or it might just be the Aerosmith cover/ duo)
That's not the way I remember it. For example, the McMartin trial started the same year as 'Paid in Full' dropped, and the West Memphis Three the same year as 'Enter the Wu-Tang'.
> Rappers get treated as "scary" for basically just being black, RIGHT AFTER
Young men 'get[ting] treated as "scary" for basically just being black' has a history way longer than rap music.
I think this claim speaks more to your perception of music that isn't "rock" (there is no greater association with stadium-filling and dull commercialism than that label for some of us) than it does about what young creative people (of whichever colour) should be making.
I think you and other posters here are jumping the gun and making associations between my comment and other comments you may have heard or read elsewhere and in a different context.
If that is the case, please consider again the HN guidelines about responding to the strongest interpretation of other users' comments. Assuming I'm criticising blacks just because I ask why they don't make rock music anymore is a very weak interpretation of my comment.
Basically the listen more, lecture less, and make space for the voices that really need to be heard argument.
I think you too are jumping the gun and misreading in my comments meanings I never intended. If you don't know what I intended, you can ask.
The reason I say listen more is because your responses make clear you have a somewhat superficial understanding of this topic area. You're expressing views on how other people should respond to racism you haven't experienced, and your specific advice on this point is not just unhelpful, but counterproductive. Or said more simply: try to refrain from telling black people what the best response to racism is.
Whether or not you intended that is somewhat besides the point. You have to own your speech as you spoke it.
I'm sorry but I really don't understand what you mean by this. What black people did I tell what the best response to racism is? Can you point to my comment where I did this, please?
Also, could you please show me where in my comments I'm "lecturing", as per your previous comment?
It's not very helpful to interpret my comments without quoting my comments, so I can see what you refer to.
> The article makes a very strenuous effort to make a point about something something racism in rock that sounds a bit boring and trite to my ears
This is very dismissive.
Then in thread you follow it up with stuff like:
> So why didn't the black grassroots ever sprout an analogous new rock scene, instead of turning towards the mainstream, big stage, light show, for-profit music that comes from black artists for the last few decades?
They did. You are simply ignorant of it. A large part of why you are ignorant of it is exactly because they were fenced away from the distribution channel by powerful publishers that ultimately only wanted reproducible results within predictable lanes. Because of the flaws of American society those lanes were very much racially defined.
This is what punk rock looked like in the 1970s. Note it was both racially integrated and willing to put a black woman in front: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6BHh_0pX_4
How did that very sort of new rock you demanded of black musicians disappear? Not because they didn't try, but because they did, and were fenced away from the means of reaching a mass audience vs the industry allowed white folk that played the same music, and even then white punk was fenced away in similar way (though not equivalent).
> Why Rihana and Beyonce, rather than a new Jimi Hendrix? Female, even. Why is Rock 'n' Roll pretty much dead to black kids, nowadays?
This again comes across as very judgmental, and an utter failure to understand what the article was telling you. You are blaming black musicians for not prevailing in a genre that was overtly hostile to them, when the people hostile to them held all the power. Then you're just asserting your own taste about Rihana and Beyonce.
Strike the phrase "female even" from your future discussions on this topic. No matter your intent that's going to read really wrong.
And specifically about Beyonce, I don't really see how you can watch this video and then assert she ain't punk rock as fuck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDZJPJV__bQ and that has nothing to do with compositional taste of the music. This is where black American music went exactly because of all of the issues the article is describing.
Jimi is celebrated exactly because he was such a rare achievement in that era. The true tragedy is there's 10k Jimi's out there that never got a shot because of race, no matter their interest or ability.
I'm trying to be charitable here, but so far all you've done is ** on black musicians you don't like, and then criticize the history of black music for not being what you naively expect. That's what I meant with my comment.
Of course I'm bringing the guideline up because I don't think you're responding to the strongest interpretation of my comments. I think you are instead responding to a very weak interpretation that only suits very low-quality debate where the point is to claim a moral high ground, rather than to learn anything new.
A few examples. You say that the following sentence is "very dismissive":
> The article makes a very strenuous effort to make a point about something something racism in rock that sounds a bit boring and trite to my ears
You don't say who it is dismissive against. My comment is dismissive - it is dismissive of the article, not any other person or group. In your previous comment you were concerned about my stance against black musicians. My comment above says nothing about black musicians, or black folks in general.
You say that the following comment comes across as judgemental:
> Why Rihana and Beyonce, rather than a new Jimi Hendrix? Female, even. Why is Rock 'n' Roll pretty much dead to black kids, nowadays?
You don't say against whom my comment is judgemental. My comment is judgemental against Beyonce and Rihana, because I don't like their music. But you are concerned about my behaviour with respect to all black musicians. You have to make a great big leap from Beyonce and Rihana to all black musicians, for example Fela Kuti would probably be unhappy if you compared him to Beyonce. Maybe not.
Finally:
>> And specifically about Beyonce, I don't really see how you can watch this video and then assert she ain't punk rock as fuck:
I'm afraid on this, I'll have to disagree. I see a bunch of people, men and women, shaking their asses. That's not my idea of punk. My idea of punk is young anglo kids getting wasted and pretending to be rebellious. You pointed to the X-Ray Spex. Punk of their era was 80% male, 99% white. I don't even begin to see how Beyonce shaking her money maker is punk, except of course that the famous punk rock bands of the '80s famously went for the money grab in their later years.
Edit: to avoid further confusion, I should point out I think punk is and has always been 99% rubbish. Same as pop.
By the way, if anyone is interested in this who doesn't know the incredible story of the Detroit proto-punk band Death, it's sort of a glimpse into a parallel reality in which all this didn't happen (but it did happen, so they were forgotten for 30 years). The missing black Ramones, Stooges, Clash.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwehxN2ipCU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAZ9R2t5Jd0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIsE8TyNEL4
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/arts/music/15rubi.html?_r... ("Their musicianship tightened when their mother allowed them to replace their bedroom furniture with mikes and amps as long as they practiced for three hours every afternoon")
This interview is so great, everyone reading this thread should just watch it:
Of course --- no story about being lost to history, though! --- there's the impact of Bad Brains on punk/hardcore as well.
The nice thing is that you have unbelievable amounts of incredible music to discover.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=764iHBRjAVw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_6gptd01mY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MouM59AbnE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McOmcNwqprA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJKe2j9Wjh4 (<-- unusually good youtube comments if you like that kind of thing)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQXqkiKXiHc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IlSP9vVpMQ (<-- not rock and roll, but the Animals sure were)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k68Fob0QA_k
Those are all songs that were done later by white artists who had big hits with them. How much money the original performers got is an exercise for the reader. I could give you dozens of other examples but, alas, HN has shot my memory.
It's important to know that in most of these cases the white artists adored the black artists and were playing their songs because they loved them—as musicians do. But it doesn't change who got the raw deal.
So how did this really happen? The mechanisms of cultural collaboration didn't really exist, but I would love to be corrected. I doubt it is different from hip-hop: it's built almost in it's entirety on the Black cultural underground, and some talented white people who skirt around the edges eventually learn enough to make a stab at the "mainstream".
All this changed with Beatles and Bob Dylan, because they made it the expectation that "real artists" wrote their own material. This caused the idea of the "original version", and consequently the "cover version" which was a recording by any other artist than the original writer/artist.
So not to dispute that Rock n Roll was originally black music which made a lot of white artists rich and famous, it is still interesting to note how many of the songwriters at the time were Jewish. Just another aspect of the story!
> So why didn't the black grasroots ever sprout an analogous new rock scene, instead of turning towards the mainstream, big stage, light show, for-profit music that comes from black artists for the last few decades?
For me, that's like asking, 'why didn't Van Gogh ever develop something innovative, like the abstract artists, instead of painting in his popular impressionist style?'.
Is there any subculture in the world that has invented more music on the grassroots level than African-Americans? There's jazz, blues, gospel, turntableism (i.e., two turntables and a microphone), rap, techno (yes, created by African-Americans in Detroit), and all their derivatives: R&B, soul, hip-hop, etc. etc.
All of that began at the grassroots. Just because people aren't inventing rock genres, doesn't mean they aren't inventing musical genres - does that need to be said? Just because you hear it now on the big stage doesn't mean it was born there, or that there isn't grassroots innovation still going on that you don't see.
> The article makes a very strenuous effort to make a point about something something racism in rock that sounds a bit boring and trite to my ears.
White people's skepticism of racism, every time it's mentioned, is tired and old - as old as racism, I suppose.
I must say I don't appreciate your attempt to connect my comment with racist views you may have encountered in the past. I invite you to consider your comment in the context of the HN guidelines about responding to the strongest interpretation of others' comments, which I believe you ommitted to do in this case.
(And I edited this and deleted other comments to make the whole exchange less combative, also in the spirit of HN guidelines).
This is my personal point of view in more detail. From the GGP:
> The article makes a very strenuous effort to make a point about something something racism in rock that sounds a bit boring and trite to my ears.
IMHO that sentence makes a joke of the article's points about racism, and calls them "boring and trite". Also, importantly it's an expression of feelings, not facts and reasoning.
I'm saying it fits a general pattern: Very often IME, when racism is mentioned, people express skepticism in the same manner. The manner is an essential factor: It implies (and the GGP sentence says almost explicitly), 'these people can be ignored; I won't give them the time of day'. The power imbalance, that the vulnerable can be ignored, is at the core of racism; it allows racism to continue and be perpetuated; it puts the vulnerable under constant threat. Whether intended or not, I think the sentence repeats and reinforces that.
To dramatize it, imagine a city council hearing: Someone says they are the victim of ongoing violence and threats from their neighbors, and gives a reasoned, factual account. The city council member doesn't ask detailed questions and explore the issue and possible solutions, they say, 'something something threats - how boring and trite'. It's a clear message that nobody need care and the attacks can continue.
I understand what you are saying but I think it's an overgeneralisation. My comment said that the way the article frames the subject is boring and trite, not that the racism it is trying to point to doesn't really exist. I agree it does.
I don't want to have to give ideological credentials here because I don't think that's healthy in any situation, but of course I think that the existence of racism in the music industry, as anywhere is a problem. But everyone who tries to point out the problem doesn't do an equally good job and I've sure seen people do it very clumsily. I think the article is all over the place and doesn't quite hit the spot when it comes to sensitising the reader to the issue.
Edit: to clarify, in the following sentence:
>> The article makes a very strenuous effort to make a point about something something racism in rock that sounds a bit boring and trite to my ears
The phrase: "that sounds a bit boring and trite" has "a very strenuous effort" as a subject, not "a point about something something racism". I find the effort boring and trite, not the point.
I admit that this is not the only interpretation of my comment, but, again, I think it is the strongest interpretation - and it's certainly my intended interpretation.
Edit again: And the "something something racism" is meant to express my frustration at the author's inability to pin down the subject they're trying to discuss, not to deny racism exists. I mean, I read a huge article that kept meandering and never really getting to the point. I wanted to read more about what Dylan said and why, what were his experiences that formed his opinions. But I read a bloated piece stitching together bits and pieces of rock and roll history that may have been related, or not. I just didn't like the article.
I'm not sure the interpretation of one sentence bears more examination (as I imagine you might agree). I think we would agree that there are various reasonable interpretations, which may be more or less apparent to different people, and that of course a comment on HN isn't scripture or a $100 million contract where every nuance is carefully authored and then reviewed by the counter-party; it's something written and read in a minute at most.
Beyond what I said, I think another instinct of mine is that people often find something to criticize, changing the subject, rather than addressing the racism. For example, person X asserts something about racism, and the response is 'X has two illegitimate kids and said something mean to their neighbor!' But that is too broad a pattern to say it describes this one specific comment.
...
Any Athens metal recommendations? The most creative, eccentric, Athens-in-particular-and-ignore-every-other-tradition musician?
You're welcome. I'm happy you see it this way too.
>> Any Athens metal recommendations? The most creative, eccentric, Athens-in-particular-and-ignore-every-other-tradition musician?
Unfortunately, it's been ages since the time I was in a band and knew the scene and much of that time was spent abroad. I don't even know what happens back home anymore.
The standard recommendation is Rotting Christ, who have never been my cup of tea yet I did listen a lot to one of their recent ish records:
Rotting Christ - Rituals (Full Album-2016)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xn972Pl88AA
Other than that, the country always had a thriving black scene. There are a few recommendations here:
https://www.last.fm/tag/greek+black+metal/artists
I even remember playing gigs with some of them back in the day, but I won't say which so as not to age myself :) Anyway Necromantia are probably the best known (other than Rotting Christ). I seem to remember really liking Varathron myself.
But remember it's black metal. Knowing the scene from inside, many took all the pagan and ancient-Greek stuff way too seriously from whence it's an easy leap to nationalism ...though I never understood how Greek nationalists could then become neo-nazis as some did. The nazis fucked Greece bad in WWII. How could a Greek nationalist admire them? Anyway, for example, Naer Mataron are the band of Giorgos Germenis, an MP of neo-nazi Golden Dawn (now outlawed). There's a lot of that in Greek black.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJNoCtcc1bk&list=PLsmrGn_1E1...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heWLnEDzkkE&list=PLsmrGn_1E1...
Though I suspect I'm the only one who would recognise them as metal :)
Why did rock die? Dylan? AARP? All but forgotten.
if you define "techno" in a very particular way, that's true.
if you define "techno" in the broader sense in which it is typically used, it was created by Germans in Dusseldorf, whose music is acknowledged by the Detroit scene makers as pivotal in their own evolution.
House didn't really come to mean what we think of as "house" today until Detroit had already started the "techno" thing, at which point "house" became a somewhat smoother form of dance music that also used mostly electronic instruments.
As near as I can tell, the earliest electronic stuff such as Kraftwerk was NOT itself techno as we know it, but did indeed spark what was happening in Detroit. The minimalism and atonality of techno caught on simultaneously in Detroit and Germany, and developed in both places. I'm not sure how influential post-Kraftwerk German techno was in Detroit, but the Detroit techno guys toured Europe and were hugely popular, so the reverse is most definitely true.
It would be wrong to say that German techno was CREATED in Detroit what with the earlier precursors coming out of Germany itself, but the use as a heavy beat dance music owes a great deal to black American dance genres.
In the very particular way techno ended up being defined, the Detroit and, can I say Berlin? techno styles ended up very similar but with slightly different flavors, with Berlin going for heightened aggressiveness, abstraction and minimalism.
Sorry, this is something that's long bugged me. Kraftwerk is not techno as we know it. That said, German techno is awesome as hell, even if it couldn't have happened without the cross-pollination of the Detroit folks coming to Europe and being celebrated well before they were accepted in their own country.
Early Kraftwerk doesn't have much to do with techno (other than the historical lineage). The 3 albums up to and including Ralf & Florian are only incidentally part of the musical pathway that starts with Autobahn, and are influential only in as much as the band (Ralf & Florian in particular) became familiar with electronics over those 4 years.
Autobahn is absolutely not atonal, and Trans Europe Express which was arguably the critical album in defining their connection to Detroit Techno was an extremely melodic album for the most part.
It is not true that anything about techno caught on "simultaneously in Detroit and Germany". Most people would date the origins of Detroit techno in the early 1980s. The "scene" that gave rise to it arguably originated in the late 1970s, but in 1977 that scene, like house in Chicago, was defined by the music various DJ's played, not by records being made. It was only in the 1980s that Detroit techno (and Juan Atkins in particular) actually started making records. By that time, Kraftwerk had been a band for a decade, and had already released "The Man Machine" and "Computerworld", two absolutely seminal albums.
I think you are correct to say "the use as a heavy beat dance music owes a great deal to black American dance genres." It seems fairly certain that Kraftwerk did not regard their music as dance music, or rather, they did not create it as dance music. On the other hand, Moroder had already produced "I Feel Love" in 1977 also, so the idea of electronic dance music was not in itself a Detroit innovation. HiNRG was a scene very contemporaneous with the setting up of the Detroit techno scene, and also represented the use of electronics to make dance music, and like Detroit techno, was very strong connected to existing black American dance genres.
The particular sound that Atkins et al. pioneered was very much their own, and its this sound that is what makes Detroit techno unique. And we can recognize that innovation without ignoring its origins, just as one might celebrate what the Rolling Stones did without obscuring its very clear origins in delta blues.
The wikipedia section on the history of Detroit techno makes it clear just how much the originators felt they were influenced by Kraftwerk (i.e. a LOT):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techno#Detroit_techno
Contemporary German techno is hugely influenced by Detroit techno, much more so than a direct line to Kraftwerk. But that's a much, much later development, and doesn't have much to do with the origins of techno itself.
We should also note that Kraftwerk were also hugely inspirational to the origins of hip-hop too. What is arguably the first hip-hop record, "Planet Rock" by Afrika Bambaata, is just a mix of Kraftwerk's "Trans Europe Express" and "Numbers", topped with NY rap.
Personally, I view almost all music as evolutionary. There are very few examples of musicans or composers who truly have no precursors. I don't know how useful it is to try to talk about the origins of any particular style of music (or even just one piece of music) when it is almost always a tangled web spanning decades if not centuries in time, and often whole continents in space. And for me, most of the best music humanity has made also generally comes from a hybridization between cultures.
However, if there really are any examples of revolutionary bands or composers, then I'd nominate Kraftwerk for the category. Although albums like Autobahn, Trans Europe Express and Computerworld fit firmly into western 12 tone conventions, and use relatively conventional rhythmic structure, the music was almost without any precedent at all. Early Detroit techno sounds a lot like Kraftwerk. Kraftwerk didn't sound like anybody else at all, not even the other electronic music being made in Germany at that time.
If you look at something like black metal and it's sub-genres, a lot of the culture and imagery revolves around satanism and European paganism; which is popular with a certain segment of European people but would hold little to no interest to those of an Afro or Caribbean heritage. Especially since so many black people have quite strong Religious beliefs. (Less so these days possibly, but many still pay lip service at the very least.)
If you then look at the 80's hair metal and glam metal genres with the emphasis on long hair and make up and an image of sexual ambiguity. I think we can all agree that there (sadly) exists a big homophobia problem amongst many black communities; which means that the aforementioned sexual ambiguity would be very off-putting to them.
Those are obviously extreme examples, but I think I've maybe made my point.
I'm probably talking out of my ass, but those are my thoughts for what it's worth.
And indeed casual racism, sexism, hooliganism, homophobia, and general assholeness was common among my metalhead friends growing up (and for some it wasn't just poseuring). So I can see why black kids wouldn't feel welcome in today's metal scene at least. At times I didn't either.
(My friends were equally dismissive of hair metal as "faggots" also, of course. Goes hand in hand with the rest. Oh, I did mention homophobia).
But, why not raise a middle finger to today's metal scene (or the rock scene back in the day) and go do their own thing- their own rock thing, like they did their own rap thing etc? That's what I wonder about.
Although, I guess I might as well ask why white kids don't all dig classical music, or their respective folk musics. Tastes change across generations.
Edit: having thought about it a bit more I think what you say is simply: any kind of rock was tainted by its association with attitudes that were offputting to black kids, one way or the other. So they didn't want to do their own rock thing because the idea of any kind of rock thing felt wrong and as if it couldn't really be "theirs". If I think of it that way, that answers my question actually.
The glam rock died by the 90s, no?
Just because it came from an anti-authoritarian place doesn’t mean the particular symbolism for that feeling translates well to different subcultures.
I would instead point to the fact that you can't really dance to metal. Music-making in West Africa and in its diaspora is strongly connected to dancing socially (and maybe getting your freak on), which has never been a priority of metal.
These may not be what most people think of when they think of dance, but most people also don't think of growling when they think of singing, and yet growling is a form of singing - and in fact one that is connected to traditional forms of singing like the Kargyraa technique in Tuvan throat singing [1] or the Sufi zikar [2].
And if I had a penny for every time I've been told "that's not music" for any metal band I liked to listen to, I'd be a penny gazzilionaire.
I digress. You also can dance-dance to metal. Why not? It's got rythm to spare. If we don't see anyone dancing-dancing to it it's only because metalheads are ... to be kind, self-conscious.
It's just a matter of what we're used to I think.
__________
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuvan_throat_singing#Kargyraa
That's when they start to growl as they whistle. Mental.
[2] Particularly Kemal Zikar; for example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GZnVKcSzMM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRnjV013f5I
Bonus Sufi zikar mosh pit (with genuine respect):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5goISKPSH8
And with headbanging:
To give a few examples, I can imagine, in my head, wild rock 'n' roll dancing, of the kind you'd see young folks of the '60s dancing to Great Balls of Fire and the like, but this time under the sweet sounds of Motorhead or ACDC and it doesn't look out of place at all.
Anyway, I don't think modern dance is much closer to traditional dances either.
I completely agree with you here. I used to dance to metal bands frequently when we were allowed to go out and dance.
They were good kids deep down. Don't judge them too harshly.
But I'm a blithering idiot and a senile old fool even. I wonder what will happen when I'm actually old and losing my mind.
Because I forgot the African metal scene:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_heavy_metal
African heavy metal refers to the heavy metal music scene in Africa, particularly in East African countries such as Kenya and Uganda, and Southern African countries including Namibia, Madagascar, Zimbabwe, Angola, Botswana, South Africa, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe.
I spent some time digging through youtube videos of those folks, when I discovered them. Crazy, crazy people who go around in full leather attire in Kenya! I remember interviews with some who had found a very Christian like message of love and brother/sisterhood in metal, gods know where. Or maybe they're in a more pure, young phase of metal, like I was in high school, when I felt a connection with every other metalhead in the entire world (which went away after I actually met a few near at home ha ha).
The fans in that scene I believe go out and dance-dance, not just headbang and mosh, if they do that at all. I vaguely remember a video in a night club with people dancing and a black metal band (see what I did there) playing on stage. I'll see if I can dig it out.
Anyway, yeah, black people can totally dig metal en masse. There is no incompatibility. It's just the culture in some places in the world that stops it, I guess, places where black folk are not the majority. But where they are, they have no reason not to embrace metal.
Edit: also, that supports what I said above, that metal is the true music of the people. Take that, pop.
Edit 2: Actually, the scene I had seen before, with the black-leather clad fans, is the one in Botswana not Kenya. Here's some pics:
https://acidcow.com/pics/55608-the-heavy-metal-subculture-of...
I don't know why looking at those pictures fills me with such joy.
I am not the biggest heavy metal fan I have to admit. There is some metal I absolutely love and then a lot that I can't stand.
Last year, bored during lockdown, I was reading a Rolling Stone 100 greatest metal albums article and decided I would try to listen to every album in the list and write a short review of what I thought of it. It was a long, and sometimes tough, journey but I managed to make it. I definitely had a better idea of what I do and don't like in metal after that lol
I have been going to blues, rock, and metal gigs around London (plus some festivals) for about 20 years now and it's fairly rare to see anything other than white faces.
That is an interesting point. I am struggling to find a good way of explaining my thinking on this but if you listen to rap music you will see here and there lip service paid to their Christian faith (liner notes thanking God, lyrics mentioning God in some form) even as they talk about "slapping bitches" and shooting rivals. So even in their rebellion they don't openly rebel against their faith.
I suspect that it could be down to differences in what people are rebelling against. If you are a kid living a comfortable middle class white existence then if you want to rebel then you will rebel against the stifling conformity. Black kids, especially in America, live under a very different reality and tend to spend their energy rebelling against being harassed by the police and against the system that keeps their communities in poverty rather than against religious faith and the like.
When hiphop evolved, rock was the premier mainstream, big stage, light show, for-profit genre. I’d argue that, insofar as rock & roll “died”, a more succinct explanation than the article’s is that: it became popular, controlled by big business, and ossified.
And because of that, it ceased to be the voice of the outsider, which hip hop became. (Of course, as often happens, the energy, diversity, and rawness that comes from being the voice of the outsider led to hiphop becoming broadly popular, so now it is thr mainstream, yadayadayada... But it became that at a time when industry gatekeeping isn’t as powerful, so maybe it won’t ossify under elite control the same way. Time will tell.)
“The poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits ever since 1994. You would never learn that from most of the media. Similarly if you look at those blacks that have gone on to college or finished college, the incarceration rate is some tiny fraction of what it is among those blacks who have dropped out of high school. So it’s not being black; it’s a way of life. Unfortunately, the way of life is being celebrated not only in rap music, but among the intelligentsia, is a way of life that leads to a lot of very big problems for most people.” - Thomas Sowell
Allegations of poor moral character are a stock racist talking point - which ignores the reality of the poor moral character of those who lean right but are privileged enough not to have to face consequences, and also the huge differences in social and economic opportunity.
But one thing that is not a stretch is what might be called Payola 2.0, after the 1.0 scandal described in the article died down. Record companies couldn't give outright cash payments to DJs, but there were many other ways of exerting influence on influential media gatekeepers. In my opinion, this is where the suits really were really able to promote biases and sideline non-mainstream musical trends.
Some of the influence was obvious. Picking artists that had the "right" look. Promoting "safe" artists. Selective access and backroom benefits for powerful DJs and music journalists and other influencers. Ignoring, sidelining, or co-opting trends bubbling up from the underground, from proto-metal in the late 60s to punk in the 70s to rap in the 80s.
And then there are the charts, which were segmented according to race and other factors aligned with the needs of the music "industry." Did you know that until the early 90s music charts in the United States were based on a sample of self-reported sales from record store managers? Can you imagine the bias and BS that went on with those numbers? As soon as soundscan was implemented, there was an immediate realignment, with rap and grunge and techno and country storming the pop charts. (https://www.nytimes.com/1991/06/22/arts/billboard-s-new-char...)
Since then, the digital transformations have resulted in an interesting fragmentation of pop music and youth tastes ... but with the music industry literally controlling major streaming platforms, we're shifting into Payola 3.0, and with whatever algorithmically dictated patterns that will entail.
The band referred to is The Jimi Hendrix Experience, a two thirds British band, assembled by a British manager, in Britain, where they recorded Are You Experienced and got famous. It would seem to me that they were effectively a "British invasion" band in the US. Hendrix's break in America was the Monterey Pop Festival, which he headlined at the instigation of Paul McCartney, a member of the mother of all British Invasion bands.
I guess the author forgot for a moment who Prince was when they wrote that sentence
As much as I agree with the idea that Hendrix' would have given us so much more if he had lived, I doubt he would have been able to single-handedly stop the music industry from pushing their own (segregated) pop music narrative everyone's throat. Systemic problems need to be solved at that systemic level.
The album that would have come after Blonde On Blonde (hinted at on Eat The Document (1/2) would have been like angels on ze livewire)
[1]
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_j-1n5g8fM0
[2]
https://m.facebook.com/vidclosetphx/videos/2709040459351627/
Am also of opinion that Led Zeppelin’s simultaneously the greatest rock n roll band ever. (And Waters such a great writer also)
Probably just a lil xtra-bitter about the prospect of an electric Dylan album after blonde on blonde being hinted at yet not happening but probably was time
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EvHq5UTRldo
~ 7:30 ~
Interviewer: “and we’re flying low over New York City ..”
Bob: “flying low?”
Interviewer: “yeah .. aren’t we flying low ?”
Bob: yeah. Did you notify Albert Grossman we were going to fly low?
Interviewer: “no I didn’t notify Albert grossman - whose Albert grossman?”
Bob: he’s my uh pepper maker. He makes all the pepper & keeps a good supply of um bandages ..”
(sounds like burnout)
So far the US has had a significant amount of soft power, and that is said to be based on a common culture, says wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_power#United_States
People who say that America doesn't have a unifying culture have never experienced another culture first hand beyond maybe as a novelty, like going to the zoo. All cultures have subcultures. That doesn't negate a unifying culture. If you can't see it it is because it has been a constant for you your entire life, just like a fish that can't see water.
Some music would just come to me (Gong, Sensation's Fix) and some I had to meet half way or more (Can, early Kluster).
Some groups like Negativland aren't very tonal. Are they music? Who cares. It occupies the same space and will make it's own changes in our brain, if allowed.
Ultimately, music is what it is.
This completely trackballs my perspective on rock, which has been set for some time now by my understanding of what happened on Disco Demolition Day. The dynamics therein are hard to articulate in their complexity, but I realize now maybe best summed up not as attempted cultural genocide but instead as a sort of Cain-and-Abel moment. Wow.
On black musical artistry and afrofuturism, and in particular, this line: "He would’ve taken experimental cosmological jazz to new dimensions, marrying philosophical inquiry with technological speculation, and tapped into the potentialities of futurist prophecy long before Silicon Valley."
Please go listen to Earth, Wind, and Fire's Fantasy. What strikes you about its thematic thrust? Transcendence, reflection, mind made manifest? It's about the Singularity.
Alright then.
You need these capabilities to write great songs.
To me the reality is much simpler. A rock n roll song needs more time to be appreciated compared to other styles of music.
Modern society goes much faster than the 60s and 70s. Also competition with other forms of entertainment...music quality has remained essentially the same compared to the 60s...whereas the quality of video based story telling (TV, movies, live sports etc.) improved from distorted out of focus sporadic content to 8K whenever you want
If you want more explanation, there are a bunch of past ones here:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
While there's plenty of examples of crap lazy music out there, making good music electronically is in fact exactly the same: you spend years learning how it all works and how you can best adapt it to your own ambitions. Electronic music production is not like copy pasting some paragraphs together and calling it done. In fact, the versatility of digital production methods means that learning how to produce good music electronically is like learning not just a single instrument, but the whole dang orchestra sufficiently well enough you can compose for it.
Also, criticizing hip-hop for having repetitive background music is kind of like criticizing Bach's Prelude in C Major for having no rhythmic variation—it may be true but it's completely missing the point.