Feb 282009
 

Thanks to all of you who contributed to Rock Town Hall’s month of features bemoaning exploitive black rock history. Through our work, I believe we made important steps toward halting the cynical practice of pop musicians employing an African American Robed Choir at nationally broadcast performances. Was it a coincidence that last week’s Academy Awards ceremony was the first nationally broadcast event featuring musical performances that sidestepped this cheap ploy?


We honestly confronted some of the many gray areas in the exploitive use of black musicians in rock, including cases of old, obscure blues artists and Amy Winehouse’s backing singers. Comments indicated a full range of gray shades.

Throughout our discussions, some themes emerged, such as a distaste for videos portraying wise, old black men on dusty porches while white rockers entertained “Pops” and other locals. Mentions were made of other questionable practices, including what a Townsman phrased as the “ubiquitous Black Guy On Bass In an Otherwise All-White Band Of the Classic Rock Era.” If fairness to other forms of cultural exploitation we even touched on Michael Jackson‘s use of token white rock guitarists, Gwen Stefani‘s exploitation of those Japanese lap dogs who’ve become such an integral part to her shows, and The Band’s exploitive use of Civil War imagery throughout their career. Nice work.

If there’s one thing I regret from our discussions, it’s that we didn’t make enough time to explore what’s truly lost as a result of rock’s infrequent, sincere cross-fertilizations with various forms of “black” music and culture. Townsman dbuskirk touched on it regarding what he felt was lost when Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band lost its initial African American and Latin rhythmic base, but there’s more work to be done.

As we leave Exploitive Black Rock History Month, I am confident that our work will not be left aside until next February. For that reason I am leaving us with this open-ended thread, in which we may begin our work toward developing Proposed Guidelines for the Appropriation of Black Musicocultural Devices in Rock ‘n Roll.

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  14 Responses to “Proposed Guidelines for the Appropriation of Black Musicocultural Devices in Rock ‘n Roll”

  1. As long as all parties involved are paid fairly, they’re free to pull any hackneyed cheese-ball stunt they want. Otherwise, if ANYONE is going to draw up guidelines for this, it should be those from the African-American community. They’re the only ones qualified to do so. I think it would be a bit patronizing to think they need ‘White America’ to come to their aid.

  2. Also, we’re talkin’ SHOW BIZ here! What ISN’T exploitive in SHOW BIZ? That’s a good 99.9% of what it’s about, whether blatant or subliminal. You want it to be PURE ART, then stay away from BUSINESS. And starve.

  3. BigSteve

    One of the rules might be that, however you engage or adapt black musical forms, you have to create good work as a result. In other words, even if Pat Boone had paid Little Richard a fortune and talked him up at every opportunity (which I don’t believe he did, but anyway…), his recordings of Tutti Frutti and Long Tall Sally would still be misappropriations, while Buddy Holly’s recording of Brown-Eyed Handsome Man holds up, because Holly gave his own spin to the song and honors Chuck Berry by being convincing in his way while not trying to be an exact copy of the original. In other words, having one’s heart in the right place is never enough.

  4. You could make that rule, but who exactly is going to judge when it’s been broken? We’re well past the days of the blatant kind of thing Pat Boone was doing, though I think the whole point of that was to negate the black man completely and replace him with a safe, white alternative. It didn’t really work, but that was the idea. The people responsible didn’t give a crap about Little Richard or anyone else of his race.

    These days the transgressions I’ve perceived have more to do with paying lip service to, & trying to express some kind of false relationship to the African-American community, for street cred, or hipness points (as hokey as that is). Sometimes I could be wrong. Who should get to decide when a transgression is actually taking place, or merely seems to be? It’s not as easy now, because it’s harder to tell who is complicit in the deal, & exactly what their agenda is. Most of the time I think the only true agenda is to get paid. The rest would be a way of buying into the sincerity myth (or a version of it) I’ve read about elsewhere on this site.

  5. Mr. Moderator

    It is a difficult task we have ahead of us – all of us, whether we’ve been in on the ground floor of this mission over the past month or whether we’re working outside the Hall, in our own way. It’s only fair to ask, at this point, that we be aware of these transgressions, assess them as fairly as we’ve assessed our few points of discussion this month, and keep a dialog going.

  6. Do you mean,”HEY, bb, just shut yer pie-hole”?

  7. BigSteve

    bb, are we really well past what Pat Boone was doing? Vanilla Ice is almost twenty years ago now(!), but judging from the videos that they show at my gym it’s still going on. Aaron Carter seems like the same thing.

  8. Big Steve, Hmmm. I’m not sure. Honestly. It’s just that, these days the lines aren’t as clearly drawn as they were in Pat Boone’s day. Would you agree with that? I don’t know the organization behind Aaron Carter, or who it’s comprised of, but what I was getting at is exactly that. At this point in time, you can’t tell how much collusion is going on between different races that are running things in The Industry. It was more clearly defined in the days when African-Americans were LEGALLY relegated to the position of 2nd class citizens (at best). I think there are always going to be substandard versions of music originally created by other races, as THE MARKET demands (see hbakshi’s comments on George H. & Indian music) . Does ANY of this make sense, or am I (despite my handle) just a rambling Irish mook? Believe me, I’m not saying that isn’t the case.

  9. dbuskirk

    Talking about the distance we have come; I do think it is interesting that although we might gasp at a record store sign that said “Race Records” (which from my understanding were the norm in the 30’s and 40’s) yet I’d say most stores I go to in the U.S. still have “Rock” and “R&B/Soul” sections in their store.

    I’d rather call it all “Pop” and let the customers duke it out.

  10. db, I completely agree. I don’t like ANY of these delineations. That it’s actually the 21st century, and we STILL have to be addressing all this old, negative crap makes me ashamed to be part of the human race. It really seems as though we’re NEVER going to get past race & religion as the main reasons we choose our allegiances. I know it needs to be addressed, but it still bums me out. My question remains: do the people in charge of selling this particular product (& they’re no longer all just one race) really have the evidence that this is the way the public wants the product sold to them? If so, we’re getting what we deserve.

    I’m not saying I really know one way or another. I just wish we were offered a different marketing scheme at some point, rather than a thinly veiled version of the same old thing.

  11. BigSteve

    I guess you could say that Dr Dre being the impresario and Eminem being the performer is a kind of role reversal. I’m not sure blacks in general benefit economically from the music biz in proportion to their artistic contribution to this day, but obviously it’s not possible to draw up a formula for this kind of thing.

    Justin Timberlake may be the Buddy Holly equivalent from my earlier framework, but me and my fellow members of the Woodstock generation don’t know enough about the music the kids listen to today to judge accurately.

  12. Mr. Moderator

    BB, I did not mean to suggest that you shut up on this. Not at all! Personally, I’m not too concerned with whether anyone wants or agrees for these things to happen. I care about examining what’s “right.” Granted, that’s an easy thing to get wrong. I like what db has added regarding the separate but equal genre bins. Then, within the “white” and “black” bins there is further separation by age. It’s getting stupid in a time in which history is at our fingertips and not that far removed from the present.

  13. BigSteve

    Here’s another proposal — that the appropriation (even misapropriation) accelerate in the other direction.

    There was a review in the local paper of a concert by Solange Knowles (Beyonce’s sister) and Estelle. The reviewer said that their styles were equal parts indie rock and contemporary R&B/pop. That’s a cool idea.

    Like Charlie Pride singing country music. Like the recently name-checked Hootie & the Blowfish reversing the usual trend by being a black songwriter having a white rhythm section. Hasn’t Darius ditched the band and gone Nashville too?

    Right now I’m watching a live recording of the Gorillaz Demon Days show. What a great cultural mash-up that is. Albarn isn’t the frontman — he stays in the back most of the time. Ike Turner is featured on piano! And they have Ibrahim Ferrer in a vocal feature too.

    This is the future. Or at least one of the likely futures. I just wonder what will happen if everything blends together. Where will the singular cultural elements come from for future artists to mash up?

  14. Moddy, I keeeeed!!! Merely a jest, dear boy. I’m kind of ADD when it comes to staying serious for long periods of time. Or just immature.

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