WordPress.com



How Rock and Roll Became WhiteAnd how the Rolling Stones, a band in love with black music, helped lead the way to rock’s segregated future.1. In January of 1973—the same month that the Rolling Stones were banned from touring Japan due to prior drug convictions, the same month that a band called Kiss played its first gig in Queens, and the same month that a young New Jerseyan named Bruce Springsteen released his debut album on Columbia Records—Harper’s?magazine published an essay by future Pulitzer Prize winner Margo Jefferson titled “Ripping Off Black Music.” The piece was partly a broad historical overview of white appropriations of black musical forms, from blackface minstrel pioneer T.D. Rice through the current day, and partly a more personal lament over what Jefferson, a black critic, had come to see as an endless cycle of cultural plunder. The article’s most striking moment arrived in its penultimate paragraph:2. The night Jimi died I dreamed this was the latest step in a plot being designed to eliminate blacks from rock music so that it may be recorded in history as a creation of whites. Future generations, my dream ran, will be taught that while rock may have had its beginnings among blacks, it had its true flowering among whites. The best black artists will thus be studied as remarkable primitives who unconsciously foreshadowed future developments.3. That Jefferson’s “dream” came true is so obvious it seems self-evident. According to anthropologist Maureen Mahon, by the mid-1970s young black musicians who wanted to play songs by Led Zeppelin and Grand Funk Railroad recalled being ridiculed by white and black peers. In July 1979 thousands of white rock fans rioted at Chicago’s Comiskey Park at the now legendary Disco Demolition Night, burning disco records in what many since have described as an anti-black, anti-gay, anti-woman, reactionary uprising. In 1985,?Back to the Future?featured a climactic sequence in which history is altered so that Chuck Berry’s “sound” is retroactively invented by a Van Halen–obsessed white teenager. By 2011, when a popular New York “classic rock” radio station held a listener poll to determine the “Top 1,043” songs of all time, only 22—roughly 2 percent—were recordings by black artists, and 16 of those 22 were by the late Jimi Hendrix (the “Jimi” of Jefferson’s dream), the lone black performer whose place in rock music hagiography is entirely secure.4. Jefferson’s words were accurate, and it’s tempting to call them prophetic, but they weren’t: Jefferson’s nightmare had in fact come true before she wrote her article, even before “the night Jimi died.” When Hendrix died in 1970, one prominent obituary pointedly described him as “a black man in the alien world of rock,” and throughout Hendrix’s tragically brief stardom the guitarist’s race had been an incessant topic of fascination among fans of the music that had once been known as rock and roll. Even in the late 1960s, the exceptional nature of Hendrix’s race confirmed a view of rock music that was quickly rendering blackness definitively other, so much so that at the time of his death, the idea of a black man playing electric lead guitar was literally remarkable—“alien”—in a way that would have been inconceivable for Chuck Berry only a short while earlier.5. How did rock-and-roll music—a genre rooted in black traditions, and many of whose earliest stars were black—come to be understood as the natural province of whites? And why did this happen during a decade generally understood to be marked by unprecedented levels of interracial aesthetic exchange, musical collaboration, and commercial crossover more broadly? Many of the most famous moments of 1960s music are marked by interracial fluidity: a young Bob Dylan’s transformation of a 19th-century anti-slavery anthem, “No More Auction Block for Me,” into the basis for “Blowin’ in the Wind,” a song that would become one of the most indelible musical works of the American civil rights era; or the revolution of Motown Records, in which a black American entrepreneur bet?against?the racism of white America and won, and in doing so created the most successful black-owned business in the country. Or the previously unimaginable inundation of groups from England, most notably a quartet from Liverpool called the Beatles and a quintet from London called the Rolling Stones, both of whom were tireless evangelists for black American music and would soon hear their own songs performed, frequently, by the very musicians they once idolized. If, by the time of Hendrix’s death, rock-and-roll music had in fact “become white,” how did this happen, and why?6. Criticism, historiography, and popular discourse generally have accepted a view of popular music in the 1960s as split according to genre and, more tacitly, race: on one hand is rock music, which is white; on the other, soul music, which is black. We hear Creedence Clearwater Revival’s 1970 version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” as classic rock—the 662nd?greatest classic rock song of all time, according to the aforementioned radio-station poll—and we hear Marvin Gaye’s slightly earlier version as something else, even though Gaye’s version spent seven weeks atop the charts in 1968 and 1969 and was far more popular in its day among white?and?black listeners. These divisions didn’t happen as naturally as we’re often inclined to think: They took work. Rock and roll became white in large part because of stories people told themselves about it, stories that have come to structure the way we listen to an entire era of sound.7. These stories have taken various and diffuse shapes, and the “whitening” of rock-and-roll music is a subject that has been approached by critics, historians, and commentators in a number of ways. One of these is casting the music’s re-racialization as just one more iteration of a broad historical phenomenon of white-on-black cultural theft. In this telling, the performance of black music by artists ranging from Pat Boone to John Lennon to Janis Joplin is held as contiguous with a tradition of cultural plunder stretching at least as far back as antebellum blackface minstrelsy. In its most reductive versions—the recurrent “Elvis stole rock and roll” accusation, for instance—this formulation relies on hard-and-fast notions of cultural ownership and racial hermeticism, an ahistorical belief that there is a clear and definable boundary between black music and white music in America that is fundamentally impermeable. This belief does not hold up under basic scrutiny: All musicians are influenced by other musicians, and throughout American history most musicians worth hearing have been influenced by musicians whose skin is a different color than their own.8. Another way that?the whitening of rock-and-roll music has been addressed has been to place the onus of separation on black performers by arguing that, as the 1960s progressed, black music effectively self-segregated. In this narrative, the trajectory of black popular music is often directly linked to the trajectory of the civil rights movement, where rhetoric of self-determination and, in more extreme cases, outright separatism became more pronounced in the later part of the decade. This is an intriguing argument with some amount of truth, but it tends to conflate music and activism when the specifics of musicians’ political commitments were often hazier. The self-segregation narrative also excuses the majority (white) side for any responsibility for the disappearance of black artists from rock music.9. But by far the most common way that the whitening of rock-and-roll music has been discussed is simply not at all. The history of rock discourse is marked by a profound aversion toward discussions of race, and attempts to reckon the music’s racial exclusivity have often been met with hostility, particularly at the level of fandom. When Lester Bangs wrote an infamous cover story titled “The White Noise Supremacists” for the?Village Voice?in 1979 about the racism of New York’s punk and new wave scenes, he was met with outrage and accusations of betrayal; when Sasha Frere-Jones wrote a?similarly controversial piece?for the?New Yorker?on the whiteness of indie rock in 2007, he was widely pilloried in the rock blogosphere. Neither of these essays are perfect works, but the dismissiveness and outright vitriol with which they were met speak to the extent of rock’s peculiar racial denialism….. ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download