Indeed, it’s hard to name mainstream Black rock musicians - try for yourself. “It’s just really weird to embrace a stereotype like that and think it’s OK.” “When you get into modern rock, there are even fewer Black people represented unless Bob Marley gets played at 4/20, which is frankly a little insulting,” he said, referring to April 20th “pot day” celebrations. “Listening to rock radio, no matter where I am in the world, the only Black artist I ever really hear is Jimi Hendrix, maybe Lenny Kravitz,” said Taylor. It was inducted into The Grammy Hall of Fame in 2003 and is frequently associated with Clapton. But there’s a power dynamic embedded in that borrowing.”įor example, she points out, Bob Marley wrote the classic tune I Shot the Sheriff in 1973 and performed with The Wailers. ‘Borrowing’ or ‘sampling’ sound like nice words, because they sound like an equal exchange. We talk about cultural appropriation… we reduce it to just borrowing, or sampling, another reductionist term. In a lot of cases, when this music becomes mainstream, it becomes disassociated from Black experience and Black context. “Over the years, you see in the 1920s and 1930s, Black music was very underground, very benign, marginalized,” said Lisa Tomlinson, a cultural critic, formerly of York University and now a lecturer/professor at the University of the West Indies. In modern speak, it’s referred to as “cultural appropriation,” the unacknowledged adoption of customs, practices and ideas of one group of people by members of another and typically more dominant group of people. READ MORE: Meek Mill’s conviction overturned after 11 years, rapper granted new trial 1, purchased and listened to by white folks. And worse still, it usually worked - countless songs written by Black folks reached No. Ideally, the songs would be presented as written with credit for their origins completely transparent, but unfortunately in a lot of cases, the songs were adjusted to be more “palatable” for a white audience. (Not to pick on Joplin specifically, but the majority of her tunes were written by Black people, with a few exceptions like the self-penned Down on Me, Move Over and Mercedes Benz.)Īnd this is just a taste. Jones and Ellison wrote two other Joplin classics, Trouble in Mind and Try (Just a Little Bit Harder), respectively. Dixon composed 16 Candles (which was reinvigorated when the movie of the same name was released in 1984, covered by white trio The Stray Cats on the soundtrack), along with other tunes like Boys and Baby It’s You, both later recorded by the Beatles. Many Black creators died penniless and nameless, without any credit for the music they brought to the world.īlackwell wrote Presley hits All Shook Up, Don’t Be Cruel and Return to Sender, as well as the future Jerry Lee Lewis hit Great Balls of Fire. In the majority of cases, it turns out most Black songwriters of those eras barely made a dime off of their creative work, while the white musicians found radio airtime, fame, money, and notoriety for generations using the exact same song. ![]() READ MORE: Woodstock 50 relocates from New York to… Maryland ![]() ![]() That’s not to say I’m naive to the songwriting process - I know that most songs have multiple collaborators - but what isn’t clear in pop culture history is how many songs were written by Black people and only made “famous” by white artists. As a white person born and raised in Canada, I’ve grown up believing that Janis Joplin wrote all of her biggest hits, as did the Beatles, Elvis Presley and any other big artist from the ’60s and ’70s. Usually the stories we’re familiar with are the ones we want to believe, or maybe the sad reality is we haven’t been taught any other alternative from the “mainstream” schools of thought.Ĭase in point is the history of music, and specifically, for this analysis, classic and modern rock.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |