CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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Black People Aren't Neccesarily Better Musicians Than White People

Saturday, January 12, 2008

this entry brought to you by grinderman, "go tell the women"


I was thinking about music the other day, and started to think about the origins of pop music. It's an undebatable fact that all pop music for the past 100 years all evolved from black people. Jazz begat blues begat rock begat hip-hop. All of them started by black people and then eventually embraced by whites.

Having said that, I don't really think that black people are more naturally inclined to be better at music than white people, or rather, that I think it's something in the DNA of blacks more so than the DNA of whites. I don't really think that it all goes back to Africa as it was once said-- well, I do in a sense, but not in the way that is often implied. Obviously the Africans were making music before everyone else, but that's because they existed before everyone else. But black people aren't naturally better at music than whites, as history has shown us. There has been a steady predictability of blacks inventing great music and, after a period, white folks coming to the same level as blacks.

Where I think all this started is religion. Although this might sound like I'm going to be bashing on religion again, and in a way I am, hear me out. It's no secret that the religious practices of white culture have been repressive. It wasn't so long ago that white people thought dancing wasn't proper. This wasn't because the genetic make-up of white people meant they couldn't dance, it was the fact that for some reason white people got the idea that God didn't like joy. When the whites looked out their windows and saw the slaves dancing in the fields, they thought the devil was inside them.

On the other hand, Africans came from no such culture of repression, and were inclined to break into festivities as the mood lead them. So while they picked up on Jesus once they were brought to America, they didn't have the history of repression behind it, so that part was ignored. What you had, then, after the slaves were freed, you have blacks with a history of praising the lord and rejoicing, but not in a quiet, sit-stand-sit-pray-stand-sit-hail Mary-stand-sit kind of way, but in a glory hallelujah kind of way.

Then you have the fact that blacks have traditionally been poor. And the difference between poor white folks and poor black folks is that the wretched white people assumed it was a punishment from God-- they must've done something wrong, maybe they didn't pray enough, so they'd sit in their wretched lofts and pray and read the bible. The blacks on the other hand knew exactly why they were poor, because it wasn't exactly a secret. So they chose instead to try to forget their troubles by getting together in oppressively hot, smoke-filled bars and teaching each other the best music ever created all through the night. I remember seeing a documentary on jazz music and seeing advertisements for white people who had learned jazz and were performing a very white-watered, washed down version of it, and seeing posters that would say things like "The 'Jazz' phenomenon-- straight from the jungles of Africa!" And when white people heard it, they reacted one of two ways: they either went apeshit and danced their honkey asses off, screaming and collapsing to the ground, or they rejected it and called it evil, because, you know, it felt good.

To this day I don't really think that black people are necessarily better dancers than white people. I just think that white people come from a long line of society that didn't allow them to dance. They can't dance because it's only been a little while since they've been allowed to dance. What's amusing about this is comparing Western Europeans, which Americans tend to be descendants of, with the Eastern European traditions of gypsies. These people, like the blacks, didn't have the religious repression and have traditionally been poor, and they are known for their parties that go on for days and days, with dancing and music, something their uptight Western counterparts knew nothing of. There's a band called Gogol Bordello, which is New York based, lead by Russian-Ukrainian Eugene Hutz, and the point to this band is to take the various members of the band's gypsy origins, and blending it with uplifting punk rock. There's a song off of their new album, Super Taranta!, called "American Wedding", and the lyrics go "Have you ever been to American Wedding? /Where is the vodka? Where is marinated herring?/ Where's the musicians that got the taste?/ Where is the supply that's gonna last three days?/ Where's the band that like Fanfare?/ Instead, it's one in the morning and DJ's patching up the cords/ Everybody's full of cake, staring at the floor/ Proper couples start to mumble that it's time to go/ People gotta get up early, yep they gotta go." The Africans probably thought the same damned thing when they first got here.
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with love from CRS @ 4:50 AM 

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