A Sense of Doubt blog post #1390 - A Debt Not Paid - Appropriation and the Co-Opting of Modern Music

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1390 - A Debt Not Paid - Appropriation and the Co-Opting of Modern Music

Every semester when I teach I get into issues concerning our modern music and its roots.

Usually, I start this rap when I share about a band called ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT in the classroom.


I touched on this issue when I created a Musical Monday about them.

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1340 - WMFW - United Minds - United Front - Musical Mix for Monday 1810.15

At the band's web site, they call themselves "true hip-hop trailblazers since 1991" and "cultural champions of consciousness." It's statements like these that prove why I love them. And BTW, they have a new album, which can also be found via the band's web site.

Arrested Development is "true" hip-hop doing more than just rap, blending gospel/spiritual, sampling, DJing and turntablism, mixing, beatboxing, scratching, rap, R&B, soul, blues, and more. Afrika Bambaataa of Zulu Nation defined hip hop as having nine elements, four of which are the main pillars of the genre. Arrested Development does it all.

But that's the present. When I talk about this issue, my rap, I start in the past and make sure that everyone understands that we would not have modern music as we know it today if not for black people, Africans.

WE OWE AN UNPAYABLE DEBT OF GRATITUDE TO AFRICAN PEOPLE FOR OUR MODERN MUSIC.




African-Americans invented the word and concept "cool." All that is "cool" comes from African-Americans, who were first AFRICAN. They were brought to this side of the world without their consent and enslaved to white people who believed them completely inferior, little better than animals.

This is also around the time I write the word "race" on the board and cross it out. The idea of different "races" in humanity is a hegemonic concept to perpetuate an illusion of difference, to perpetuate the myth of inferiority, and to ground racism, prejudice, bigotry, hatred in a sociological construct or even a scientific mandate that does not exist. As late as the 19th century, so-called "legitimate scientists" were attempting to use "science" to prove the illusion of superiority for white people and to link the mythical inferiority of black people to primates and apes as some kind of equal measure. I know. It sounds insane. But it's true.

There is one race.

The human race.

PERIOD.

The rest is just coloring: hair color, eye color, skin color. It's all plumage.

We might see racism disappear when the aliens from another planet (or dimension) show up on earth,  openly, and maybe with hostile intentions. Nothing galvanizes togetherness more than unity against something that is even more completely and totally DIFFERENT than you are.

Back to music, slavery, and AFRICANS:

African people were brought to the Americas: twelve million total and 350,000 into the original thirteen colonies of the United States. And with them they brought music.

AFRICAN MUSIC.

Most of the music that survived is about how it sucked to be a slave, work songs like "Hammer, Ring" and "Arwhoolie (Cornfield holler)." As the African slaves were turned to Christianity, they also created and sang religious songs, often which were how God would help them with the terrible life that was slavery in the cotton fields of the South, songs like "Do, Lord, Remember Me" and  "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" come from this tradition that is now known as gospel music.

Many of these songs of work and God have survived because they were sung around white people who wrote them down, and though the slaves passed along songs and music by oral tradition, many of the truly wonderful songs were not written down and are lost in the past.

These other songs were the recreational ones about good food, fun times, laughter, families, booty, and love. They were songs for dancing, drinking, and whooping it up. But their spirit lived on and was later expressed in ROCK AND ROLL.

Chuck Berry - https://observer.com/2017/03/surprising-factors-that-made-chuck-berry-music-eternal/

It's these songs from the days of slavery that gave rise to Blues as an official musical form in the late 19th century. Without Blues, there would be no ragtime and without those forms there would be no jazz music.

It was these forms of music that gave birth to rhythm and blues and to rock and roll.



Though country and folk music influenced the development of rock and roll and its origins, without the contributions of black people, there's no "cool," and so there is no rock and roll as we know it today.

When rock and roll first began to appear and be heard, most white people hated it. "That's not music that's noise" was a common refrain from the 1940s all the way into the 1960s when the Beatles and the British Invasion formed the second round of white people appropriating of the sounds of rock and roll pioneers. Rock and Roll was not even played on the major radio networks for some time.

One of the first great appropriators of the music created by black people was Elvis Presley. Merging a rockabilly style with rhythm and blues, Elvis put a white face on a new cultural movement, a new form of music, a face that was more palatable to bigoted white people.

Even so, Elvis' gyrations and "Hound Dog" music was much too black, and much too sexy even for many white people in the 1950s when he became a national sensation with appearances on the Milton Berle show and the Ed Sullivan show.

The second Milton Berle Show appearance came on June 5 at NBC's Hollywood studio, amid another hectic tour. Berle persuaded Presley to leave his guitar backstage, advising, "Let 'em see you, son."^[102] During the performance, Presley abruptly halted an uptempo rendition of "Hound Dog" with a wave of his arm and launched into a slow, grinding version accentuated with energetic, exaggerated body movements.^[102] Presley's gyrations created a storm of controversy.^[103] Television critics were outraged: Jack Gould of The New York Times wrote, "Mr. Presley has no discernible singing ability. ... His phrasing, if it can be called that, consists of the stereotyped variations that go with a beginner's aria in a bathtub. ... His one specialty is an accented movement of the body ... primarily identified with the repertoire of the blond bombshells of the burlesque runway."^[104] Ben Gross of the New York Daily News opined that popular music "has reached its lowest depths in the 'grunt and groin' antics of one Elvis Presley. ... Elvis, who rotates his pelvis ... gave an exhibition that was suggestive and vulgar, tinged with the kind of animalism that should be confined to dives and bordellos".^[105] Ed Sullivan, whose own variety show was the nation's most popular, declared him "unfit for family viewing".^[106] To Presley's displeasure, he soon found himself being referred to as "Elvis the Pelvis", which he called "one of the most childish expressions I ever heard, comin' from an adult."^[107]



What is appropriation?

Better known as "cultural appropriation" or even "cultural misappropriation," this abuse occurs when a member of a hegemonic (dominant) group adopts (steals) the elements, arts, and/or fashions of a minority culture.

It's a form of re-packaging and re-branding. The true roots of the originators of an art form, like rock and roll, do not earn the recognition or reap the rewards on the same scale as the appropriators.

When appropriation occurs, then the art form or the thing appropriated is co-opted; it's drained of its power, of what makes it a thing of value.

Hence the term (also invented by African-Americans): "keepin' it real," which means staying true to the roots of a thing.

So we have this debt for our whole culture to the Africans who never wanted to be here in the first place.

Not to say the debt is totally unpaid. Because rhythm and blues gave the world Motown, soul music, and funk music among many many others. Black people had their own clubs, radio stations, and culture. But it was not ever the hegemony, though maybe, it is now or it is in part, at least. One can hardly say that Michael Jackson, Beyonce, Jay Z, Kanye West, and many others have not reaped great rewards.

By the mid-to-late 1970s and into the 1980s, most white people were on the band wagon with popular music in one form or another be it rock and roll, punk, new wave, or even country. Few were telling people to "shut that shit off" or "that's not music, it's noise." The appropriation worked, and though co-opted of its essence in many ways, all sorts of other cultural spin-offs came about, which has produced some of the greatest music of the 20th century. But there's no Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin without the contributions of a long history of black musical artists, like Chuck Berry, Billie Holiday, and more.

And then there was hip-hop or rap as many people misname it.

Seeing their creations appropriated and co-opted, in order to "keep it real," black people moved on and created something new.

SOMETHING REALLY NEW.

And then history repeated itself. When I started teaching in college class rooms in the late 1980s, and when I tried to play early hip hop -- such as Public Enemy, Boogie Down Productions (KRS-One), and N.W.A. --  I had white students tell me to "turn that shit off" and "that's not music, that's noise."

Hello, racism, you're alive and well even as late as the last years of the 1980s and the early 1990s.

Of course, these white students would rationalize (and did when accused) that they were not racist and that they just didn't like that kind of music, preferring Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, or Metallica.

SAME EXACT THING THAT rock and roll went through as it was being born and growing up.

SAME EXACT THING.

There was less racism by the 1990s, and more media, so the breakthrough of this new form of music was less underground than with rock and roll. Would hip hop and rap have needed an appropriator to help the breakthrough? Or could the forms have become as wildly popular as they are with just the greatness of Public Enemy to fuel the rise of the culture? Because very soon, hip hop ruled, by 1989, hip hop music comprised nearly a third of the Billboard Top 100 chart.

Sure, there was also MC Hammer, Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, Wu Tang Clan, and of course, the Jim Morrison of hip hop: Tupac Shakur.

But would even the Notorious B.I.G. versus Tupac in the East-West "rivalry" (or maybe we should call it gang warfare) have been enough to mainstream hip hop once the key players were dead and the fighting settled down? Maybe.

But hip hop gets a white champion anyway (and no, not Vanilla Ice).

Eminem is the Elvis Presley of hip hop.

Like Elvis, Eminem (or his Slim Shady "alter ego") was not an immediate success. But by the year 2000 and the release of The Marshall Mathers LP, Eminem had the same kind of success as Elvis and has successfully co-opted hip hop and rap through cultural appropriation.

Yes, yes, I know. If our society was color blind, if it was all the same, then we could say that Elvis and Eminem are just other artists making their music as part of the same culture.

Since I use this post a lot in teaching, I am visiting here from three years in the future to place this article link here (on 2105.20):

HOW EMINEM CONQUERED BLACK MUSIC (and white privilege) WITH THE MARSHALL MATHERS LP: Looking back at on the racial politics of a certified hip-hop classic 20 years later

But we're not a color blind society, even when we want to be, even when we try to be.

Racism can be invisible, insidious, and deeply buried in our patterns of denial and rationalization.

I could argue that without appropriation these musical forms may not have gained the success that they did and have, surely this is even more true of rock and roll than it is of hip hop.

Here endeth the lesson.

Know appropriation and co-opting of a culture.

And when you listen to music, know where it came from and how much blood had to be spilled to get it where it is today.



Oh yeah, and Eminem even built his own mythology.

Sure, Elvis was a film star but these were mostly Elvis in modern musicals like Blue Hawaiiand Jailhouse Rock and then later live films.

Eminem created his own mythology to re-invent himself in a way that tried to erase his pathological appreciation of violence, his homophobia, and his racism.

It was kind of a brilliant marketing strategy.

Also, I have to admit that the opening riffs of "Lose Yourself" are some of the most urgent, powerful, driving, emphatic lead in riffs in all of modern music. For reals.



But then, there's great stuff like this, positive stuff, spiritual stuff, AFRICAN-AMERICAN STUFF.



And just because I tagged him, as Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in Between the World and Me in discussing race and white people:

"people who believe themselves to be white."

Because it's all a melting pot and it always has been.

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1812.11 - 10:10

- Days ago = 1256 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.