Anonymous
6/16/2025, 3:52:33 PM No.126729536
>To me, this feels like virtue rewarded. I always considered my struggle with black music awkwardly moralistic, the white guilt trip, but as usual the real issue turned out to be aesthetic. To be blunt, black music is better. The apparent strength of white music in whatever present always seems to deteriorate. Stephen Collins Foster preferred his sentimental ballads to his "Ethiopian songs," and Paul Whiteman thought that he was doing the Muse a favor by whitening the "discordant jazz, which sprang into existence . . . from nowhere in particular," but we remember "My Old Kentucky Home," not "Poor Drooping Maiden," and listen to King Oliver while relegating Whiteman's music to the gramophone museum.
>This time, though it really seemed as if we'd escaped fate. Only a year ago, the white rock fan who dismissed what was judiciously referred to as "the soul sounds"--as if only a stylistic preference, not a race or a culture, was involved--had some credible arguments. We know the wheezing pop of the early '50s was cured by that shot of rhythm-and-blues because R&B was realistic instead of sentimental, idiosyncratic instead of mass-produced, free of show biz nonsense, and rooted in a genuine community. But by the late '60s it was soul music, which was to R&B and gospel what black power was to civil rights, that seemed unrealistic, artificial and showy, although the paradox was that it sounded worst when it tried to assimilate white modes. The excesses of the soul myth proved that black people were far from immune to the pretentious floundering that so often accompanies new consciousness.
>In contrast the best white music--not that déclassé AM bubblegum, but what was then called underground even though it was the staple of an entire industry--was the voice of a youth subculture that had reached full flower after a dozen years of nurture. It was vital, sensual and real, and not only that, it boogied.
>This time, though it really seemed as if we'd escaped fate. Only a year ago, the white rock fan who dismissed what was judiciously referred to as "the soul sounds"--as if only a stylistic preference, not a race or a culture, was involved--had some credible arguments. We know the wheezing pop of the early '50s was cured by that shot of rhythm-and-blues because R&B was realistic instead of sentimental, idiosyncratic instead of mass-produced, free of show biz nonsense, and rooted in a genuine community. But by the late '60s it was soul music, which was to R&B and gospel what black power was to civil rights, that seemed unrealistic, artificial and showy, although the paradox was that it sounded worst when it tried to assimilate white modes. The excesses of the soul myth proved that black people were far from immune to the pretentious floundering that so often accompanies new consciousness.
>In contrast the best white music--not that déclassé AM bubblegum, but what was then called underground even though it was the staple of an entire industry--was the voice of a youth subculture that had reached full flower after a dozen years of nurture. It was vital, sensual and real, and not only that, it boogied.
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