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Originally Posted by Genteel Death
Glice made a good point about hip hop having little to no-relation to blues. I wish I still had the recording of an incredibly entertaining interview of Nina Simone where she goes off on a rant about hip hop being a worthless representation of African-Americans, which is brilliant and very insightful when all her ill-informed views are patronised and made fun of by.....an African-American interviewer.
I think this continuous hammering the point about the blues is only so widespread because it's mostly a media debate that stems, rightly, from American guilt in regard to its success at pop music and harrowing relationship with black people, rather than something which has that much resonance and influence outside of it, including, ironically, Africa itself.
This litany of the blues having an influence on all forms of popular music is untrue a lot of the time if we aknowledge that wildly different takes on pop exist outside of the Westen world, what with the filtering of local traditions and languages through top ten hits that become so massive and lucrative in so many other countries? What has a lot of Bollywood pop, for instance, got to do with the blues?
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Something I'm really interested in is how the mythology
still carries traces of racism. 'Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil' - because, of course, it's not possible for a black man to be prodigiously talented. Django is generally considered in jazz circles to be prolifically gifted, not because of the suffering he underwent as a gypsy (an ethnic identity) but because he was fucking amazing.
And there's this other thing: there's lots of black music traditions that are resolutely intellectual and virtuosic. I was reading about the Diabaté dynasty recently, as a for instance. But no, 'black music' is still broadly represented in popular culture as either the music if 'slaves' (which is what a lot of the blues narrative boils down to, for me), the music of righteous anger in poor people (hip-hop - Chuck wasn't a great lyricist because he was poor. You wouldn't get half the things said about him that are said about, say, Leonard Cohen - a worse lyricist in my mind), the music of junkies (Miles, Coltrane - both astonishing musicologists in their own rights) or the music of sexual liberation and a-political hippiedom (reggae, broadly speaking - why is always Marley and not Tosh? Why is Perry a 'stoned madman'? Why is Pablo not considered in the same terms as Feldman? Why is Sizzla an 'everything's irie' rastaman rather than a frighteningly articulate political spokesperson (with racist and sexist undertones)?)
Oh, another thing - hip-hop, in the very early days, was a mix of white, hispanic, black and 'other' groups. It only, to my mind, became 'seriously' black around the time of NWA. Hip-hop is the product of a very American multi-culturalism, some of which includes a black narrative (PE again); why is that always rendered as 'black' music?