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Originally Posted by Toilet & Bowels
firstly, there's more musical intruments than the electric guitar, so why have all traditional instruments been largely abandoned in favour of technology.
secondly, i think this has to do with dance culture and music being played in public by DJs rather than bands... essentially i think this dates back to the begining of hiphop when black kids from very poor neighbourhoods were too poor to buy instruments and had to find other ways to make music which lead to the DJ as musician and thus sampling, the loss of the value of actual live music played on instruments... in turn, this lead to the rise of music created by one man bands, which i think is far more appealing to a young man's ego (being the sole creator) than having to do make music in a group. and this lead to the use of instruments being seen as being against the spirit of hiphop.
i guess this has to be tied into jamaica too, because of the influence jamaican music has over electronic dance music, where there was that school (alpha boys school, or something) in the 60s where all the apparently most of the future ace musicians were trained my this one nun... i don't know what happened to that nun, but i imagine that at some point or another she got too old to teach, and then with the way the jamaican scene worked with it being controlled by a couple of label owners/producers who produced the majority of records to come out on certain key labels, and the logical move for those guys was to embrace technology because it gave themselves more control over the sound and required less reliance on musicians...
also, it makes me think about some stuff that joe carducci said in his book Rock and The Pop Narcotic, about the nature of pop music being a primarily studio based music, and dance music is essentially pop.
not to mention that some of the pioneering groups that are supposed to be influential to house and techno, like new order or erasure were also super-white in their sound and appearance.
then i suppose you'd have to draw kraftwerk into this, i guess those guys represented the future, but they were also about as white* as it's possible to be, but their music was embraced by a handful of black dudes in america which lead to the births of house and techno
thirdly... zillions of white people embraced technology based too.
fourthly, in countried like the UK, where all the non-whites are immigrants, i think there is something in this that has to do with them separating themselves from the music traditions of their nations of origin. for example, lots of people immigrated to the UK from jamaica, but as far as i know no jamaican musician of any significance ever immigrated here, thus the traditions of the music (and intrument playing) remained in jamaica, and the primary interface british jamaicans had with jamaican music was through recordings, so it could be sort of argued that records/DJs became more important than musicians... this is getting really incoherrent, i'll stop.
basically, i think there's this really something to base an essay (that i'll never write) on rather than some post on an internet message board.
in years to come i think this current period of technology over conventional instruments is going to be seen as an anomally, and that instruments will return to equal if not higher grounding.
and ADF have a fucking guitarist anyway.
*white in the sense of what black people make fun of white people for being like, i.e. stiff, uptight, asexual, nerdish.
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First of all, good post. An underappreciated poster (Iain falls into this category as well).
I personally don't really like the white/ non-white division of music, although unfortunately, in England at least, there is a predominance of white boys playing with the 'classic' rock format, and non-white playing dance type instruments (samplers, laptops, decks). I think within a wider perspective instruments don't really belong to anyone - Take a genre like African Soukous, where the rock format is used (with additional percussion) in an entirely different fashion. I think there are some instruments, usually on the classical side of things that are played by the culture (which is a different thing to race) from which it comes - it's not that white guys or black guys (or whatever) can't play Tabla, Sitar, Shukihachi, Er-hu (etc, etc), it's that they require a very intense training which generally doesn't happen outside of that culture - for instance, I have to travel about 25 miles to find a Tabla teacher, whereas if I were in Delhi it wouldn't be quite so difficult. By the same token, I suspect European classical players are predominently white because European classical music is the music of white Europe. I should modify that - I am talking about a culture which goes back before the widespread immigration which was afforded by technological developments - in the 20th Century onwards, there is no real reason why you couldn't have a black bassoon player, and the modern rise of Japanese / Chinese piano/ Violin virtuosos is probably due to the 'importing' of European traditions to those countries. Again, I don't particularly think that music belongs to a race, but it can be more difficult to make a decent scratch at some genres without being immersed in that music - for instance, Reggae is predominantly from the culture of Jamaica. In this case, a white guy could very easily make decent reggae, but they probably wouldn't if they were from anywhere other than Jamaica. Lately I've been finding myself most interested in areas which are between, or made up of several different cultures - the Balkans, for instance, where there is a lovely mixture of Jewish, European and Arabic musics (Jewish itself being an agglomorate of various musics from the pogroms (sp?)).
It's an interesting point you raise about techno and Erasure - I think Erasure are fantastic, but ultra-white as you say. But then again, there was a lot of disco in their music, and disco comes from places with a heavy ethnic mix generally. But yeah, techno, as we understand it now, comes from Black guys (Derrick May et al) listening to white guys (Erasure, Throbbing Gristle, Kraftwerk). But like I say, I don't think racial divisions are as important as cultural ones.
There's a lot more I could write, but I can see why you gave up, sudden paranoia about this boring the arse off of everyone.