Should white people perform the blues?

[AthenaAwakened]

What are you talking about?

I have stated how I felt on the subject. Go back and look.

For three years, while in my twenties, I sang with a band. We were a jazz band by trade, but from time to time we had to expand our repertoire. In that time I sang jazz, blues, soul, rock, folk, country, western swing, funk, bluegrass, gospel, and I do believe I may have even sung Verdi's Aida, all the parts, in its entirety one night in Charleston, but I'm not sure.

All I did with my post referencing yours was point out that CW music has black roots, That CW, really all American and even all World music is an amalgamation of every culture that comes in contact with said music. That is how music is. So you see I am not arguing with you. If anything I am agreeing with you.

Now I don't know what the Charlie Pride post was supposed to prove, if it was a genuine attempt at furthering discussion or a troll to start a fight but I assure that you if it was the latter, this is not the day and I am not the one.

The Charlie Pride link wasn't supposed to prove anything. It was to show that those who stereotype people or insist on assigning roles by some preconceived idea of race is absurd. People, all people, are simply people and have their own likes or dislikes independent of what "group" behavior others think they should live by.

I was just disappointed in your pointing out that C&W also had "black" roots. Certainly C&W had roots in many earlier music genres including "black". It originated as music of the "common folk". Isn't that enough?

What is wrong with stating historical fact? In all music there is history and in that history in treachery and salvation, theft and sacrifice, mendacity and truth, sin and sanctity. Ignoring these things, cloaking them in under a oneness of humanity where conflict doesn't exist isn't what gets us a brotherhood of man.

 

[repoman]

So I heard a talk today (at work, I was not an attendee) of a Native American saying that people who buy native themed art should buy from "Inspired Natives" not "Native Inspired" artists. I agree with him to a reasonable degree. But, I won't be involved with directing people away from a "native inspired" artist, it doesn't concern me too much.

 

[Metaphor]

So I heard a talk today (at work, I was not an attendee) of a Native American saying that people who buy native themed art should buy from "Inspired Natives" not "Native Inspired" artists. I agree with him to a reasonable degree. But, I won't be involved with directing people away from a "native inspired" artist, it doesn't concern me too much.

Why do you agree at all?

People should buy whatever art pleases them the most aesthetically, just as you should listen to musicians whose songs and music pleases you most.

 

[repoman]

Not about art, but buying the art.

 

[RavenSky]

True, but I can't get there. Technology wrt commercially available recordings has taken one too many turns for me...

A few years ago I bought my 70+ year old mom a USB turntable as a Christmas gift. She had a whole bunch of records that she hadn't listened to in years. The first day I showed her how to transfer a record to CD - it was an album called "Jerry Lewis Sings." Not Jerry Lee Lewis. Turns out Mr. MDA telethon did an album and it wasn't half bad.


Anyway, a couple weeks later she called and said she had a long list of requests from her friends wanting to transfer their old vinyl records to digital.

I haven't purchased it yet, but this is exactly what I want to do with all of my vinyls.

When I sold my house a few years ago, I had three regular turntables (& a lot of stereo/audio equipment) that I had not used in years. I expected that I would have to send all of it to recycling, but posted it on Craig's List for sale first just in case. Oh my goodness, my phone/email exploded with requests. The part that shocked me is that the buyers were all young men. That is how I learned that vinyl was "a thing" again

 

[Metaphor]

Not about art, but buying the art.

Huh? So, you should buy from Native Americans as an act of charity?

 

[Canard DuJour]

Should white people perform the blues?

Sure, it's universal. No question where the blues came from, but people everywhere just get it when they hear it*, like the difference between major and minor. They might not know what it's like to slave on a plantation, but neither does Robert Cray or Roberta Flack.


(* ETA : except Pat Boone, apparently)

 

[Canard DuJour]

Should black people perform Classical music?

That picture must be terrifying for you. Gives you flashback to when you were in an elevator with a black man in 78. Stand you ground.

Shit, there's two of 'em! Where's me Glock?

 

[Perspicuo]

A century and a half after the Emancipation Proclamation, how is this even a thing?

Americans should be color blind by now.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

A century and a half after the Emancipation Proclamation, how is this even a thing?

Americans should be color blind by now.

Why is being color blind a thing? Why would you not want to see someone's color?

 

[Tom Sawyer]

A century and a half after the Emancipation Proclamation, how is this even a thing?

Americans should be color blind by now.

Why is being color blind a thing? Why would you not want to see someone's color?

Colour-blind doesn't mean not seeing someone's colour, it means not having their colour influence your opinion of them in any way.

 

[Canard DuJour]

Blues = easy chords and sad BS that belongs only where someone is getting drunk. People say so many things are rooted in blues and that is wrong. They are rooted in the tired notes which are rooted in music, not the blues. As a guitar amateur I find the blues easy to impress someone with and easy to play. So easy to play that it makes me wonder why it is a genre at all. Stupid.

(...)

... Even B.B is stuck in the blues chord progression and drunkard... archaic structure known as "the blues". He could be considered a good freestyle musician. Too bad so many musicians are held back by this assumption that the blues is so important in music. I play a blues riff every time I tune my guitar. It is a stationary and uninventive trap that some musicians fall into. I love tuning my guitar and smacking that first blues riff out. After my guitar is tuned, I play less limited music. Why is soul associated with the blues so much anyway? The only reason the blues can assume to take credit for being the backbone of any other genre is because of pentatonic scale being mutilated yet still strictly adhered to. The limitation the blues has is my problem with the assumption that anyone could consider the blues a genre. It may be a cultural byproduct of bile, yet cute as can be, but break down what is actually being played and you get nothing more than a whiney warm up for actual music to be played. That of course is my opinion. It isn't like I have ancient scales and chords that predate the blues longer than B.B can sustain a note on the thing be beats on called a guitar in real genres of music.

Hmm.. I've seen people with serious neoclassical and bebop chops come unstuck in a simple blues. Gotta be dead easy, right? so they start doing what you said : the ole pentatonic noodling wall to wall. Except in front of an audience where you hear yourself way more critically, it soon starts sounding crap. Falling back on technique, they go all chromatic and start playing dead accurate tuplet runs, which also sound strangely crap - more sewing machine than vocalisation. Then the modest blues guy they thought they'd wipe the floor with wipes the floor with them. It's then they notice that he's actually playing through the changes to keep it interesting, that he's phrasing rather than noodling, the space he leaves being just as important as the notes he plays, and a whole dimension of rhythmic tension and release - playing behind or across the beat then suddenly on top of it for the stingers - that make a few apparently simple notes seem to talk.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

Why is being color blind a thing? Why would you not want to see someone's color?

Colour-blind doesn't mean not seeing someone's colour, it means not having their colour influence your opinion of them in any way.

That sounds all well and good, even noble, but that is not how colorblindness works. Consider

White people, who are unlikely to experience disadvantages due to race, can effectively ignore racism in American life, justify the current social order, and feel more comfortable with their relatively privileged standing in society (Fryberg, 2010). Most minorities, however, who regularly encounter difficulties due to race, experience colorblind ideologies quite differently. Colorblindness creates a society that denies their negative racial experiences, rejects their cultural heritage, and invalidates their unique perspectives.

Let's break it down into simple terms: Color-Blind = "People of color — we don't see you (at least not that bad ‘colored' part)." As a person of color, I like who I am, and I don't want any aspect of that to be unseen or invisible. The need for colorblindness implies there is something shameful about the way God made me and the culture I was born into that we shouldn't talk about. Thus, colorblindness has helped make race into a taboo topic that polite people cannot openly discuss. And if you can't talk about it, you can't understand it, much less fix the racial problems that plague our society.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/colorblind/201112/colorblind-ideology-is-form-racism

When you don't see my color, then you don't see me. And we can never be real friends because a part of my daily existence, and part of the history that made me, me you refuse to see. When I run into racism, no matter how blatant, you can't help me because you will not see it. And if I try to explain it, you will have to call me mistaken or a liar, because you will not see it.

Calling people wrong or a liar doesn't endear us one to another.

 

[bigfield]

A century and a half after the Emancipation Proclamation, how is this even a thing?

Americans should be color blind by now.

Why is being color blind a thing? Why would you not want to see someone's color?

It doesn't do any good to presuppose things about a individual's life based on their skin colour, such as whether or not they meet one criteria for a blues musician. ETA An individual's race does not provide one with any reason to change how one treats that person.

When Perspicuo made that comment about colour-blindness, I doubt he also meant it to mean that Americans should be oblivious to social problems involving race.

ETA: For example, it's entirely possible to be aware of the fact that people of colour are often treated differently than white people, based on their race alone, and also refrain from perpetuating that behaviour oneself.

Would you have responded to Perspicuo's post differently if he has said "Americans should not judge individuals based on their race by now", instead of "Americans should be color blind by now"?

 

[AthenaAwakened]

Why is being color blind a thing? Why would you not want to see someone's color?

It doesn't do any good to presume things about a individual's life based on their skin colour, such as whether or not they meet one criteria for a blues musician.

I doubt that when Perspicuo made that comment about colour-blindness, I doubt he also meant it to mean that Americans should be oblivious to social problems involving race.

I too doubt that was the intention, but it is the outcome.

 

[bigfield]

It doesn't do any good to presume things about a individual's life based on their skin colour, such as whether or not they meet one criteria for a blues musician.

I doubt that when Perspicuo made that comment about colour-blindness, I doubt he also meant it to mean that Americans should be oblivious to social problems involving race.

I too doubt that was the intention, but it is the outcome.

If you suspected what he actually meant then your response was disingenuous.

 

[doubtingt]

Why is being color blind a thing? Why would you not want to see someone's color?

It doesn't do any good to presume things about a individual's life based on their skin colour, such as whether or not they meet one criteria for a blues musician.

I doubt that when Perspicuo made that comment about colour-blindness, I doubt he also meant it to mean that Americans should be oblivious to social problems involving race.

Neither Perspicuo nor anyone else using the term in a positive manner mean what Athena and her pseudo-intellectual sources twist it to mean. The anti color-blind argument is just a way for the "I'm a victim" culture to ensure that blackness is equated with victimization and thus with the need for reparations. They do not want equal treatment, they want special favors to make up for the past victimization that they want everyone to assume about them based upon skin color. IOW, they are advocating racism and want people to infer a individual's identity, perspective, and past based upon skin color, they just want the outcome of that racism to benefit rather than harm them.

What color-blind actually means is not assuming things about individual people based upon their skin color, IOW, not being a racist.

The anti color-blind argument is big among proponents of the more blatantly racist forms of affirmative-action, because it serves to justify the fact that such policies treat people differently and unequally based upon skin color rather than relevant attributes of the individual persons.

 

[AthenaAwakened]

I too doubt that was the intention, but it is the outcome.

If you suspected what he actually meant then your response was disingenuous.

How? You need not consciously plan to harm racial minorities day in and day out in order to support or participate in a system of white supremacy.

 

[bigfield]

Delete

 

[Bronzeage]

If you suspected what he actually meant then your response was disingenuous.

How? You need not consciously plan to harm racial minorities day in and day out in order to support or participate in a system of white supremacy.

Participating in white supremacy is easy for someone like me. I take care of business, keep things running smooth, all is good.

The real problem is all these white people who are so obviously less than supreme. They fuck up everything they touch and just because they are white, some dumbass lets it slide.