Rosi Hristova
I found that this week’s
articles shared common themes about remembering important figures in the historical
timeline of music and the influences they either took from or had on other
musicians. With Gayle Wald’s piece, Wald looks at how though Tharpe was one of
the most popular artists of the 1940s, she “had been actively erased from
musical history and memory” (Wald, 158). She stresses how important Tharpe’s
influence really was and how her gospel-meets-rock style places her at the true
beginnings of rock and roll rather than those we commonly think of like Elvis
Presley, who actually took inspiration from Tharpe. In this way, Wald critiques
music’s dominantly masculine historical narratives and uses biography as a “crucial
tool of ‘un-forgetting’” (Wald, 160), presenting Tharpe to the world and
thereby correcting the musical history. Similarly, with Michelle Habell-Pallán’s
article, one point of focus is the importance of ranchera on Alice Bag’s punk
music. Bag’s loud and emotional performances were infused with “elements of
cancion ranchera’s vocal aesthetic, estilo bravo (wild style) – an influence
that is hard to deny … even though this interpretation flips the script of
received narrative of the West Coast punk scene” (Habell-Pallán, 250). Just
like how re-inserting Tharpe into the rock narrative redefines the entire narrative,
recognizing the ranchera elements in Bag’s style rewrites the conventional
history of punk and recognizes the latino influences that have been forgotten. It
shows that music takes inspiration from many different sources that are all equally
valuable to truly understanding its evolution.
The first song I have
selected is Next Up Forever by AJR. It begins with a choir reminiscent of the
1940s, something the band strived to achieve and recognize as accurately as
possible, down to using recording technologies that would’ve been available at
the time, showing that they acknowledge where they pull their inspiration from.
The song also talks about being worried about the progression of their musical
career and how if they hit their ‘peak’, they might start to come down and be
forgotten, and just deals with progressing musically while trying to stay
relevant.
The second song I have selected is Tainted Love by
Gloria Jones. The version of this song that most of us know is by Soft Cell,
but they actually covered the original by Jones. This is just another example
of a woman of color musician getting forgotten in the musical narrative. I didn’t
even know this song wasn’t actually by Soft Cell, and I quite enjoyed the
original version but since the version by Soft Cell is what everyone knows, I
wouldn’t have known anything about Gloria Jones, who was even recognized by
some as the queen of northern soul, if I hadn’t specifically looked into her.
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