The two assigned
readings from week five that I would like to talk about is the article from
slate.com’s Jack Hamilton titled, ”How Rock and Roll Became White,” and a video
story from PBS News Hour “How the U.S. became the hip-hop nation.” What I find
most compelling about Hamilton’s article is that he takes the time to refute
each popular argument about cultural appropriation of rock and roll music.
There are a ton of ways to argue why genres in music have become so racialized.
My theory as a student journalist is that white people had more access to media
than blacks, such as radio play and tv time, and thus managed to control the
narrative of rock and roll history.
“Even in the late
1960s, the exceptional nature of Hendrix’s race confirmed a view of rock music
that was quickly rendering blackness definitively other, so much so that at the
time of his death, the idea of a black man playing electric lead guitar was
literally remarkable—“alien”—in a way that would have been inconceivable for
Chuck Berry only a short while earlier.” (slate.com)
But when hip-hop
arrives there’s no denying where it came from. The visibility that black people
made for themselves with hip-hop gave them that platform to stake their claim.
“When you think about hip-hop, it's from the core of the
culture of America. How do we really represent in the world? And to have a
soundtrack for that becomes very important.” (PBS News Hour)
DJ selections:
Lenny Kravitz – “Are you gonna go my way.”
Gary Clark Jr. – “Bright Lights”
I chose these songs mainly because
of the artist, and not the songs. The way I see these two rock musicians who
are black is kind of in the same light as Hendrix. Although Hendrix was truly
in his own rock stratosphere, I compare Kravitz and Clark Jr., in their time,
to be in the same “exceptional” category of “black man playing electric lead
guitar” as he. I guess things haven’t changed much in rock music.
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