Posted on 12/24/2021 3:43:58 AM PST by Kaslin
Beatles fans of all ages can flock to Disney Plus for a new documentary called "Get Back" that reassembles footage of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr creating music as the band begins to dissolve. NPR used the occasion for guilt-trip clickbait: "How did we get stuck with the idea that four white guys make a rock band?"
NPR music critic Ann Powers uncorked a long, unforgiving treatise on how it doesn't matter that the Beatles were progressive and loved black music because they were still somehow part of making rock music white and exclusionary: "Rock's defining narrative still stands alongside others that reflect the historic segregation of Anglo-American social spheres."
The Beatles and the Rolling Stones wouldn't play segregated venues and paid tribute to black musicians who inspired them. But Powers wrote, "As they became rock's norm, they allowed white fans to enjoy what the late great music writer Greg Tate identified as a pasteurized form of Black culture." Tate called it "everything but the burden."
They "allowed white fans" to eat a Velveeta cheese version of black music. So much of this racialized criticism thrives on a vivid imagination of "allowance" and thievery.
Powers writes that black musician Questlove's documentary on the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, compared with the new Beatles documentary, "felt like a newly uncovered landmark in the recentered cultural world emerging in step with the Movement for Black Lives. The other, wonderfully intimate and revealing as it is, reasserts familiar hierarchies."
NPR is reasserting its familiar ideology. This is where many readers would check out after a few hectoring paragraphs. Can't you just love the Beatles without feeling like you're reinforcing an "informally segregated sphere"?
This is not how people listen to music any more than people only limit themselves to one ethnicity of food. The alleged racism here is about definitions: what is rock; what is pop; what is rhythm and blues. This artificially sets up the genre of rock to be a white, male preserve because many of its stars are white men.
But the "familiar hierarchy" of white people also loved the Motown sound and embraced its virtuoso black performers and innovators such as Stevie Wonder. You can love rock, jazz, country and classical. You can have them all on your playlist.
Powers wants to pretend we're still living in 1965. She cited an "infamous" cover story in Time magazine on "The Sound of the Sixties" that proclaimed, "The Beatles made rock'n'roll fun again ... The Beatles also made it all right to be white again."
Time's writer wasn't spewing racism. Powers left out the next sentence, which suggests whites are culturally inferior, quoting French critic Frank Tenot: "Since the downfall of the Viennese waltz, nothing in popular music, and particularly dance, has known any success unless associated with one or another of the rhythmic discoveries of the Negro."
NPR's point here is to keep white men perennially confessional about their "privilege." Powers started with rock buddies McCartney and Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters being "band guys," then added that term was problematic. "In 2021 it's as common for women, trans and nonbinary people to jump into rock's timestream as it is for men. Yet something continues to infuse the rock mythos with the sweaty-socks scent of conventional, if boyish, masculinity. Whiteness, too."
What's exhausting here is taxpayers still have to fork over their money to NPR to "infuse the news mythos" with the arrogant odor of cultural guilt-tripping. "Public radio" is at war with half the "public" it supposedly informs. It's long past time to pull the funding plug.
All whites are evil. Everything was stolen.
It’s the liberal core belief.
I used to drive home with someone who listened to NPR’s “All Things Considered” religiously. The pompous intro music set the tone for the whole serious. That alone was enough to repulse me. I once told him my opinion of the music and his reaction was that “It was just my imagination”. I told him: “I don’t think so Tim.”
NPR would find racism in my farts, that’s how ridiculous they are. No one takes them seriously.
Chuck Berry had a well known affinity for country music and incorporated it into his foundational rock music. I wonder what this “whyte” lady thinks about that?
She’s probably still mad bc John Lennon in 1980 said he would have voted for Reagan.
‘....... liberals wreck (and rob joy from) everything they touch.’
it is done deliberately and with purpose.
I am watching the Get Back special on Disney now and as a big Beatles fan, it is great.
BTW, I had no idea that the song, Get Back, was marginally influenced by Enoch Powell and the influx of Pakistan immigrants into the UK in the late 1960s.
NPR blames Lincoln.
LETS GO npr!
bump
So much of what Ann Powers says is wrong and racist in itself. I find her statement, “They “allowed white fans” to eat a Velveeta cheese version of black music.”, fallacious and offensive. This is contemptible, even for NPR.
The Beatles may have loved black music but the music that they produced was was not a repackaged, pasteurized form of it. The Beatles drew inspiration from a wide variety of musical genres. Yet their music was, in itself, unique and extraordinary.
How ironic. She is wearing a Hindu/Indian art, yet she fails to realize that the Beatles drew some of its musical influence from Indian culture.
We did a Beatles taxi tour of Liverpool a few years ago. It was wonderful!
I thought it was Paul’s rebuke to Yoko.
Yoko actually comes off as likeable.
It’s NPR, it’s Christmas Eve. All I can think of now is that SNL skit about NPR interviewing Alec Baldwin about his Schwettes Balls. Not funny anymore.
NPR always sounds like high school radio station to me. Written and performed by precocious student government dweebs.
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