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.
These people who try to manufacture these issues are pathetic.
Then the white liberals should just off themselves
Ill even help clean up their messes
- SNIP
Race issues evidently played on McCartney’s mind during the Get Back/Let It Be sessions. He led The Beatles through ‘Commonwealth’, an unreleased improvised satire loosely based on British politician Enoch Powell’s notorious ‘Rivers of blood’ speech.
The most infamous of the unreleased ‘Get Back’ versions is known as ‘No Pakistanis’, and contained the line “Don’t dig no Pakistanis taking all the people’s jobs”. While mostly unfinished, the song did include a mumbled rhyming couplet which paired the words ‘Puerto Rican’ with ‘mohican’.
Various demo versions of this early version were recorded, one of which contains the following lines:
Meanwhile back at home too many Pakistanis
Living in a council flat
Candidate Macmillan, tell us what your plan is
Won’t you tell us where you’re at?
Once again, the Left destroys while WE THE PEOPLE are forced to pay for it.
Thanks
This is total NPRBS. Billy Preston was essential to the Fab Four with his Keyboard mastery. The End.
The Beatles adamantly refused to play in parts of the country that were still segregated.
One of the reasons they are going after Eric Clapton is because he was an unabashed supporter of Enoch Powell.
As long as she doesn’t sing. I can’t wait to watch this!
Link to the Ann Powers NPR article:
https://www.npr.org/2021/12/21/1066022789/beatles-get-back-band-guys
Very much liberal “diarrhea of the keyboard.” You have been warned.
Link to her NPR page: https://www.npr.org/people/140955737/ann-powers/
I’m surprised they didn’t mention anything about the “White Album.”
When George Harrison walked during the Get Back session, Paul wanted to bring in Clapton to replace him.
Hey NPR....they’re BRITISH, not American. Kinda busts your “racist” narrative a bit.
Goes to show the utter ignorance of history (music history here) by educated people.
The Black culture can have rap and djembe but the rest comes from European Culture. Sorry.
There were less than 20,000 non-white people in the UK at the time of the formation of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and all the other British rockers.
This is undeniable empirical evidence that white people can rock.
Of course, facts never stopped racists in the past. Why would you expect facts to stop NPR today?
NPR = National Propaganda Radio
“How did we get stuck with the idea that four white guys make a rock band?”
????
Just like the idea that the preponderance nonblack in this country shall announce and agree to some contrived apologetic stance by insistence.
Well hows that working out? Salvation Army
NPR sucks just ask Juan chachachachavez .
I think it’s ironic now that Macca’s “Give Ireland To The Irish” would now be banned because it would ‘racist’.
Rock’n’Roll would never have happened without White country music to build on.
I know, it’s sacrilege to say that.
Yes, far too nationalistic for the one worlders.
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