We are BOTH racists!
This is a black and white photo...
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.
DEFUND npr
As Rush used to say, liberals wreck (and rob joy from) everything they touch.
NPR what?
Billy Preston the 5th, 6th or 7th BEATLE!
The fab 4 racist??? Never! They were woke before woke was cool.
This is a black and white photo...
I say 'professional' because they make money at it. A lot of money. Our money -- taxpayer dollars. That only makes the bitter irony all the greater.
This is a black and white photo....and 50 shades of grey. :)
There’s reaction to her piece on Twitter.
It’s pointed out this woman, born in
‘64, had a “brain fart” when she referred
to a club as “Hamburg’s grubby Cavern”
It was in Liverpool.
F NPR and F anybody else who touts this BS
Merry Christmas, Kaslin! Enjoy your posts!
NPR is messin where they have zero concept. The Beatles revolutionized rock and roll. Period.
Music is generally a jumble of genres, each borrowing from the other. Now according to the pubahs at NPR, its just a cover for racism?
Gimme me back my money.
and STHU.
I never take a back step to anyone.
I talk to 20 somethings when they say they’re
“privileged” et al, and it’s almost a lost cause
to try and steer them clear of this type of
pervasive propaganda.
I watched Get Back and the way the producers brought life to the film footage is nothing short of remarkable. It looks as if it were filmed yesterday (all my troubles seemed so far away...) After watching it if anyone has any doubts that the Beatles were John & Paul with Ringo and George tagging along, they missed it.
How did we get to a point where NPR is considered news?
I would love to say that the Beatles placed a premium on Anglo-European culture…. They did not.
The communist always champion the supposed downtrodden, whom they care little about to change society. We ‘ve been listening about black plight for many years. It’s always the rabbit they pull out of their hat.
The list of the 100 most useless things in this world has got to include NPR and NPR “journalists.” The Eeyore Channel.
NPR is still prattling on about the “insurrection” despite the fact that nobody has been charged with that crime. It’s a total disgrace they were not fully defunded while Trump was POTUS. Let Soros pay for this garbage and remove the veneer of impartiality that NPR now gets.
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