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.
Or black rhythm and blues and gospel.
The liberal witch who wrote this must REALLY hate the Beatles’ song “Taxman”.
“How did we get stuck with the idea that four white guys make a rock band?”
Who says “we” were stuck with the idea that four white guys make a rock band. If she had the faintest clue of the music and bands of the 60s, she wouldn’t have said something that stupid.
Oh, of course, a young white female lecturing the rest of us about racism against non-white people. Scourge of the earth they are.
Did she ever here of "Booker T and the MGs" or "The Jimi Hendrix Experience"?
They could find racism in a glass of water.
Like EVERY other art form, music builds upon itself.
I once saw a list of music down through the ages based upon Pachalbel’s Canon in D - one was Green Day’s Basket Case.
It works both ways, Miles Davis took a bunch of crap from black musicians for working with Bill Evans on “Kind of Blue”.
The Left has an endless supply of self-hating Whites who never tire of searching for new and ridiculous examples of imaginary “racism”.
I didn’t think that at all,but her trying to sing was ear piercing.
Um...I'm drawn to the music first. THEN I find the picture of the band. Sometimes it's white guys...
...sometimes its black people...
...sometimes it's a mix ...
Increasingly, however, I have sensed that it is leftists who first seek out if a band is black or female, and THEN decide they like them. Usually, the band they push is meh.
So, how did we get stuck with the idea that the race or sex of the band is more important than the content?
As Mr Start once said ‘Every band has to have a drummer, I hit pay dirt’.
Next up... NPR to denigrate Larry Bird’s NBA career?
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.
Chuck Berry, in interviews, said as much about himself. He never cared to be called the originator of rock like Little Richard did. He just saw himself an artist on a continuum of popular music.
The modern day racists like the writer of this article are just gaslighting to fit their narrative
Well at least The Beatles didn’t outright plagiarize black artists like Led Zeppelin did.
“So, how did we get stuck with the idea that the race or sex of the band is more important than the content?”
It’s just National Propaganda Radio doing their thing. Other than my tax dollars paying for the crap I don’t care too much.
By the way where does Carlos Santana fit into all this, I can’t figure out who he “appropriated” from but it must have been someone or some culture.
TRUE STORY.....Jude was the nickname of John Lennon’s son, Julian.
The Beatles rented space for a retail shop.
Wanting to include Julian in the project, they had written “Hey Jude” on the store window.
The victimization industry...the ADL types......were miffed
They thought Hey Jude was a Jewish slur......and had the venture closed down.
Rd later.
Can’t these inane instigators let Ebony and Ivory live in perfect harmony?
It was a couple white guys who invented the electric guitar. Any black person playing one is engaged in cultural appropriation.
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