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.
Say it loud. I’m white and proud.
And with the exception of percussion, all instruments played by black Jazz musicians came from whites.
I didn’t think it was funny then.
Jumping in......
“Sun Records is an American independent record label founded by producer Sam Phillips in Memphis, Tennessee in February 1952.[1] Sun was the first label to record Elvis Presley, Charlie Rich, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash. Prior to that, Sun had concentrated mainly on African-American musicians because Phillips loved rhythm and blues and wanted to bring it to a white audience.” Wiki
The point is that those that mattered mingled racially and mere twits from the NPR peanut gallery are just plain ignorant
Rock music was/is built on an amalgam of pop, country, gospel, vocal-harmony and what was referred to as ‘race’ music.
To posit that only blacks are the genesis of the genre is just patently false.
The article doesn’t make any sense to me.
But notice how that got worked out eventually among themselves. Meanwhile, we have these young white women—again, the scourge of the earth—lecturing us about racism, burning cop cars, etc.
At my company which is a very large multinational, the VP of our internal organization is a young 40s white woman who has added head of the CRT task force to her hectoring duties. (They call it unconscious bias as if they're Superman putting on those fake glasses to fool us all about the true identity.) During her most recent all hands meeting, she informed us that we're all going to be receiving the same enlightening training she went through and proceeded to introduce two people to introduce the topic. Oh gee, by coincidence it was two more young white women.
NPR just playing to their shrinking audience ... not a problem, they have lots of “free” money!
I'll add also that Paul and John collectively were better than by themselves.
Wings sucked.
I have little to no time for Ann Powers.
Long past
Ringo seemed like an upbeat spirit who appeared to thoroughly enjoy the moment, while at the same time avoiding the drama.
Peter needed a song for his first album and knew Paul was working on one. He asked Paul about it and Paul replied: 'We aren't going to use it, John hates it." The song became a huge international hit for Peter and Gordon:
Another mentally imbalanced person speaking nonsense.
Watching McCartney rehearse and invent the melody to Get Back from thin air made me realize how creative and talented he was. I took it all for granted at the time. Again, this documentary is unique and IMO a must for those of us who grew up in the 60s and were influenced by the incredible music that surrounded us.
Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise
Blackbird singing in the dead of night
The use of the word "arise" was long a mondegreen for me, as I thought the word used was "arrive".
The song is a tribute to the black civil rights movement, some say specifically regarding black women. But that was not reflected in an interview with Paul that I once saw.
McCartney mentioned he didn’t care for the way Peter & Gordon did his song, “Woman.” One of them was apparently off key.
I thought he was black for many years, until I saw him in concert.
But I bet he sure enjoyed the royalty checks!
Jazz and Blues were European ? Who knew!
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