Also see the Adam Neely video!
White people appropriating black music is America’s main contribution to world culture. Black music itself is a big deal, too, but it is dwarfed by the commercial ubiquity of white imitators. It’s easy to dismiss the crass knockoffs, the modern-day minstrels, and the cynical thieves. But what happens when a white person is expressing sincere admiration, with only the purest intentions? What happens when Chris Thile sings “Alright” by Kendrick Lamar, as he did on the February 6, 2016 broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion?
If you’re unfamiliar with Kendrick’s song, get familiar, it’s one of the most significant musical works of this century so far, and it comes with a devastating video.
This song is a hard one to play and sing, and Chris Thile does it more than capably. He’s a brilliant musician, arguably the best mandolin player in the world, maybe the best one ever. He has spent his entire career transgressing genre boundaries. Based on interviews, he seems like a good person. Who can blame him for being taken by Kendrick’s song? Who can blame him for wanting to learn it, and sing it at home for his son, and then eventually do it on stage?
I have to admire Chris Thile, in a way. He had little to gain by doing “Alright” in front of the Prairie Home Companion audience, and much to lose. I went to a couple of tapings of the show back in the Garrison Keillor era, and while the crowd might have been politically liberal, it was also very old and uniformly white. Thile’s risk paid off, to an extent–you can go online and read positive reactions from people who had never heard “Alright” before, who were impressed by it, and who were even motivated to go listen to the Kendrick Lamar original. So, mission accomplished, right?
I’m trying to be generous here, but the fact remains that Thile’s performance is “skin-crawling,” in the words of one of my Twitter friends. To his credit, Thile recognizes that his version was problematic: “I would readily admit that my love of the song kind of blinded me… I think it was a bad call.” This whole situation raises uncomfortable questions for other white people (like me) who admire black music and want to imitate it. Robby Burns puts the question well.
@ethanhein I often ask how someone like Thile progress artistically without embracing musical influences that challenge him. And what avenue does he have to explore this without imitation? I think in this case he is trying to challenge his audience as much as he is himself.
— Robby Burns is on Mastodon (@robbyburns) October 19, 2018
Of course Thile should be paying attention to Kendrick, everyone should. And there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with straying outside your lane; that’s how innovation happens. Here’s the problem, though. Music is never just organized sound. It’s inextricable from cultural and political context. The Western classical concept of “absolute music” would have us believe that musical works exist in some Platonic realm of pure abstraction, but that belief is itself a politically motivated ideology. It’s easy to ignore the cultural and political issues of eighteenth century Vienna and other faraway times and places. But if you’re an American in the present day, you can’t ignore the issues around “Alright.”
So what should Chris Thile and the rest of us be doing? One alternative that would be more in the spirit of hip-hop would be for Thile to write a song over the beat/backing of “Alright” that’s truthfully autobiographical, or at least plausibly fictional. Because, does Chris Thile actually hate the po-po? Are they going to shoot him dead in the street for sure? You might say, well, Thile has done plenty of murder ballads in bluegrass contexts, and he didn’t literally mean those either. But the whole point of Kendrick’s music is that it revolves around autobiographical truth-telling. Maybe the best thing Chris Thile could have done was to just play Kendrick’s track intact for the Prairie Home Companion audience (or even better, the video) and let it speak for itself.
There’s a whole genre of YouTube videos showing white people playing rap songs on acoustic instruments. For example, here’s Artie Figgis doing a Wu-Tang classic on guitar.
I will say this, the guy plays beautifully. I especially admire him for his ability to capture the track’s Thelonious Monk samples. His guitar interpretation of “Big Poppa” by Biggie Smalls is beautiful too. His rapping, however, is not so beautiful, and unlike Chris Thile, Figgis isn’t shy about using the n-word. Are his interpretations ironic? His deadpan expression makes it hard to tell.
Update! This guy made a new video explaining why he no longer uses the n-word in his covers. It’s thoughtful and worth watching.
Both Chris Thile and Artie Figgis have made a good-faith effort to study their source material closely and attend to its nuances. Not every white rap cover artist can say the same. Here are two especially objectionable examples, drawn from this post on Noisey.
These guys certainly are proud of themselves for being clever and audacious. “Oh, look at me, doing something naughty and improbable.” Chris Thile was at least engaging seriously with the substance of “Alright” and not just going for a patronizing chuckle.
Is every white rap cover automatically a bad idea? Emily Wells does a version of Biggie’s “Juicy” that I can get behind.
Why is Emily Wells so much less cringeworthy? I guess I appreciate that she isn’t trying to emulate the vibe of the original at all, that she made a genuinely new and personal work of art out of it. She sounds like Emily Wells, not like an awkward imitation of Biggie. (Artie Figgis does “Juicy” too, and while his rapping doesn’t do much for me, his interpretation of the beat is a thing of genuine beauty.)
On the other side of the aesthetic spectrum, there’s a whole universe of white people doing joyless covers of R&B songs. Pomplamoose’s condescending take on “Single Ladies” is among the worst. The duo’s musical sophistication makes their cover that much more obnoxious–with so much skill, you might expect these two to also have developed better judgment. It’s especially grating when they make fun of the bridge.
I will admit that some of my revulsion for the likes of Pomplamoose comes from the fact that they force me to take an uncomfortable look in the mirror. I’ve spent my musical life playing blues, funk, jazz, and R&B, and producing hip-hop and techno. I like to think I treat my source material with more respect than Pomplamoose does, but I’m sure I’ve done some tone-deaf appropriating too. After seeing Office Space, I got obsessed with “Down For Whatever” by Ice Cube, and even performed it in front of a small audience one time. I also sometimes do “I Know You Got Soul” by Eric B and Rakim in class. How much daylight is there between me and Chris Thile, or between me and Pomplamoose for that matter?
I’m trying to do better, though. I want to challenge white supremacy, and I take bell hooks seriously when she says that “contemporary commodification of Black culture by Whites in no way challenges White supremacy when it takes the form of making Blackness the ‘spice that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.'” We need that spice, and it’s impossible to resist reaching for it when it’s all around us. I’d like to believe that there’s a way for us to use the spice more gratefully, and to give more back in return. This is especially urgent in the context of music education. I want there to be more hip-hop in the music classroom, but music teachers are overwhelmingly white, and until that changes, we run the risk of creating an army of Chris Thiles. Right now, there’s probably a well-meaning choral arranger trying to work up an arrangement of “Jesus Walks” for middle school kids to sing. I would like us to nip that in the bud, but first we need to think of constructive alternatives.
Updates: There are some fascinating conversations around this post happening on the Facebook Music Educators and Hip-Hop Music Education groups. Also, I did a mashup of Kendrick Lamar and Chris Thile, it got taken down from SoundCloud, but if you want to hear it, send me an email, it’s… something.
More thoughts: I’m especially interested in which lyrics Thile chose to alter and which he kept intact. He omitted all the n-words, understandably. He replaced them with “brother” (makes sense) or “Calvin” (the name of his infant son, to whom he likes to sing the song at home.) Thile also chose not to say “motherfucker”, I assume because NPR doesn’t like the word. At one point, he replaces it with “little buddy,” presumably meaning his son again, that’s sweet. He replaces “fucked up” with “messed up”, which again, fine. He replaces “pussy” with “women.” But otherwise he keeps the lyrics intact. Including “we hate the po-po.” Why? I know “po-po” isn’t a curse word, so that’s why Thile left it in. But once he’s altering lyrics, why not alter that? Why not say “they hate the po-po”? Maybe he just wasn’t thinking about it on that granular a level. But this song is really complicated, he must have listened to it many times to transcribe it all, and then practiced it quite a few times to nail all those fast lyrics. The changes have to have been at least somewhat considered.
Another thing. When you search for Chris Thile on Google, one of the first hits is this:
This is a fascinating video, because it’s all about race without ever expressly saying so. Thile talks about the reserve shown by classical concert audiences, which is a key signifier of whiteness, one that many music teachers are very intent on imparting to their students. My son took some preschooler group piano lessons, and at their little performance, the kids had to walk onstage with their music tucked under their arm and bow stiffly to the audience before sitting on the piano stool in a specifically decorous way. It had nothing to do with music, and everything to do with white bodily comportment.
Thile bookends the video with two different performances of “Rebecca” by Herschel Sizemore, one in “Baroque” style and one in “bluegrass” style. The differences are instructive. “Baroque” style is flowing and linear, with straight eighth notes and slight rubato in the timing. “Bluegrass” style has a metronomic beat, with swinging eighth notes and lightly funky phrasing, an implicit backbeat, and lots of improvised blues embellishments. In other words, “bluegrass” style brings in the musical signifiers of the African diaspora in America. This is no accident. Bluegrass is a combination of British Isles fiddle tunes and the blues. Before he founded the Blue Grass Boys, Bill Monroe learned blues from a black fiddle player named Arnold Shultz.
Earlier in this post, I talked about how maybe it’s okay that Thile doesn’t literally mean the lyrics to “Alright” the same way he doesn’t literally mean the lyrics of the many murder ballads he has sung in his various bluegrass bands. If you Google “Chris Thile murder ballad,” one of the top results is this one:
The very first comment on it is careful to distinguish between this genre of song and “rap or other tripe.” Got it? Bluegrass bands singing about murder is fine. Rappers singing about it is tripe. Very logical.
Last thing: multiple people have referred me to this video of a white lady doing a karaoke version of “Work It” by Missy Elliott:
This performance isn’t uncomfortable at all; it’s delightful. Missy herself signed off on it. Why is Mary Halsey so cool when Chris Thile is so awkward? For one thing, she’s rapping over an actual rap instrumental, not a mandolin, that helps. Also, the subject matter of the song is more plausible coming from her. Her obvious good humor helps too. But I don’t feel like I have a conclusive answer to this yet. Here’s a suggestion I got from Twitter:
https://twitter.com/rbxbex/status/1054795098809077760
Your thoughts are welcome.
Yet another update: Kira Grunenberg wrote a rebuttal to this post, and she respectfully disagrees with me. Go read her insightful post, then read my response:
Hi Kira. Please call me Ethan! Thanks for this response, it’s a lot to think about. My post is a collection of thoughts that I wrote down more or less in the order I had them, and I keep coming back to it, revising, reconsidering, and responding to the many comments it’s been generating. You’ve given me a good opportunity to drill down on all these thoughts further.
I’m not a fan of Chris Thile, per se, but I admire him. There was a time in my life when I was obsessed with newgrass virtuosos like Bela Fleck, and if Chris Thile had been on my radar then, I would have idolized him. He’s only one degree of social separation from me, and I have every indication that if we met, I’d like him. I picked his cover to write about because my feelings about it are so complicated. There’s a “purely musical” level on which I think his Kendrick cover is a superb achievement. I lined it up with the original in Ableton Live, and listening to them superimposed, it’s impressive how precisely Thile conveys the complexities and nuances of the track with just his mandolin and voice. In an alternate universe close to this one, twenty-five-year-old me might have tried a similar performance, though I wouldn’t probably have pulled it off with so much skill. So part of my discomfort around the cover is the pain of looking hard in the mirror at my younger self (and probably, still, present self.)
I don’t think that people should only be allowed to perform songs that are autobiographically truthful. I have sung plenty of songs in public that had nothing to do with my personal lived experience . But rap is different from other genres of music. Rap songs don’t have an existence that’s separate from their writer. Some rappers do employ ghostwriters, but it’s a secretive and shameful practice. You’re supposed to write from a real place, and you’re only supposed to rap your own lyrics. Cover songs are vanishingly unusual in rap. It’s more common for a rapper to play a recording of another rapper’s song during a show than to do a cover of it! The strength of that norm should make any of us hesitant about doing rap covers, not just white people.
By this standard, of course, the lady doing the Missy Elliott song should provoke just as much bad feeling as Chris Thile. After thinking about it some more, I think the difference is that she’s doing karaoke, rather than a cover. She’s playing the character of Missy Elliott. Chris Thile, on the other hand, is not playing the character of Kendrick, he’s singing as himself, directly addressing his baby son. That makes the line about the po-po far more jarring than if he was doing Kendrick karaoke.
You and I agree that cultural appropriation can be a good and beautiful thing. But the relative privilege level of the cultures involved makes a difference. When Chicanos appropriate Morrissey, they’re appropriating upwards, doing something subversive. When white people celebrate Cinco de Mayo or Day of the Dead, they’re appropriating downwards, and perpetuating colonialism. The two aren’t equivalent.
Amy Winehouse is a complicated character. She was an excellent singer and songwriter, but if you’re a fan of Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, you know that there’s some cultural appropriation issues there. Sharon Jones never got a tenth the recognition or money that Amy Winehouse did, even though she sang the same style of music, backed by the same band. Sharon Jones was understandably angry about it. That isn’t Amy Winehouse’s fault, but it doesn’t speak well to the culture around her.
Addiction is indeed distributed across every social group in America. Police brutality, however, isn’t. Every white person has been touched by drug problems, directly or indirectly, but white people don’t relate to struggles with the po-po the way that black people do.
To me, everything about Thile’s genre-hopping video is about race. The bodily comportment rules in the concert hall aren’t arbitrary. They only emerged after European and American societies started making regular close contact with Africans. Historically, concert halls were full of rowdy socializing. They didn’t take on their churchlike atmosphere until the nineteenth century, as Europeans and Americans started asserting their nationalist and imperialist identities in earnest, and as whiteness emerged as an ethnic identity. There’s some research around how the racial politics of bodily comportment continue to be an issue in music education, for example: Gustafson, R. (2008). Drifters and the dancing mad: The public school music curriculum and the fabrication of boundaries for participation. Curriculum Inquiry, 38(3), 267–297. I see it in my own life; for example, watching a white choir director demand that black girls in chorus stop stomping and clapping along with a Christmas carol.
As for “pop,” I agree with Amiri Baraka: in America, that word is a euphemism for black music. You can’t talk about the conflict between classical music and an American vernacular form like bluegrass without talking about race. Even the terms “highbrow” and “lowbrow” are racial. They emerged during the era of phrenology – “highbrow” describes the high foreheads of Anglo-Saxons, while “lowbrow” describes the low, sloping foreheads of the lesser races.
The example of Smoke is an interesting one. Jazz clubs didn’t have “no talking” rules back when jazz was a black popular music. (Charles Mingus and Nina Simone complained bitterly and often about people talking during their sets.) The sacralization/classicalization of jazz only dates back to the 1980s, when, for better or for worse, it became an academic music. On the one hand, it’s nice to go to a jazz concert and be able to hear everything. On the other hand, the music is not exactly the dynamic creative force it was back when it was being played while people smoked, drank and danced.
If it were just me and my feelings, you could certainly dismiss them if you didn’t share them. But both Chris Thile and Mary Halsey got strong and opposite social media reactions to their respective covers from a wide range of listeners. It’s worth examining why so many people (including Chris Thile himself) thought his cover was a bad idea, while everyone from Missy Elliott on down approves of Mary Halsey.
OK, you seem like you have good intentions but I think you are just a bit confused, misled, and a little bit unaware of what it is you are actually arguing.
1. Culture is life, love and praise. Praise is vital in culture. Without praise there is no reason for culture. America has *one culture* and many *sub cultures*. Praising other sub cultures is always and only a cultural act of love. The inability to praise other cultures (and your own culture and sub cultures) equals death of culture, nihilism and end of culture. You are starting from a place of negativity and hate that no culture can exist in.
2. Your argument is not a black vs white race thing. Your argument would be better placed as a purely cultural argument. People of all races come and *can* from the culture that Kendrick is from. Would you deny a white/latino/asian person who is from exactly the same neighbourhood and social experiences the right to sing/rap Kendrick’s music? My guess is you would – and this is where your logic firstly breaks down, and it becomes clear that you are actually arguing from ideology, not reasoning or experience of culture.
3. You are arguing for strict cultural borders and barriers. This is not a new idea of course, and does have its points. History is full of isolated cultures and the artistic benefits (in terms of variety) of retaining isolated culture can be seen in history. However, I do not believe this is your argument, but this is where your argument, or this type from far-leftist identitarians tends to get very confused. On one hand you want to break down barriers, like national borders, male/female borders, white/black demographics white/male dominated fields/ etc, on the other you want to zealously retain the borders around certain cultures, so they cannot mix.
4. There should be a hugely “problematic” issue according to your credo, as a white skinned affluent coastal elite, dictating what is and isn’t allowed to be done with “black” music. You acknowledge this only by dismissing it, and interesting go on to actually declare a type of ownership by proxy of Kendrick’s music. You also dismiss Kendrick’s own opinion on whether it’s ok for a white skinned person to play his music. How ironic. A black academic elite from a rich family has more in common with you than they do with Kendrick’s culture. I think you have good intentions, but someone could easily read you an entirely different way, as an insidious attempt to “own” Kendrick’s music, deny his own agency, under the guise of faux “social justice”.
5. Your argument is also based from academic ignorance of basic facts in the world. The culture Kendrick is from is far, far more accepting of differences than your own leftist politic activist one. Black community and poor communities (and their music) in America are still today based on a Christian culture of forgiveness, and compassion, and acceptance – long ago abandoned by the academic elite. The radical leftist comes from a different culture, a secular, elite culture, based on segregation of identities, and political theory. Your picture of Kendrick’s culture is a cartoon pastiche invented by academic social activists largely divorced from the actual sentiment of the cultures they claim to represent.
6. You are advocating censorship. This goes beyond a mere opinion of something. You go one step further, a crucial step, and argue for censorship of a music. This is the root of extremism and tyranny.
7. The obsession with power-dynamic politics to be applied to all things at all times is simply regurgitating Communist-Marxist politics and is just so obviously tiresome, passe and ludicrously out of place because it’s been skewed by a race element. There is no power dynamic in your argument. If it is, the power is with Kendrick. He is a multi millionaire and sells out shows to 10,000s of white people all over the country with far less social “power” than he has. To remove his power on your word, is a power grab by yourself, and one I am sure he would be offended by.
I agree with you that praise of other cultures is an essentially good thing. But positive intent is not enough. Al Jolson intended his singing to be praise of the black music of his time, but he still wore blackface. We can recognize his intention while simultaneously recognizing that you shouldn’t wear blackface. By the same token, I recognize Chris Thile’s genuine love and respect for Kendrick Lamar, while simultaneously believing that performing covers of “Alright” is not a good way to praise him.
There is no “purely cultural” argument about music that can be disentangled from race. This is especially true in America’s popular music. For an argument why “American popular music” is a euphemism for black music, see: Feld, S. (1988). Notes on world beat. Public Culture, 1(1), 31–37. For an argument that black music is still black music even when performed by non-black artists, see: Lewis, G. E. (1996). Improvised music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological perspectives. Black Music Research Journal, 16(1), 91–122. For an argument that rap in particular is essentially a black music, its many nonblack practitioners notwithstanding, see: Perry, I. (2004). Prophets of the hood. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
I do believe that white people have a right to interpret and engage with Kendrick’s music. (Practically an obligation!) But white people should take a cue from rap’s own norms and choose not to perform covers. It’s not that only white people are forbidden to do rap covers; it’s that almost no one does rap covers inside rap itself, and other musicians should recognize that, and engage the music on its own terms. Hip-hop poses many challenges to our dominant musical norms, one of which is the “work-concept”, the idea that a musical work is a Platonic abstraction that exists independently of its social context. Rap songs are inseparable from context. Kendrick’s song isn’t just notes on a page, it’s tied to Kendrick. If we want to show him respect on his own terms, it would be more in keeping to write our own rap songs. We can even use Kendrick’s instrumentals to do it! It’s a ubiquitous rap practice to freestyle over another artist’s instrumentals, including Kendrick’s. I think a Chris Thile freestyle (with or without mandolin) over a Kendrick beat would be amazing.
I don’t know how Kendrick feels about Chris Thile’s cover. He hasn’t said anything publicly about it. But I do know plenty of rappers and rap aficionados, and their feelings about this kind of cover are uniformly negative. I take my cues from them. This includes several black academics from, if not “rich”, at least middle-class backgrounds.
Censorship is done by governments, not individuals. I’m performing criticism. That’s a function of free speech, not the suppression of it. If I were to somehow get in power, I would not make rules forbidding people from exercising poor judgment, but I would certainly continue to express opinions about it.
Al Jolson was an innocent. “But white people should take a cue from rap’s own norms and choose not to perform covers.” scares me, enrages me, an artist shall do the opposite of what is a “norm”.
I essentially agree with the above, for my simple pleasure I act artistically via “I gotta do what I want to do”.
Not a single student of mine, black or white, ever considers covering a rap. My understanding of their view is that a rap must be uniquely personal (at least in word play and rhythmic invention). Has any popular artist, black or white, ever successfully covered a rap? Is it possible that popular American music, heavily weighted with white appropriation of black forms, has finally broken free from the tradition of covers? If so, doesn’t this evolution support the general trend of music’s dissociation of time and place, as well as race?
there are many, for example, check https://www.pastemagazine.com/blogs/lists/2011/09/10-terrific-covers-of-rap-songs-and-10-we-want-to-happen.html
There are plenty if rap covers by white rock and pop musicians, but the point here is that covers *by rap artists* are vanishingly unusual. Which stands in sharp contrast to their love of sampling and interpolation.
Vanishing? What do you mean with that?
“Vanishingly unusual” is an idiomatic expression meaning “extremely unusual.”
Thanks, didn’t know that.
I enjoy this more ’cause there is a bit of Weird Al about it. I really do think Kendrick and his ilk take things too seriously. On the other hand I like serious fiction in my movies and music. Its important for humor to be offensive. More so than than owning a word I can’t say (I’m white) or is there a word other races can’t say that I can? It would be better if Chris used the word, and we (us humans) take the power out of it.
It’s not up to white people to take the power out of the n-word. White people invented it and used it as a tool to dehumanize black people for many brutal centuries. We do not get to decide now who uses it and who doesn’t. It’s possible to be funny (and even offensive) without punching down.
What does it matter who invented it? The word bitch was probably not invented by a girl, or maybe it was. Or maybe by a black girl, but what does it matter? Is the usage of words prohibited, is it copyrighted? I would opt for freedom. Bend any culture in any way you’d like. Make music, change music, express yourself. Don’t conform to the rules. Be creative.
It matters because there are power dynamics between social groups, and those power dynamics have a history. If we, the good people, aren’t willing to engage those issues, we just give tacit approval to the white nationalists.
Does Kendrick really need white liberal academics jumping to his defense, though? How is it up to you to be the arbiter of who can and can’t cover his music, or the music of any black artist? Frankly it presumes too much, no matter how noble its intentions.
I do not know Kendrick or presume to speak for him, and so I speak for myself when I say that Chris Thile’s cover was a terrible idea. But my reaction appears to be shared by a significant number of people, black, white, and otherwise. There are two large socially shared ideas at work here: on the one hand, the idea that music is just music and it belongs to anyone, which is the idea that motivated Chris Thile to do his cover in the first place; and on the other hand, the idea that some music is culturally specific, which is the idea that provokes the negative reaction to Chris Thile’s cover that I share with so many other listeners. For all I know, Kendrick has heard the Chris Thile cover and thinks it’s delightful, but his music doesn’t solely belong to him alone. It belongs to a culture, and it’s worth debating what the extent of that culture is, who belongs to it, and whether or not outsiders can participate in it.
Pigment is such a small factor and we are still fighting over it. I have more chromosome in common with Miles Davis than any black girl.
Why think in these terms, black and white? Good music is good music and anyone can make it, remix it. Mike Clark was sampled a lot in HipHop. Is that not allowed because he’s white and the HipHop person is black? Can’t Miles Davis play classical stuff? Or do Willie Nelson’s stuff which he loved?
It is just music. And most music is a blend of cultures. And that’s so great about it. Let’s blend in all colors. If you want to do a Miles Davis track on acoustic? Perfectly fine. Same as when doing Aphex Twin on guitar. Just music.
Play from your heart.
We should think in terms of black and white because racism is alive and well and has ongoing impacts on the lives of millions of people. Musical crossover is fine some of the time, neither you nor I would have a musical life to speak of otherwise. But music is *not* just music. If it was, then Chris Thile’s Kendrick cover would sound terrific. In “purely musical” terms, it succeeds completely! Chris Thile is one of the best musicians in the world, and he certainly plays from his heart. And yet, his cover still fails, very hard. That fact only makes sense when you consider Chris Thile’s cultural status relative to Kendrick’s, and the cultural status of their respective audiences.
But isn’t speaking in terms of black and white what keeps racism alive? My sources are all kinds of races, not just black and white and my instruments are build by all sort of races. I don’t think in these colors. I simply make music I love. Love, not racism. It is all good. Collaborate. And coversongs are often the best compliment you can give any musician.
The main approach that white liberals in the US have taken to racism in the past few decades is to avoid talking about it. This has been totally ineffective in addressing racism. New York City has the most politically liberal population in the country, and also has the worst residential segregation, and its jails are disproportionately full of black people. Colormuteness might be well intentioned but it makes us passive in the face of unresolved structural racism and plays into the hands of white supremacists. We can only deal with our problems by talking honestly about them.
Black people can be racists as well. I don’t think music should be about this.
Black racism is not equivalent to white racism because of power. And I agree, it would be great if music wasn’t about this. But it is.
I think I don’t understand what music has to do with race. Black people can’t do classical music and white people can’t do black music? Who makes these rules? Why can’t it not be just about music? Doesn’t matter who makes it or who’s the listener. I believe music is THE best example color doesn’t matter. We are all using the same sources.
Black people can and do make classical music, and white people can and do rap. But it’s also true that classical music is historically a European-descended music, and that it is still predominantly associated with whiteness, just like rap descends from the African diaspora in the United States, and is still predominantly associated with blackness. To claim otherwise is to miss a substantial part of the meaning of both musics.