Jay Doubleyou: music and race

Saturday 11 March 2023

music and race

Racism is everywhere - but is very much part of the fabric of the United States: Jay Doubleyou: race is the big issue in the united states

Here's an interesting experiment from the 1960s: Jay Doubleyou: jane elliott - brown eyes vs blue eyes Jane Elliott “Blue Eyes - Brown Eyes” Experiment Anti-Racism - YouTube and A Class Divided (full documentary) | FRONTLINE - YouTube

The issue is pretty massive - so let's look at 'music and race'.

For example, how it's treated in musicals, how it's sung about in the blues, how it's understood in opera: Jay Doubleyou: racial issues

It's everywhere in pop music: Jay Doubleyou: the devil's music

To start, here's a very interesting video asking why we measure all music (from pop to 'world') from "the harmonic style of Eighteenth Century European musicians": Music Theory and White Supremacy - YouTube [with a response here: Responding to "Music Theory and White Supremacy" (Adam Neely & Philip Ewell) - YouTube]

For over twenty years, music theory has tried to diversify with respect to race, yet the field today remains remarkably white, not only in terms of the people who practice music theory but also in the race of the composers and theorists whose work music theory privileges. In this paper, a critical-race examination of the field of music theory, I try to come to terms with why this is so. I posit that there exists a “white racial frame” in music theory that is structural and institutionalized, and that only through a deframing and reframing of this white racial frame will we begin to see positive racial changes in music theory. MTO 26.2: Ewell, Music Theory and the White Racial Frame

In other words, is how we understand music 'racially structured'?

This is a very sensitive subject in the United States in particular - and goes beyond the academic world: Why Philip Ewell’s “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame” is Fundamentally Wrong: Ignoring Inconvenient Facts by Edwin S. Fruehwald :: SSRN and Obscure Musicology Journal Sparks Battles Over Race and Free Speech - The New York Times and Black Scholars Confront White Supremacy in Classical Music | The New Yorker

Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies. What Is Critical Race Theory, and Why Is It Under Attack?

And it's part of a bigger debate: DeSantis pushes bill targeting critical race theory in schools and Ron DeSantis Enters Big Brother Territory With ‘Stop Woke’ Act – Rolling Stone and DeSantis’s critical race theory attacks fail to resonate with most parents, poll shows | The Independent

But the debate has been going longer than the Florida Governor's eying-up the White House...

Here's MJ: Michael Jackson Speaks Race & RACISM In The Music Industry | the detail. - YouTube

Here's record producer and Grammy winner Robert Glasper, who touches on 'blue-eyed soul': While white artists triumph in Soul - thousands of black artists remain in the background. An example would be Amy Winehouse and Daptone Records. The tension is between white artists who have the freedom to connect effortlessly with the new commercial sounds of Southern soul and R&B, regardless of their complicated historical legacy, and colored artists who don't have the same freedom to alternate between their own set of stylistic influences. Racism in music industry: Robert Glasper shows racial inequality in music - YouTube

There's a lot of bitterness: According to scholar Joanna Teresa Demers, the "successors [of Presley] in blue-eyed soul and white funk" embittered poet Gil Scott-Heron, as it proved that "blacks were still being victimized by cultural appropriation, making their contributions to American history virtually invisible and inaudible." The "long tradition of white co-optation of black cultural identity" since Elvis amounting to "artistic theft" was, in Scott-Heron's words, "no new thing."[26] Daryl Hall has described the term "blue-eyed soul" as racist, saying "it assumes I’m coming from the outside. There’s always been that thing in America, where if you’re a white guy and you’re singing or playing in a black idiom, it’s like: ‘Why is he doing that? Is he from the outside, looking in? Is he copying? What’s the point of it?’ C’mon, it's music! It's music."[27] Blue-eyed soul - Wikipedia

And yet a lot of 'white' musicians have been welcomed by their 'black' colleagues.

For example: The star of the British jazz and blues scene in the early 1960s from Comber- and it’s unlikely you’ve ever heard of her | BelfastTelegraph.co.uk and My Name Is Ottilie At The Queen's Film Theatre + Q&A article @ All About Jazz