And at each stylistic plateau of African-American music, not only will we find much grand talk about how hopeless black music is, we will at the same time find a great deal of imitation, appropriation, and exploitation of it going on. . . . Part of the exploitation of African-American music has always been to appropriate it as some anonymous expression in the world, and not as the creation, primarily, of the African-American people. How can a people be oppressed as “worthless” if they are actually creators? Which is why the fiction of black music’s “anonymity” continues. So that the terms soul and soulful also refer to the music’s origins as an African-American cultural projection, finally, no matter the players. Because what is being expressed in the music, in its original and most striking forms and content, is the existence of a particular people and their description of the world. -- Amiri Baraka, from The Phenomenon of Soul in African-American Music,” excerpted from Jubilee: The Emergence of African-American Culture #relevant #Grammys
Posted on: Mon, 27 Jan 2014 04:37:22 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015