When it’s mockery or poor imitation, then it’s–while not offensive–eye-rolly. See Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby”. Now, the song isn’t that bad, and the lyrics are quite catchy. But watching dude dance with the high tops and the fade, and then realizing he grew up in the burbs and that his “accent” was an affectation, well, yeah. That wasn’t cool.
But Blue Eyed Soul isn’t a joke at all. When I think of all the white folks doing R&B, I realize I like many of their songs more than a lot of black people’s. Teena Marie kills Beyonce and Keisha Coles every time they spin one of her records on the radio.
I think labeling music by race is stupid anyway. I listen to a adult contemporary R&B station, and 99% of the artists they play are black. They’re throw in a Hall & Oats or Teena Marie every now and again, but really, they are just as guilty of race segregation as the Top 40 stations that refuse to play rap unless it’s Limp Bizkit or Everclear.
And then there are artists who are simply hard to classify. Annie Lennox, for instance. One of the most soulful white woman in the universe, and a pretty good rapper too. I don’t know a black woman who doesn’t have “Diva” in their CD collection. But her music isn’t R&B; it’s kind of “everything”. Is she a minstral or is she an artist?
Music and other forms of art can allow us to transcend race in ways we can’t seem to do otherwise. That’s why I love it so much.
If I had one mild problem with the pasty-Brit-sings-the-blues, it might be along those lines: that having the pocket money, in suburban England or for that matter the U.S., to obsessively collect old jazz and R&B records so as to mimic the sound does not a Mississippi sharecropper make. But as noted, I’m willing to take that as respectful homage, not just poseurdom or misery-appropriation. And I can look at it like, songs are stories, meant to be retold, and relative privilege doesn’t necessarily bar you from re-telling them.
If I had two mild problems with the pasty-Brit-sings-the-blues, the second might be the sheer nerdish fanboy aspect of it that occasionally makes me want to walk into a Western manga shop and start knocking heads on general principle – but we were already warned about the corellation between these types of singers and the otaku gene when R. Plant started talking about the hobbits or whatever.
I mean that it’s all a fusion within the larger culture, they bleed together. There is no culture that is distinctly ‘black culture’ uninfluenced by white culture as in turn the white culture is uninfluenced by black culture.
If you say there is a distinct black culture, is there also a distinct white culture?
Correction: the blues was, factually, developed to a disproportionate extent by centuries of Western music in the even-temperament twelve-tone diatonic scale under Western-influenced 4/4 and 12/8 beats, on Western instruments such as piano, guitar, bass, and so forth. To claim that the blues was invented solely and exclusively by black people ignores the fact that the very musical system in which “the blues” resides was invented, ultimately, by predominantly white Europeans: Pythagorous, J.S. Bach, et al. The chord theory and tonality is virtually identical, strongly based in the same I-IV-V you’ll find everywhere in Western tunes.
As a subset of music within that scale, and within that defined set of measures and beats, yes, black writers had a very strong hand in developing that subset of sounds and rhythms which today we call “the blues.” There are some uses of harmony and dissonance, uses of call and return, that are unique to, or strongly associated with blues. There’s no particular reason other than ethnic pride to say that the blues was invented entirely by black people, as if the structure of music itself was forged intact from some mystical ether common to all humankind. Not every culture on Earth uses the 12-tone even temperament with a heptatonic major scale. If the music were invented entirely by black descendants of slaves, it would probably be in a pentatonic scale, like other West African music.
I’m not trying to deny credit where credit is due, here. What we call “the blues” was unquestionably the musical invention of blacks, a fusion between European and West African tonality. However, there can be no question that “the blues” was itself greatly influenced by white European music before it was ever invented.
All of the Japanese characters in The Last Samurai were played by Japanese actors. Many were already well known in Japan. You may be thinking of Memoirs of a Geisha, which attracted a bit of criticism for casting Chinese actresses in the three biggest female roles.
Tia Carrere has played three or four Asian ethnic groups (of course, she can play Harold Godwinson for all I care) and many other actors (mostly Japanese-American) have played Japanese, Korean and Chinese characters.
Both “Koreans” in Gilmore girls are of Japanese descent (Agena and Kuroda).
Not to mention the horrific casting disaster with Latin American characters, confusing ethinicites, languages, accents, food.
FYI, Everclear is a hard rock group and have never, to my knowledge, done a rap song. You’re thinking of Everlast, a musician formerly belonging to House of Pain.
Incidentally, he doesn’t really rap anymore. I don’t know what I’d call it, but I wouldn’t classify it as rap.
It’s a great compliment to be considered “weird” by such as you.
What do you think about Freddy Fender’s hit “Wasted Days & Wasted Nights”? It’s pure Louisiana Swamp Pop in style. Sung in English. Should he have stuck to Tejano? That’s a music style that includes quite a few polkas, brought to Texas from Central Europe. And cumbias from way down South…
Show me where I am “bitching” about anything – you may have noticed there is another forum for that, and this is nothing remotely approaching a Pit thread. Your comprehension of tone and content, and your rambling syntax, betray either extreme fatigue or . . . .
I asked, factually, if anyone had ever considered the vocal and thematic mimicry of white bluesmen offensive to black bluesmen, and I put it in GD (it could just as easily have been a GQ except for the sensitivity that people have noted around “cultural appropriation”). Where in your odd world do you see me “bitch” in the OP or any other post (well, I did mildly mock Plant’s Middle Earth nerd-dom)?
Singing or performing in a certain style is not mimicry in the sense that someone is copying someone else. When musicians play classical music, they aren’t mimicking Bach and Mozart. Justin Timberlake sings R&B in the style of his black colleagues; his skin just happens to whiter than theirs, big deal. How could this possibly be offensive to a rational person?
It’s much more offensive to believe that white people can’t perform and partake in “black music” without their being some exploitative or parodying motivation behind it.
Think of it this way; just because a bunch of Americans play Bushido Blade and draw pictures of little kids with big heads and superpowers doesn’t mean there is no distinct Japanese culture. You’re making an unfair standard here, by insisting that in order to be a distinct culture it can’t be influenced by any outside sources. That’s not how it works. People have a distinct culture when they feel like they’re part of a social group. Black culture celebrates blackness, so you can say “black culture” just as easily as you could say “Japanese culture” or “New England culture”. As far as I know, there’s no significant cultural group that celebrates whiteness. If they did, it would almost certainly not be a real culture group, but a way to protest. There are a zillion different cultural groups that are typically associated with white people, but whiteness isn’t necessarily something they use to identify themselves.
My loose impression is that Asian/Asian-Am. actors have a tacit agreement to be more or less okay with directors just casting roles as “Asian,” even if the story’s set in a particular Asian locale, rather than getting more granular, as it means potentially opening up more roles for any given Asian actor (though of course increasing competition).
OK. This is Great Debates. First, you need to come up with a quotation from a black bluesman in which he excoriates white bluesmen. Then, answers arrive.
I do remember Lightnin’ Hopkins looking on with amusement as a very young Townes van Zandt played some pretty good blues on the guitar. Which he’d learned by listening to Lightnin’s records & watching him like a hawk. Townes performed a couple of Lightnin’s tunes but made no effort to mimic his vocal style. Because there was no way he could have. Besides, Lightnin’ was just one of his influences.
Lightnin’ liked Rex Bell’s bass playing enough to hire him during the last years of his life. (Lightnin’s life; Rex is still going strong, especially since his club–the “new” Old Quarter–is beginning to recover from Hurricane Ike.)
Most of the blues men I was privileged to meet in my youth were pleased at the interest of young white folks; they got payed to play for us & we treated them with respect. If some of the young guys who played weren’t very good–well, they just weren’t very good. The old guys got where they were by cuttin’ the competition. (That is, in musical contests–no knives involved.)
Sorry if I’m not being linear enough for you. Just waiting to hear your argument. And not in the form of a question–this ain’t Jeopardy.
I’m not even sure how this tangent fits into the thread. We have all sorts of British actors in French roles, German actors in British roles, Spanish actors in Greek roles, etc. (And when you get to all those mongrel Americans, it gets even more difficult to figure out what ethinicty/nationality it would be legitimate for them to act.)
Using Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, or other ethnic actors to portray people from other East Asian countries might offend the sensibilities of a group promoting more work for their own co-nationalists, but it does not have much to do with violating ethnic boundaries. It is hardly the same thing as putting Peter Lorre or Walter Oland into the roles of Mr. Moto or Charlie Chan.
There are two separate types of event that subsequently came under criticism:
The aforementioned sort of substitution of distinct perceived race in cases such as Mr. Moto and Charlie Chan along with the radio actors who did Amos ‘n’ Andy;
The claims that such performers as Elvis Presley “stole” black music and made millions while failing to acknowledge the source.
While similar in feelings, the situations are a bit different.
In the case of the actors, white actors were made up to imitate stereotypes of other peoples, not portray other peoples. Even thought the Moto and Chan characters were the protagonists of their movies, they were still rendered as a bit silly by their roles.
In the case of the music, there was a definite distinction between Elvis Presley, whom I continually hear denigrated for his “theft,” and the later groups–Stones, Clapton, Doors, etc., who were quite open in their acknowledgement of their sources.
(I’m not entirely sure that Presley desreves the scornm I have seen heaped on him. I am not sure that he was sufficiently aware of the social ramifications as to even recognize what he should have done to acknowledge his sources. (Remember, he was pretty young when her got started in the mid-1950s South.) I have heard claims that he deliberately ignored his musical roots and claims that his efforts to acknowledge them were suppressed by his promoters and claims that he simply had no clue. I do not know the real story, so I only toss out that the views are conflictiong.)
Unlike Presley, however, the minstrel shows were very clearly intended to be racist defamations of black people–even if very entertaining to the audiences of the time. Nothing coming out of late 20th century “white” blues was ever intended to mock the culture from which the rifs were borrowed.
To put this into perspective for myself, I shifted it around a bit. I’m of (at least partly) Irish heritage (at least, it’s the part of my heritage with which I identify most strongly), and I like Irish music. If a black musician, or an Asian musician, or a Czech musician, decided to perform Irish music, I would judge the music by how good it sounded, not on the ethnic background of the musician. While it’s true that a Czech musician probably didn’t see his hometown militarized and torn apart by sectarian strife between Catholics and Protestants, and that might make it a little more difficult for him to appreciate the songs than it was for, say, Tommy Makem, if his music is still good, I’ll still listen to it.
Now, on the other hand, if a singer dresses up like a leprechaun for his shows, and drinks a mug of green beer after every song, that I’ll get offended by, no matter where his ancestors came from. That, I think, is a closer analogy to the old blackface shows.
I think there’s a huge difference between a white performer pretending to be a black performer and a white performer singing a song that was written by a black performer.
Depends of who you ask. For a white guy like me, East Asians may all look alike, but for “them” the differences are clearer and more important. It’s like getting a guy with a British accent play Bill Clinton, for guys reading the subtitles the difference may not be obvious or important, but if yopu know any English, it’d be glaring.