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the valorisation of blues seemed to play into some sort of white magic negro fantasy for swa.
"yeah man! all our shit is like ripping off the blues man, those cats knew where it was at." hold on a second. it's really not. not all the time. not inherently. sure, it happens, this does not somehow make blues the source material for all worthwhile special music the world has ever produced like he claimed. you can trace things back to whatever you want. you cannot make up some sort of historicity that isn't there. you can't just say "because X ripped of X who ripped of X who was black everything is really stolen from black people". you can do those X's for people of any race.
if you have any respect for these musicians, or any musicians at all you call them on their crap, you demand greater standards, you approach their work critically not patronisingly. i don't think its necessarily a sign of progress that black american musicians seemed to pretty much abandon the electric guitar at a certain point and move into the drum/bass sound of hip hop. it's just what they did. i don't think it necessarily came from them being "ahead" or a realisation that the white cannon of late 20th century american popular music isn't all that shit hot after all. it isn't, i mean, obvi-fuckin-ously it isnt. obviously, they were coming from a different vantage point in regards to seeing this fact, but that just does not make them somehow "better". the idea that we who are white should pretend that they are "better" or specifically focus on this idea of them as special and magical just does not do them any favours. you can say it makes the blacks music different, but i'd much prefer if you just dropped the black/white frame altogether. so it could eventually become unnoticeable. isn't that what's best for everybody?
you make arguments like swa did, you are just keeping race as something somehow relevant or visible to music. like its something worth noticing and treating specially. i mean, its a factor in the musicians lives and situations, and its relevancy is massively varied at best. that's really about it.
unlike what swa seems to want to believe, having lower standards of wealth compared to whites in the US does not somehow bestow greater artistic... well i guess magic is the word he was inferring. did he really think some of this magic was going to rub off on him when he started knowingly falsely accusing knox and others of racism? lol, kind of projecting there a bit aren't we?
what i'm saying isn't intended as a denigration of a particular races music, i don't think i even need to say that. more an attempt to make the point that you decide to go the opposite route you are still keeping alive the previous racial framework, it may be positive instead of negative but it's still there. there would be no racial problems if we didn't have that framework in the first place.
i don't care about most of what little blues i've heard, it's about as dead as punk rock is at this point. in fact punk rock is pretty much its twin in limitation, lack of ambition and obsolescence.
and man, i've just wasted all this post thinking vaguely about black/white politics in regards to music, which is just boring and pointless.
shows what fucking happens when b0lly isn't around
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