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Originally Posted by porkmarras
What struck me as being totally intelligent of this guy is how he states that ethnic minorities generally go for more technologically enhanced music because of the fact that the nostalgia generally attached to guitars is one for a past that was good only for the white oppressors of this earth, while the embracing of the latest technology in music making is generally more widespread in the black community because the future is the only thing to be longing for
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well i don't particularly agree with that theory, i'm kind of tired at the moment and i can't be bothered to think this through properly and form a coherent arguement so i'll just put out a list of points that probably won't mean a thing unless you are a mind reader
firstly, there's more musical intruments than the electric guitar, so why have all traditional instruments been largely abandoned in favour of technology.
secondly, i think this has to do with dance culture and music being played in public by DJs rather than bands... essentially i think this dates back to the begining of hiphop when black kids from very poor neighbourhoods were too poor to buy instruments and had to find other ways to make music which lead to the DJ as musician and thus sampling, the loss of the value of actual live music played on instruments... in turn, this lead to the rise of music created by one man bands, which i think is far more appealing to a young man's ego (being the sole creator) than having to do make music in a group. and this lead to the use of instruments being seen as being against the spirit of hiphop.
i guess this has to be tied into jamaica too, because of the influence jamaican music has over electronic dance music, where there was that school (alpha boys school, or something) in the 60s where all the apparently most of the future ace musicians were trained my this one nun... i don't know what happened to that nun, but i imagine that at some point or another she got too old to teach, and then with the way the jamaican scene worked with it being controlled by a couple of label owners/producers who produced the majority of records to come out on certain key labels, and the logical move for those guys was to embrace technology because it gave themselves more control over the sound and required less reliance on musicians...
also, it makes me think about some stuff that joe carducci said in his book Rock and The Pop Narcotic, about the nature of pop music being a primarily studio based music, and dance music is essentially pop.
not to mention that some of the pioneering groups that are supposed to be influential to house and techno, like new order or erasure were also super-white in their sound and appearance.
then i suppose you'd have to draw kraftwerk into this, i guess those guys represented the future, but they were also about as white* as it's possible to be, but their music was embraced by a handful of black dudes in america which lead to the births of house and techno
thirdly... zillions of white people embraced technology based too.
fourthly, in countried like the UK, where all the non-whites are immigrants, i think there is something in this that has to do with them separating themselves from the music traditions of their nations of origin. for example, lots of people immigrated to the UK from jamaica, but as far as i know no jamaican musician of any significance ever immigrated here, thus the traditions of the music (and intrument playing) remained in jamaica, and the primary interface british jamaicans had with jamaican music was through recordings, so it could be sort of argued that records/DJs became more important than musicians... this is getting really incoherrent, i'll stop.
basically, i think there's this really something to base an essay (that i'll never write) on rather than some post on an internet message board.
in years to come i think this current period of technology over conventional instruments is going to be seen as an anomally, and that instruments will return to equal if not higher grounding.
and ADF have a fucking guitarist anyway.
*white in the sense of what black people make fun of white people for being like, i.e. stiff, uptight, asexual, nerdish.