Ripping Off Black Music
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
“Elvis Presley was the greatest minstrel America ever spawned, and he appeared in bold whiteface.”--"Ripping Off Black Music" (1973) by Margo Jefferson, incipit "According to rock and roll chroniclers, the Beatles "revolutionized rock and roll by bringing it back to its original sources and traditions."" --"Ripping Off Black Music" (1973) by Margo Jefferson "The night Jimi died I dreamed this was the latest step in a plot being designed to eliminate blacks from rock music so that it may be recorded in history as a creation of whites. Future generations, my dream ran, will be taught that while rock may have had its beginnings among blacks, it had its true flowering among whites. The best black artists will thus be studied as remarkable primitives who unconsciously foreshadowed future developments. Two weeks later Janis Joplin was dead. What does that mean? I asked myself, momentarily confused. It means she thought she was black and somebody took her at her word." --"Ripping Off Black Music" (1973) by Margo Jefferson |
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
"Ripping Off Black Music" (1973) is an essay by Margo Jefferson originally published in Harper's Magazine, January 1973. It is partly a review of the Monterey Pop Festival (1967).
Blurb:
Written more than 40 years ago with astonishing prescience, celebrated critic and memoirist Margo Jefferson’s "Ripping Off Black Music"—her first published essay—is at once unflinchingly honest and dead-on in its critique of appropriation in popular music, from Chuck Berry to Elvis, Jimi Hendrix to the Beatles.
Excerpt[1]
THE CURRENT FAMILIARITY, then, breeds contempt, exploitation, and a great deal of bad music. Borrowing itself is not the question, since music lives by eclecticism. Still, if you borrow, you must return, and nobody wants an imitation back if they've lent out an original. Bonnie Raitt, Carole King, Bonnie Bramlett, Randy Newman, Joy of Cooking, Tracey Nelson, Bob Dylan, and some others have characters or traditions of their own to which they have joined blues and jazz. Others are singing and playing in styles that derive more from Country and Western, pop and musical, or classical forms. But far too many white performers thrive and survive on personas and performances that are studies in ventriloquism and minstrelsy, careless footnotes to a badly read blues text. "There are a lot of colored guys who can sing me off the stage," says Rod Stewart. "But half the battle is selling it, not singing it. It's the image, not what you sing."
See also
- Appropriation in music
- Black music
- White music
- "Because they're anti-Negro, that's why", dictum by Alan Freed
- Rip off
