Hmmm......well it wouldn't be first time stolen things happened. I mean it's not like this type of thing didn't just happen a few decades ago with music.
“This is the first time I heard a Black man play piano like Jerry Lee Lewis,” he told Davis after they exchanged pleasantries. Surprised with the statement, Davis quickly replied, “Well, where do you think Jerry Lee Lewis learned how to play that kind of style? . . . He learned it from the same place I did: Black blues and boogie-woogie piano players.” The White man was in disbelief and refused to accept Davis’ proposal.
Hearing about this incident on the
Joe Rogan Experience podcast made me realise that I had been just as ignorant and oblivious as this man about the extent of the artistic contributions of Black people to American music.
www.thelovepost.global
History is a selective thing. Usually the stories we’re familiar with are the ones we want to believe, or maybe the sad reality is we haven’t been taught any other alternative from the “mainstream” schools of thought.
Case in point is the history of music, and specifically, for this analysis, classic and modern rock. As a white person born and raised in Canada, I’ve grown up believing that
Janis Joplin wrote all of her biggest hits, as did
the Beatles,
Elvis Presley and any other big artist from the ’60s and ’70s. That’s not to say I’m naive to the songwriting process — I know that most songs have multiple collaborators — but what isn’t clear in pop culture history is how many songs were written by Black people and only made “famous” by white artists.
In the majority of cases, it turns out most Black songwriters of those eras barely made a dime off of their creative work, while the white musicians found radio airtime, fame, money, and notoriety for generations using the
exact same song. Many Black creators died penniless and nameless, without any credit for the music they brought to the world.
---
In modern speak, it’s referred to as “cultural appropriation,” the unacknowledged adoption of customs, practices and ideas of one group of people by members of another and typically more dominant group of people.
“Over the years, you see in the 1920s and 1930s, Black music was very underground, very benign, marginalized,” said Lisa Tomlinson, a cultural critic, formerly of York University and now a lecturer/professor at the University of the West Indies. “It was seen as sleazy. In a lot of cases, when this music becomes mainstream, it becomes disassociated from Black experience and Black context. We talk about cultural appropriation… we reduce it to just borrowing, or sampling, another reductionist term. ‘Borrowing’ or ‘sampling’ sound like nice words, because they sound like an equal exchange. But there’s a power dynamic embedded in that borrowing.”
For example, she points out, Bob Marley wrote the classic tune
I Shot the Sheriff in 1973 and performed with The Wailers. It wasn’t until 1974 that it hit No. 1, when Eric Clapton redid the song. It was inducted into The Grammy Hall of Fame in 2003 and is frequently associated with Clapton.
Many Black songwriters barely made a dime off of their creative work, while white musicians found radio airtime, fame, money, and notoriety, writes Chris Jancelewicz.
globalnews.ca