The fusion of various musical styles is one of the great triumphs of America. Having grown up with Boomer music, I find this influence to be rich and interesting, especially those influences from black communities. Aretha Franklin, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles. Such great talents. In my own community, I collaborate with black Christians and have sung gospel music at black churches. I think we can appreciate our own cultural influence and heritage without disparaging others’.
If we “de-Africanize” music we will lose most modern genres of music: rock, Jazz, blues, most folk genres not to mention all of the Latin American styles and dances. European culture has no syncopation pre African exchange. We have hymns, classical, plain chant, and proto-folk old time music. I love those genres but what you are describing is a radical impoverishment of the human musical lexicon.
Addendum: I am technically incorrect when I said European culture has no concept syncopation. What I meant to say is that is that It didn’t have the PARTICULAR style of syncopation we all are familiar with in Jazz, Blues, and rock, NOT the syncopation you can here on the rhythm patterns from the Renaissance and other European traditions.
However, with this correction in terminology all of my original points still stand.
I’d like to add that by the logic in this article, we should RETVRN to using Roman numerals instead of Arabic ones. One of the defining features of Western culture is bringing the good from beyond it’s borders and reconciling it with itself. Some scholars argue that the roots of Gregorian chant are actually contained within particular ME Jewish traditions.
Secondly, this idea of ‘European Stock’ as a monolith is a social construction of the post-civil rights era. There was no shared concept of even a shared Catholicism among American Catholics 100 years ago. You can see this in East-Coast cities that built separate churches for German/Italian/Polish/Irish populations. That is before even getting into Catholic/Orthodox/Protestant splits which were often violent both on this continent and Europe.
There is nothing that could create an ethnos like pressure. Ironically, the regime will create the very white identity it seeks to destroy. White Americans are largely deracinated from their ethnic European identities already, so they are ripe for ethnogenesis if they survive.
Not a bad point, but I think that will happen more along religious lines than ethnic ones. There is a reason all across the Northeast you will meet people that are Italian/Irish or Polish/German, but rarely a mix of WASP/Scandanavian/Russian/Jewish. Anecdotally, I know more interracial couples that share a religious tradition and/or Socio-political outlook then I know people dating/marrying across political party and/or faith. At its root, this is a religious conflict, and that's where the fault lines will appear. This may sometimes be close to ethnic dividing lines, but never exactly.
Give it up, it's not an impoverishment any more than removing a wasp's stinger is impoverishing the body of a supply of venom. These forms of media, no matter how attached we've become to them, are more or less dead ends. It turns out their value at scale was in inducing rot and little more.
It's not clear how it would it be impoverishment to embrace a shift towards forms that feed the spirit in a way that doesn't appeal to the colored soul. If you insist mass culture ought to appreciate negrified music, you might as well be telling people to appreciate an increased crime rate.
Or, we realize that the reason our music has degenerated so completely is because of who controls the radio stations and the publishing houses. Remove the vermin from the top and put a hold on their retarded cultural engine. New European cultural forms will naturally take what was good from the past and discard the rest. We don't need a policy of de-negroization. We just need to circulate the elites and close all their cultural engines of chaos.
New European cultural forms will naturally arise IF AND ONLY IF elites of European taste are in charge of the institutions which gatekeep culture. It would be negligence to have spiritual boomers who are unwilling to stomach their childhood listening to negrofied music in charge of cultural gatekeeping.
I agree and this is something many people even in this sphere don't want to face. These things you loved in your formative years may not have turned you in to a terminal liberal, but the effect they had generally and at scale was culturally counterproductive. Whether you enjoy it or not, it's not appropriate to be a cultural landmark for our civilization, except as something we turned away from.
If you can't turn away from boomer music, how do you expect to turn away from liberalism itself?
I dont think this is a very good take. You can say that much of "boomer music" was influenced by black music, sure. But what are the roots of black music? Partially, to African music. But most of that culture was never brought to the Americas, as a consequence of aspects of the slave trade. The roots of older black music are more easily traced right back to white southerners, and Baptist churches. The two groups influenced each other, back and forth.
And while its important to celebrate our own musical cultures, the moral undergirding and the messaging of music is important as well. We're not really gonna pretend Led Zeppelin made music that was pronomian, are we? Hardly...
I probably should have cited a source for this article. For reference, my take is based off of my reading of The Land Where the Blues Began by Alan Lomax. As well as Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer.
I wont pretend to have read or have been familiar with either of those books, because I havent and am not. I am simply speaking from my own experience of being a musician and my musical education. I largely agree with the sentiment you raise, peoples should listen and celebrate their own culture when they choose music. However, I also think that American history is inescapable, and any attempt to identify and isolate "heritage stock" cultures across time in our history as unique and untainted will require heavy revisionism and a blind eye. I think it is better to look to the future than split hairs in the past.
Popular history readily and regularly escapes actual history. Not that it's about escaping history as much as choosing the best of it to shape the future with.
Yeah not tracking with this one. I didn't give the article a "like", but did the three comments. Seems others have sensed similar disagreements.
Dave Greene highlights how broad the effects of this concept would be, and equally highlights the input of something like syncopation into the melting pot of music (MPM) bringing forth something new and, well, authentically American.
Heather Carson further emphasizes the fusion that occurred in making this MPM we have here, and in doing so names multiple artists that, before the decadence and corrosive attitudes of the 60s/70s took hold, were almost all images of class in dress, language, style, and manners. Note the before and after corruption of some of those artists.
Finally, Ethan points to how the corporate music infrastructure was able to focus, coordinate, and carry forth the message of rot, base urge, and lecherous filth into all musical art forms - to bring us to such abominations as CRap (a fabulous portmanteau for country-rap, thank you Mandril), what passes as pop, and honestly what pretty much most genres collapsed into.
A true RETVRN would return to the great fusion of MPM (with new ideas entering of course) that we had, that supported the existing moral and aesthetic culture, and above all sounded amazing.
From Appalachia to the Great Lakes, the Great Planes to the Gulf Coast, from Sea to Singing Sea - the music of our fathers has risen from this land through its people down through the ages to us. I for one will not turn away from our heritage and history.
Music is literally the one thing boomers didn't entirely ruin, and actually did some good with. I'm a huge fan and advocate of folk music, but to divorce our modern music from non European influences is just silly. Shall we also get rid of every lute based instrument? I think we should just understand what musical forms were tradditional, and focus on celebrating those. This will involve demoting musical forms with more outside influences. However, one of the shining qualities of the faustian man is our curiosity in other people's, and I for one embrace this trait.
And on Blues - it's African origin are undeniable, but it's also not indigenous African music. Much of what is celebrated in blues is indigenous to the American negro. In this context. The music of Jimmy Rodgers, the arguable founder of American Country music, has obviously and undeniable Ragtime influence. However, in the understanding that Ragtime is already half American, just from the underclass ethnic group, only an idiot could call his music anything other than American. I suppose some Hawaiian influence is also present.
As as an additional side comment, it is truly an oddity that Marxism's infatuation with the working class led to the deeply anti traddition hippies doing the majority of the work to record our tradditional music before being utterly eviscerated by the tsunami of popular culture. Characters such as Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, Ewan MacColl, etc. And led to these figures being comfortable friends with men of polar opposite worldviews. I truly think that such a strange happenstance could only have been divinely orchestrated. It's devastating to think how much European folk culture would have otherwise evaporated.
This is for sure a similar description of Marxism as Bowden had. He stated that it killed many, but ultimately froze the culture in permafrost from which something could arise once it was gone. The problem with American cultural forms is that it provides that which we want and find familiar, but always packages it with other, more subversive forms. I like to say that it is restricting our access to the legitimately true/good/beautiful, whilst forcing us to pay an upcharge for the cheap simulacra.
The fusion of various musical styles is one of the great triumphs of America. Having grown up with Boomer music, I find this influence to be rich and interesting, especially those influences from black communities. Aretha Franklin, Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles. Such great talents. In my own community, I collaborate with black Christians and have sung gospel music at black churches. I think we can appreciate our own cultural influence and heritage without disparaging others’.
If we “de-Africanize” music we will lose most modern genres of music: rock, Jazz, blues, most folk genres not to mention all of the Latin American styles and dances. European culture has no syncopation pre African exchange. We have hymns, classical, plain chant, and proto-folk old time music. I love those genres but what you are describing is a radical impoverishment of the human musical lexicon.
RATCHET.
Not sure what that implies. Is it a ratchet towards purity spiral and cultural impoverishment?
Addendum: I am technically incorrect when I said European culture has no concept syncopation. What I meant to say is that is that It didn’t have the PARTICULAR style of syncopation we all are familiar with in Jazz, Blues, and rock, NOT the syncopation you can here on the rhythm patterns from the Renaissance and other European traditions.
However, with this correction in terminology all of my original points still stand.
I’d like to add that by the logic in this article, we should RETVRN to using Roman numerals instead of Arabic ones. One of the defining features of Western culture is bringing the good from beyond it’s borders and reconciling it with itself. Some scholars argue that the roots of Gregorian chant are actually contained within particular ME Jewish traditions.
Secondly, this idea of ‘European Stock’ as a monolith is a social construction of the post-civil rights era. There was no shared concept of even a shared Catholicism among American Catholics 100 years ago. You can see this in East-Coast cities that built separate churches for German/Italian/Polish/Irish populations. That is before even getting into Catholic/Orthodox/Protestant splits which were often violent both on this continent and Europe.
There is nothing that could create an ethnos like pressure. Ironically, the regime will create the very white identity it seeks to destroy. White Americans are largely deracinated from their ethnic European identities already, so they are ripe for ethnogenesis if they survive.
Not a bad point, but I think that will happen more along religious lines than ethnic ones. There is a reason all across the Northeast you will meet people that are Italian/Irish or Polish/German, but rarely a mix of WASP/Scandanavian/Russian/Jewish. Anecdotally, I know more interracial couples that share a religious tradition and/or Socio-political outlook then I know people dating/marrying across political party and/or faith. At its root, this is a religious conflict, and that's where the fault lines will appear. This may sometimes be close to ethnic dividing lines, but never exactly.
Religion certainly used to be a shorthand for ethnicity, perhaps that is returning...
Give it up, it's not an impoverishment any more than removing a wasp's stinger is impoverishing the body of a supply of venom. These forms of media, no matter how attached we've become to them, are more or less dead ends. It turns out their value at scale was in inducing rot and little more.
It's not clear how it would it be impoverishment to embrace a shift towards forms that feed the spirit in a way that doesn't appeal to the colored soul. If you insist mass culture ought to appreciate negrified music, you might as well be telling people to appreciate an increased crime rate.
Great read. Definitely a larger point to be made here on all our cultural mechanisms.
Or, we realize that the reason our music has degenerated so completely is because of who controls the radio stations and the publishing houses. Remove the vermin from the top and put a hold on their retarded cultural engine. New European cultural forms will naturally take what was good from the past and discard the rest. We don't need a policy of de-negroization. We just need to circulate the elites and close all their cultural engines of chaos.
New European cultural forms will naturally arise IF AND ONLY IF elites of European taste are in charge of the institutions which gatekeep culture. It would be negligence to have spiritual boomers who are unwilling to stomach their childhood listening to negrofied music in charge of cultural gatekeeping.
I agree and this is something many people even in this sphere don't want to face. These things you loved in your formative years may not have turned you in to a terminal liberal, but the effect they had generally and at scale was culturally counterproductive. Whether you enjoy it or not, it's not appropriate to be a cultural landmark for our civilization, except as something we turned away from.
If you can't turn away from boomer music, how do you expect to turn away from liberalism itself?
Great point.
I dont think this is a very good take. You can say that much of "boomer music" was influenced by black music, sure. But what are the roots of black music? Partially, to African music. But most of that culture was never brought to the Americas, as a consequence of aspects of the slave trade. The roots of older black music are more easily traced right back to white southerners, and Baptist churches. The two groups influenced each other, back and forth.
And while its important to celebrate our own musical cultures, the moral undergirding and the messaging of music is important as well. We're not really gonna pretend Led Zeppelin made music that was pronomian, are we? Hardly...
I probably should have cited a source for this article. For reference, my take is based off of my reading of The Land Where the Blues Began by Alan Lomax. As well as Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fischer.
I wont pretend to have read or have been familiar with either of those books, because I havent and am not. I am simply speaking from my own experience of being a musician and my musical education. I largely agree with the sentiment you raise, peoples should listen and celebrate their own culture when they choose music. However, I also think that American history is inescapable, and any attempt to identify and isolate "heritage stock" cultures across time in our history as unique and untainted will require heavy revisionism and a blind eye. I think it is better to look to the future than split hairs in the past.
Popular history readily and regularly escapes actual history. Not that it's about escaping history as much as choosing the best of it to shape the future with.
This is true.
Yeah not tracking with this one. I didn't give the article a "like", but did the three comments. Seems others have sensed similar disagreements.
Dave Greene highlights how broad the effects of this concept would be, and equally highlights the input of something like syncopation into the melting pot of music (MPM) bringing forth something new and, well, authentically American.
Heather Carson further emphasizes the fusion that occurred in making this MPM we have here, and in doing so names multiple artists that, before the decadence and corrosive attitudes of the 60s/70s took hold, were almost all images of class in dress, language, style, and manners. Note the before and after corruption of some of those artists.
Finally, Ethan points to how the corporate music infrastructure was able to focus, coordinate, and carry forth the message of rot, base urge, and lecherous filth into all musical art forms - to bring us to such abominations as CRap (a fabulous portmanteau for country-rap, thank you Mandril), what passes as pop, and honestly what pretty much most genres collapsed into.
A true RETVRN would return to the great fusion of MPM (with new ideas entering of course) that we had, that supported the existing moral and aesthetic culture, and above all sounded amazing.
From Appalachia to the Great Lakes, the Great Planes to the Gulf Coast, from Sea to Singing Sea - the music of our fathers has risen from this land through its people down through the ages to us. I for one will not turn away from our heritage and history.
MPM is a great acronym because it's for a music company called Manhattan Produced Music. Kek. No shit, it's real.
Haha perfect, time is a flat circle
Music is literally the one thing boomers didn't entirely ruin, and actually did some good with. I'm a huge fan and advocate of folk music, but to divorce our modern music from non European influences is just silly. Shall we also get rid of every lute based instrument? I think we should just understand what musical forms were tradditional, and focus on celebrating those. This will involve demoting musical forms with more outside influences. However, one of the shining qualities of the faustian man is our curiosity in other people's, and I for one embrace this trait.
And on Blues - it's African origin are undeniable, but it's also not indigenous African music. Much of what is celebrated in blues is indigenous to the American negro. In this context. The music of Jimmy Rodgers, the arguable founder of American Country music, has obviously and undeniable Ragtime influence. However, in the understanding that Ragtime is already half American, just from the underclass ethnic group, only an idiot could call his music anything other than American. I suppose some Hawaiian influence is also present.
As as an additional side comment, it is truly an oddity that Marxism's infatuation with the working class led to the deeply anti traddition hippies doing the majority of the work to record our tradditional music before being utterly eviscerated by the tsunami of popular culture. Characters such as Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, Ewan MacColl, etc. And led to these figures being comfortable friends with men of polar opposite worldviews. I truly think that such a strange happenstance could only have been divinely orchestrated. It's devastating to think how much European folk culture would have otherwise evaporated.
This is for sure a similar description of Marxism as Bowden had. He stated that it killed many, but ultimately froze the culture in permafrost from which something could arise once it was gone. The problem with American cultural forms is that it provides that which we want and find familiar, but always packages it with other, more subversive forms. I like to say that it is restricting our access to the legitimately true/good/beautiful, whilst forcing us to pay an upcharge for the cheap simulacra.