2,453 words
If there ever was a time that whites and blacks have aired their grievances, then the past two weeks have been it. Cities are burning. People are being killed. “Justice,” as defined by one person or another, is being demanded. In so many ways, the true nature of blacks in the United States is being put on display for all to see. In fact, many blacks are expecting us to thank them for their mere presence. I came across one such example of this in my Twitter feed yesterday, while poring through footage of riots, mismanaged police responses, and those damn bricks. It was only five words:
I initially dismissed this little hypothetical as another example of black hubris, bolstered by various enemies. But for whatever reason, it stuck with me. It’s like a little microcosm of the black attitude towards the white people of the countries they live in, specific to one facet of culture. I pondered the scenario myself, but instead of an answer, I came away with some issues with the concept itself.
For one, this thought experiment implies black people can claim ownership over aspects of pop music. The idea that certain modern musical developments, genres, or leitmotifs belong to one ethnic group in a country that is inescapably multicultural is somewhat disingenuous. Music is a broadly cosmopolitan field, with many different people and groups collaborating on the global stage and across time. It is not inaccurate to suggest certain practices that an ethnic group is notable for are their own musical traditions, but this is typically only applicable to folk music; of course, a German folk song is distinctly German. A pop song? The lines become much more blurry.
The ways in which popular culture is consumed in the United States may have some clear ethnic lines. That much is obvious when you consider the kind of music played at a shopping mall vs the kind of music played from ghetto blasters. But the people who make popular culture inevitably collaborate with people outside of their own group. This was true of great jazz artists, and remains true of black rappers and their often white (or Jewish) producers, managers, and marketers. Is it really accurate to call a genre of pop music in the United States exclusively “black,” just because a black person contributed to it? Even “black” genres and styles are tinged with the influence of other Americans, oftentimes white people.
Popular music will inevitably trend towards some kind of artistic average in a multicultural society, simply because it’s inherently commercial. Label men want to sell as many records as possible, so they try to make their music as broadly appealing as possible. (The end result is often terrible to people like us, with ears, but I digress.) In recent years, there has been a shift towards unprecedented amounts of black representation in pop music, as a reflection of the country’s demographic trends and consumer habits — a negrophilia of sorts has, unfortunately, taken root in the nation. By my count, 51 of the Billboard Hot 100 Tracks on this day — June 5, 2020 — were by black artists exclusively or featured black artists. Even then, is all of that truly “black” music? Or is it a culturally-washed, commercialized sort of “black” music that is sold to naive whites, with black consumers of music correctly assumed to automatically be interested in listening to their kin? To claim this as “black” music simply seems like a shallow opinion at first, and a rather dishonest or even depressing one upon closer inspection. While slightly old data, the number-one producer of Billboard-charting tracks in 2019 was Louis Bell, a white man. I don’t envy anyone who solely identifies with a commercial product, especially not my kin, and the neoliberal, miscegenated “black” music offered to blacks is just as much of a sin.
Another question is raised when considering “music without black people.” The implication here seems to be that without black people in the country, their contribution to music would not exist, or that music, in general, would not be influenced by black people at all. That is true to some extent, in the sense that cooperation would not be as close. But to suggest that you must keep another people in your country in order to collaborate with them is false on its face. In fact, I would suggest that even deeper and more productive cultural collaboration could exist between people if they are allowed to remain separate from one another. There are immutable differences between ethnic groups living together in the United States, but there are many commonalities between us as well — pop culture being one of them, as mentioned.
European peoples have a long history of exploring other nations and bringing home bits and pieces of culture that we liked from there. Other nations have done the same with us. The English put their own spin on Chinese tea; the Japanese love making fusion American food; Persian rugs are a hit in Europe; I occasionally (with some white nationalist guilt) clamber out of my writing chair in search of Ethiopian food. It’s in this way that each nation can decide just how much of a foreign nation’s culture they’d like to partake in, what changes they’d like to make to it, and how “exotic” they would like it to remain. The average Japanese person would balk at American “sushi.” That’s alright, because they don’t have to eat it. Put the Americans and the Japanese in the same spot, and they’d quickly grow to resent us for ruining their food.
So, would a nation without black people necessarily have absolutely no black influence on their music? Possibly. But not necessarily. And any collaborations between black and white musicians would probably yield something much more novel, and much more interesting, simply because differences between our two nations would be acknowledged rather than half-assimilated, as they are now in the United States. When we grow tired of another nation’s culture, we’ll also have our own to turn to. That option doesn’t exist in a multicultural society. And when groups get fed up with this arrangement and seek to practice their own culture again, the outcomes are almost never positive. You begin to see ghettos, imperialist policies, or sometimes actual war. It’s much easier to buy a plane ticket home than it is to insulate yourself from a strange neighbor.
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Let’s entertain the hypothetical, without qualifications, for just one minute. What would music be like without black people?
Well, it would certainly be different.
It would be dishonest to suggest that black people have not greatly influenced music in the United States; distinctly black musical traditions, like the blues, are vitally important forebears to the development of rock’n’roll. Without black people, there would not be jazz. Without black people, we probably would not have breakbeats.
Very well. Just one thing: I reject this whataboutism entirely, simply because of its chauvinism of the present tense.
This thought experiment begs the question. It is implied in the statement that without the contributions of black people in music, we would be worse off. We simply don’t know that. Are acid jazz and postmodern rock really the peak of culture? Who’s to say; this is simply what we have. Personally, I doubt it. To suggest that absent the contributions of black people, Western music would inherently be worse really just underscores an important truth about the differences between us. Black people think that Western music without blacks would be worse for obvious reasons; it wouldn’t be tailored to them and their tastes. White people who were raised in a society with black-influenced music think that music would be worse without black people simply because they know nothing else. The underlying assumption is that genres a lot of white people enjoy, like techno or jazz, would simply cease to exist sans blacks, with nothing to replace them. That’s a bit of a stretch. Culture abhors a vacuum. And today, we can only hypothesize about what music would have developed into without the influence of other cultures. Ultimately, it’s just a matter of a changed variable.
You can certainly make an educated guess about what Western music would be like without black people, because there is a rich corpus of musical works produced by Europeans before the artistic input of Africans was ever considered. The West developed the opera, the concerto, the waltz, and countless other fascinating musical forms before blacks lived in our societies. Knowing the Faustian spirit of our people, I also find it hard to believe these traditions would have remained frozen in time.
It’s plainly obvious that this question is asked in bad faith. Two can play at this game. Imagine music without white people. Specifically, imagine “black” music without white people. The role that whites have played in shaping black music is undeniable; both the pop-culture “black” music and actual, black-dominated genres, such as jazz. A rather obvious example of a white contribution to the black musical canon would be our instruments. What would Thelonious Monk have done without a piano? Miles Davis without a trumpet?
Let’s get even more abstract, beyond just instruments. Where would black music be without music theory? Hip-hop relies heavily on the boom-bap and trap beats, drum patterns uncovered only by formalizing the arrangement of sounds on a logical timeline. If blacks didn’t know how to syncopate a kick drum, there’d be no “Old Town Road.” The very first hip-hop records — and for that matter, even most hip-hop records made today — are a collage of sampled, previously-existing music and produced drum beats. Even the drum beats are sometimes sampled, as is the case with the famous Amen break. Without a massive library of Western music, almost all of it made by whites, what would the emcees of New York have sampled instead? In fact, the disk jockeys of the East Coast can’t even lay claim to the libertine, cut-and-paste workflow that made their productions possible. That honor goes to a bunch of sexually perverted English provocateurs.
Even when handed the rudiments (and then some) of music by Europeans, blacks will gravitate towards tribal bombastics. When whites use that aforementioned Amen break — one recorded by blacks, actually — we produce “Hajnal.” When blacks use it, they produce “Fuck tha Police.” Our interests and inspirations are very clearly different, so why should we entertain the notion that black contributions to our musical canon are some kind of heaven-sent gift to us? We work with what we have, no matter where it came from.
A lot of music by black artists in the United States comes from a place of great pain. The most compelling works from black musicians inevitably dwell upon trauma; jazz came from an environment rife with drugs, sectarian violence, and inner-city tribulations that are far from forgotten. Gangsta rap is not a violent boast for the sake of violent boasts; to the thugs of the 90s, it was simply a way of life that they were putting on tape. Modern black musicians, typically rappers and RNB singers, spend a lot of track time discussing theirs and others’ addictive habits, resentment about their upbringing, and (perceived) lack of recognition in their spheres.
The life of a famous black person in the United States doesn’t seem conducive to longevity or happiness. Something has clearly gone terribly wrong. Many of them end up overdosing. Many of them are angry and violent predators. Some are just very depressed. No matter their dysfunction, it’s readily apparent that a great many blacks have a hard time fitting into white societies, and they turn to the arts as a way of expressing that. Whites will probably have a hard time understanding a lot of it; I don’t think I am being presumptuous when I say the average reader of this site can’t empathize with a rap song.
Black art, nonetheless, is still an expression of pain, a lashing-out at what they believe to be their oppressor. This animosity is goaded on by the same people who profit from it. That this same content is consumed by a lot of white people is really quite ironic, and frankly, unconscionable. The suggestion that we would be losing out on black music if they were no longer in the country is really suggesting that overwhelmingly Jewish media companies would be losing out on the ability to commodify their suffering and anger — anger that is presently threatening to destroy us. In essence, some hip-hop-loving Leftist insistent on keeping his token blacks in the country really wants to keep them here to suffer for his entertainment. That’s not even the worst part, either. Insisting on blacks remaining in the country would be to trade one’s life and society for rhymes about money, bitches, and rims. I also find it funny that black people wish to stay in the United States because of the music they make. It’s like they need us to give them a reason to be pissed off.
This line of reasoning isn’t exclusive to blacks, but it’s particularly unjust when applied to them. In music spheres, I have heard unironic statements about white musicians along the lines of “they made better music when they were on heroin.” Is that true? Probably. But that’s a rather damning indictment of the state of culture and arts in the West than it is evidence good art only arises from suffering. It’s also very cruel. The opiate-addled grunge rocker can overcome his addiction. The American black is stuck here, and to suggest he needs to stay in order to sate the sickened cultural appetites of the nation’s youth, political Left, and culture-distorting “entertainment” industry borders on self-destructive minstrelsy. It’s the cultural equivalent of poking the bear.
Black people aren’t the only ones who suffer while living in white societies. We suffer, too. We suffer from crimes committed against us, the watering-down of our culture to commercialist dreck, and the burning down of the cities that we built. If nobody is happy, then who cares about rap albums and jazz standards?
So, let’s imagine music without black people.
If that means society isn’t being torn apart, then I’ll take it any day of the week.
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27 comments
I didn’t catch this if you mentioned it, but there’s another aspect of “what would music be like without black people?” that needs to be pointed out. And this is normie friendly tier…
Does musical contribution give them a free pass to fraudulently use counterfeit money? Does it give them carte blanche to resist arrest when high on fentanyl? Does their musical aptitude excuse them from behaving like civilized human beings?
In other words, imagine civilization without white people.
Excellent & very fair-minded article. And a subtle rejoinder to that Jeelvy article a few weeks backs. Despite everything, I still rate PM Dawn.
Nice to know there are still PM Dawn fans. My shaky rap fandom was undercut for good when KRS One, that bully, bumrushed Prince B simply because Prince B said rappers were sometimes too violent, or something like that, and the idiot KRS proved him right.
It would be the music of the spheres. All geometric and mathematical. Blacks are terrible at math.
If nobody is happy, then who cares about rap albums and jazz standards?
This is illumination.
In my C-C piece, “I’ll Have a White Rock, Please”
https://counter-currents.com/2011/11/white-rock/
that is “the beat” is characteristic of black music, then by dialing back on rhythm we can discern that New Age music is the Platonic ideal of White music without black input. If that seems to hippie-ish, consider Kraftwerk (discussed here recently by Mr. Weiswald) whose motoric beats would influence nerdy suburban blacks like Carl Craig in creating Detroit Techno (Craig on Kraftwerk: “They were so stiff, they SWUNG!”).
Imagine music without blacks?
Nah brah. Like Mr Wilkinson commented earlier, I’m too busy imagining life without blacks.
I’ll happily forfeit Aretha Franklin if Maxine Waters will disappear. I’ll give up Wilson Pickett if I never again have to gaze upon the withered visage of Al Sharpton.
Lets see, without white people, blacks could never have recorded even one second of their incredible musical genius. In Africa, they never invented the wheel, and I would assume that would still hold true today, nonetheless inventing a record player or a recording device.
They make their jungle beats on equipment invented by White men, and every part of the process was invented by white men. They would still be beating drums make of animal skins and singing ooga booga if not for us.
I do like some black artists. Reggae, etc. I’m not discriminatory. However, I do suspect the tendentious history of rock music that highlights the blues roots and black forebears is exaggerated, and an equally valid history stressing white rockebilly and country roots could be written. There is an obsession of media impresarios, dating back to the roots of rock, to unite white and black culture, but the two spontaneously separate over time like oil and water. For example, the birth of early hard rock and folk in the sixties was a white affair. Then there will be a corporate attempt to unite the two again by creating a black “legend”, such as Jimmy Hendrix, who in reality has only one good song and a cover of a song in which he botched the lyrics. Next there was the rise of 80s disco pop type music, a fundamentally white genre, and the great unifier of Michael Jackson was presented. Michael Jackson is good of course, but is really more a cultural phenomenon outside the US, where people don’t understand the American nuances well. No white kids wore Michael Jackson shirts stateside. Another example is the run dmc Aerosmith cover of walk this way.
I find whites, particularly young male, are more attracted to authentic black gansta rap type music than the reverse, and I believe it has to do with the fact that their lyrics are real, about something, whereas white lyrics can only be arcane messages about the “IT.”
There’d be no Charlie Parker, but no Nikki Minhaj or O. T. Genasis, so it’s a wash, at best.
Since I’ve not listened to pretty much any music created in the past 30 years primarily because of black influence on what is available, I’d miss them not one whit.
And as long as I can keep my CD recordings or type the titles in on YouTube, of some of my older favorites like Shirley Bassey or Dionne Warwick, then ta-ta black musicians! Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
I have never liked black music, though I can certainly silll appreciate and even admire the very great bravura and musicianship often displayed. I freely admit that the great tradition of Western art-music lost its way after the First World War, so that we Occidentals have accompanied much less in this contemporary epoch of decay and vulgarity which circumscribes popular imagination and memory.
But at heart I do not particularly enjoy listening to any of the musical genres of black origin: blues, jazz, soul, hip-hop or even rock! The truth is that I find their insistent rhythms wearing and even base, while the melodies and harmonies of blues-derived tonality are to my ears somehow angular and ugly. It is as if there is something of the stench and delirium of tribal Africa in all black music: so that it is stunted and cannot express the truly beautiful or truly sublime: it can never transport me.
For most black music concerns the hylic level of human existence: lust and jealousy, exuberance and misery, or bragging and hostility. Jazz, which utilises European instruments and compositional techniques, may achieve the level of the noetic in textural ingenuity, but even there it cannot approach the heights of our great master J.S. Bach. No, only the European ethos can create music of a pneumatic nature, for our people and their civilisation are rooted in the great Faustian quest to create, to know and to overcome. That is why Western aesthetics date back to the very beginning, to Plato and Aristotle. One has only to hear recreations of the very earliest Ancient Greek compositions to recognise an immediate kinship.
Our music can scale the heights of heaven, express the complex emotions of the poet or evoke the wild beauty of our northern homelands and the glories of our people. There is nothing in the world’s music that can approach that. The African-American composer or the BAME musician may be gifted, expressive and spontaneous to the n-th degree, but he lacks the soaring Geist of the West (and maybe even resents it). His thumos may be unequal to the aesthetic and spiritual ambition of Bach’s Kunst der Fuge or Beethoven’s Late Quartets. Winterreise and Parsifal will perhaps bore and repel him. And the ‘urban’ youth, if exposed to these great masterpieces, invariably revile them as excremental.
Therefore a world without black music would be no loss to me at all, but rather a great relief. Indeed I can remember when it was less prevalent and less intrusive, when it was not inflicted on us in public transport, at supposedly solemn occasions or upon the sick in hospital wards — and when it was not so comically and universally revered as sancrosant and peerless. Oh for a return to those days!
Black music is perishable. Bach’s Kunst der Fuge is timeless.
Not directly related to music, but an inscription from Egypt’s Pepi II, circa 2270 BC, says the king instructed a governor of “Elephantine” to deliver a black pygmy to the court to dance and amuse the king (The Book of the Dead. E.A. Wallis Budge, translator. Citadel Press, 1960, page 22). The inscription implied that previous governors had also done this. So, it’s more like “We was jestazs,” not “We was kangz.”
Techno is white.
All the top techno labels are from NW Europe.
They can keep the bebop. We’ll keep the electricity.
“Imagine Music Without Black People”
Well, we can dream can’t we?
While out on my bicycle the other day I imagined a magic button. Say there is a button that when pressed just once would instantly remove all whites from earth. Without pain, misery or anything like that, whites would simply vanish. All the stuf we created would remain, but once the button is pressed, no more whites.
Even better: nobody would remember any whites either. Not even the person that pressed the button. It would simply be a world, exactly like today, but without any whites and without anybody remembering whites. (And lets imagine that pictures and video’s of whites would also magically be scrubbed)
So, the question is to blacks: Would you press the button?
I live in a world without black music — I have kept my dial tuned to a classical music station ever since I’ve been inadvertently ‘quarantined’ by age and underlying conditions since early March. Beautiful waltzes, opera arias, lyric symphonic second movements, as well as the stirring and inspiring — “Entrance of the Gods into Valhalla” — float through my day. Try it for 30 days, you’ll never go back.
Pains me to see self-proclaimed WNs going soft on black music out of some liquetoast attempt at fairness.
Blacks only care about rhythm. What matters to a white brain instead is melody – something that requires a musical insights that negroes are incapable of.
*Make that “milquetoast.”
Imagine music without black people, eh?
Just imagine; no Rick James, no Prince, no James Brown, no silly Mo-town, no Aretha Franklin, no Ike ‘n’ Tina, no stoopid rappin’, no Bootsy Collins, no Sly and the Family BS, no Stevie Wonder etc.
Then, if there was no black people music…no goddamn Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Eric Burdon, Rod Stewart, and assorted irritating English idiot performers.
As ol’ Satchmo said, “What A Wonderful World…”.
The World-wide moronification process is in full swing.
Most subgenres of American “Black” music were spearheaded by Whites, usually to superior effect. Even the earliest known example of a proto-Rap song was “Trouble Every Day” by Frank Zappa.
“Imagine music without black people”
No need to imagine it. It’s called the Western Classical Music Tradition (“classical” used here in its colloquial sense, not the technical sense of the era of roughly 1750 to the 1820). Over 1000 years of some of the greatest artistic creations ever known.
The formal perfection and ingenuity, sublime spiritual striving, and profound emotional and intellectual depth of Western music from the age of Plainchant down through the late romantic and early modern era are unmatched by anything that can be attributed to blacks or black culture (whether in Africa itself or the diaspora).
That tweet is aimed at the same people who genuinely believe that the US becoming a failed Latin American country is a worthy trade off for easy access to hot tamales. The existence of those Luther Vandross & George Benson records totally counterbalances our inner cities resembling the Congo as far as they’re concerned. Riots? Mass fentanyl deaths? Your kid is murdered? Just mention Motown & tacos, all will be forgiven, part & parcel of diversity.
Scott’s article is of interest.
The contribution (except for some forms of jazz and the blues in general) is over-rated.
Even in jazz, over 100 years ago, interesting white Innovations on it were already present in places as distant from each other as Germany and Australia.
To what extent did white styles such as Cajun, bluegrass, country, influence early jazz? From listening, it is pretty obvious.
That does not apply to Coltrane, Davis, et al., but their work is solidly rooted in western traditions.
The degenerate Chet Baker and others formed a west-coast sound, at its best just as valid (still hear it in shops here).
I could write 30,000 or more words on the topic, so two quick themes from here.
When at a karaoke bar, I enjoy belting out Johnny B. Goode, and doing whatever Rick James (R.I..P.) did on Superfreak. It works.
Techno
Techno has nothing to do with black music (which is generally godawful for the last 15 and more years).,
I was once dragged to a ‘performance’ by the ‘lengendary’ Freddie Knuckles of Detroit (I gather it is a very happy city now).
I was mentally referring to him at the time as Freddy Knucle Dragger, since that was his posture.
All of the black lies about inventing techno are just that, lies, from your now dying city.
Grandmaster Flash, (a true DJ piece) Adventures on the Wheels of Steel, something of a masterpiece, on the other hand, Africa Bambata’s Planet Rock is entirely based on a long sample from Kraftwerk, with some vocoder vox on top.
Wow, what originality?
Techno is a european and east-asian creation.
Breakbeats were inevitable not because of black creativity, but because of the tempo manipulations offered since the appearance of machines and programs that make it very easy.
Blacks cannot detect differences in melody as well as whites on average according to Richard Lynn, but they’re just as good at detecting rhythm, so most blacks literally don’t hear the same thing when they listen to music like Beethoven as we do. Therefore, the black woman on Twitter was correct that– to blacks– music would be worthless without them–as was Chuck Berry when sang a song telling Beethoven to “roll over” in his grave. Relative to whites, however, they are idiots when they express this sentiment, because they can’t hear what we hear. They can’t go the places we go metaphysically in our minds.
“So, would a nation without black people necessarily have absolutely no black influence on their music?”
Russia has no black people, but black music from the US influences them. As long as another white nation has a black minority, especially one as big as the US, then the black influence will trickle in. Just look at the top pop songs in Russia. While they have a dark tone and a wispy flowing quality which are all their own, they have the American pop beat and they don’t really sing but do a kind of tonal rap. Here is an example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGLZbBK5wTw
I plan to write an article about music soon, but as to how music would be without blacks, it would still be a downgrade from traditional forms, the 19th century, and even the early 20th century. I’ll explain why I think this is in my article, but thanks for asking thought-provoking questions.
4th World music will quagmire this discussion. Mixing different cultural sounds is the future so the best bet is that there will be a creative tension between Identity and the Other.
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