Newsgroups: rec.music.bluenote
Subject: Benny G.; racist?
From: jhurley@husc3.harvard.edu
Date: 11 Jan 93 19:22:39 EST
Organization: Harvard University Science Center

In article, <KXN2@psuvm.psu.edu> replies
to mciver@kibblesnbits.cs.colorado.edu (William McIver Jr.):

McIver>>As an artist Elvis was a thief.
> 
KXN2> I understand that Elvis copied R&B (black) musicians music and style, 
but what did he steal?
> 
McIver>>As an artist or a pop icon (take your pick) Elvis
>>was a racist.  Blame the mainstream media for
>>conveniently overlooking this last point.
> 
KXN2> I havn't heard this claim before.  What are the reasons?

This is a pretty interesting issue in the social history of popular
music (and whatever it is now, jazz arose as a popular music). I 
doubt many people out there would agree 
with the argument that it's some kind of racist thieviery
for an artist to work in a genre originating in a cultural group to which
he/she doesn't belong (this is a different question from whether or not
the artist is a racist; I doubt Elvis could have grown up white in
Memphis in the 20th century without being a racist). When the argument 
is put in this essentialistic way, all we have to do to see how 
ridiculous it is is to turn it over; is Yo Yo Ma, or Wynton Marsalis,
commiting cultural thievery by playing European classical music?  

However, it is not an accident that it is a very recent development that non-
whites like the two musicians mentioned above are allowed to play classical 
music in major venues in the U.S., while
white musicians have been playing black music for centuries. This is  
because this kind of crossover takes place in the context of a
society where cultural groups are stratified. So a slightly different
question arises: is an artist from the 
dominant group complicit in oppression when he uses the idiom of an oppressed
group to give himself opportunities not available to the "authentic"
artist (eg Benny Goodman, whose whiteness allowed him to become
much richer than any black jazz musician)?  What about someone like 
Lennie Tristano, who makes a real artistic contribution to the idiom
he "stole?" What about the fact that the success of the appropriators
often has real benefits for the "authentic" artists; the ODJB were the
first popularizers of jazz (which they absurdly denied originated
among Afro-Americans) on a national scale, and Michael Jackson's success 
today could
never have happened if white rock musicians like Elvis hadn't created the mass
market to which he sells.

Behind this is the question of whether, in a multicultural society,
artistic idioms really "belong"
to cultural groups. Genres never have simple lines of descent, because,
no matter how unequal the power situation, cultural groups that
live in the same society inevitably shape each other's consciousness;
if there were no relations between the groups, there would be no
oppression, and, in fact, no society. Jazz 
arose from Euro-American military music as well as black folk
music, as anyone who has ever heard a New Orleans brass band knows. The
immediate predeccessor of jazz, ragtime, owed a lot to 
classical music in its harmony and song structures. The rhythmic 
complexity of west African music is an important part
of jazz,but most instruments played in jazz are European in origin. Blue 
notes are African in origin, but the reason we have a name for them is that
they stand out in the context of the European tonality that surrounds
them.

While it's obviously unfair that white musicians like Elvis or Jerry Lee Lewis,
(or Benny Goodman or Paul Whiteman) have incomparably greater opportunities
than black artists in the same genres, it's hard to see how the "authentic"
artists really suffer because of the success of the white appropriators, or 
how they damage the idioms they adopt and popularize. Furthermore, IMHO, 
McIver's attack on this 
kind of appropriation is based on an unrealistic and ahistorical view of
the way artistic idioms develop.