The Underestimating of Black Music

Dvořák's Predictions Fulfilled, Bowie on MTV, Lots of Curtis Mayfield, and Fast Car

In 1892, the master Czech composer Antonín Dvořák, teaching in New York City, prophesied that the melodies of African-American musical genres would inspire a “great and noble school” of American classical music. But the Black musical motherlode instead fostered popular genres known the world over; American composers mainly squandered the opportunity at hand. A modernist “standard narrative,” popularized by Aaron Copland, kept a distance from the vernacular. Joseph Horowitz, in Dvorak’s Prophecy, proposes a “new paradigm” privileging Charles Ives, George Gershwin, and Black classical music. The recent excavation of Black composers includes Harry Burleigh – with whose “Deep River” Black classical music begins. Our program includes Sidney Outlaw singing Burleigh; John McWhorter reconsidering Gershwin; and Allen Guelzo exploring Ives and the Civil War. The larger endeavor is to embed American classical music in the larger narrative of American culture.

Discussion and Concert – Dvořák’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music | Princeton Alumni

Way back when I saw this I realized, yeah, I keep listening to a lot of stuff that’s clearly based on Black music, but I don’t know all that many Black artists even though it’s not like they’re all in a different style, some of them are literally doing the exact same styles as stuff I like. That means David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, etc. Black music doesn’t mean just listening to “Johnny B. Good” like what they pathetically put on the Voyager probe in addition to way too many songs by Bach and Beethoven, nothing wrong with Bach and Beethoven but we don’t need that much Bach and Beethoven to the exclusion of everything else. I could swear the aliens who pick that up are just going to come to Earth like this:

The real problem with the Voyager disc isn’t that it doesn’t have Kraftwerk and King Crimson on it, even though it absolutely should, the problem is that it should have the Black artists those are based on too. It certainly shouldn’t just be a bunch of dead White guys, even though there’s nothing wrong per se with being a White guy. The problem is the context of sending your space music disc and it being nothing but White guys with no one else, not that White guys are on it. Like we really don’t need multiple tracks by Bach and Beethoven, I’m sure the aliens can extrapolate and understand that Bach and Beethoven had other hits and it was a contest to decide what to pick and then they can come to Earth and learn more about our music. If aliens sent me an album of nothing but alien Bach and Beethoven I’d probably assume this was just space junk that was being thrown away from the alien public library, and probably also that aliens are racist and/or trying to Clockwork Orange us.

So yes, David Bowie in particular seemed to use his notorious weirdness that was somewhat accepted to publicize Black music in a way even people like Elvis and Led Zeppelin didn’t. I am very glad that I used to be pretty obsessed with David Bowie and even though I’m not actively obsessed anymore that kind of influence is still there. I did send David Bowie some fan art while he was still alive and I was a teenager which makes me wonder if I’ve secretly had it displayed in the Liberty Museum in Philadelphia with all the fan art he had sent to him and they just didn’t tell me because that would be unreasonable. I can imagine just how many piles of stuff there would’ve been in the Liberty Museum in that case. I do remember going to Philadelphia with my family years ago and we saw the outside of Bowie’s studio there so I can confirm that’s a great place to host the displays. So I have known a lot about Bowie for a long time, including having memorized the lyrics to rather obscure songs like “Saviour Machine” just because I listened to them often. So once I saw the video where Bowie talked about MTV’s refusal to play Black music the first thing I did was look for Black artists who inspired David Bowie, should be quite easy since he had the term “plastic soul” and lines like “black’s got respect / and white’s got his Soul Train” on some of his most famous songs.

How David Bowie Inspired—and Was Inspired by—Black Artists (theroot.com)

I also really like this one, it sounds like a synthwave version of Curtis Mayfield, even though I heard it before I knew what either of those things was sadly. Then, some of the later Curtis Mayfield with more electronic instruments sounds like “synthwave Curtis Mayfield” anyway, it just doesn’t get called that, probably because it’s Black music, and that’s sad.

For example, this song. It’s literally called “New World Order” and when you listen to the lyrics they’re literally just about Jesus and contrasting that to all the problems in the song.

Speaking of “New World Order,” I’ve heard the original context for that phrase that a lot of people have associated with something creepy and evil was literally just “the New World.” Like America. What Dvořak called his “New World Symphony,” about, well, America.

(I also learned Curtis Mayfield was paralyzed and that’s why he’s depicted on his back so often, because he literally sang like that. Cue the inevitable return of the mutants.)

For over a month at this point, I have had an alternate hypothesis to the commonly-accepted idea that Dvořak’s prediction has somehow failed to pass. I think we’ve had Black classical music for a long time, especially when it’s basically White people making Black classical music rather than actual Black people, and especially when it’s British people rather than Americans for seeming perceived reasons of purity notions even if they are probably mostly subconscious. Not that there’s anything wrong with White Brits making Black American music. The problem is just that Black Americans are getting basically no credit for it.

The reason I think that is, you see, the whole notion of “classic rock.” As much as I’ve kind of attacked the humanities at college in the past and still have major problems with it because I think it’s extra work, extra time, and extra charges that don’t teach anything needed for careers and further disadvantage both minorities and just poor White people, I remember being in a music “it’s not appreciation!” class for my art “elective” credit (which I think was probably the single-most popular art elective credit to be honest) I remember the professor saying “What about classic rock? That’s sort of questioning the difference between classical music and popular music, because it’s saying no, our music will endure and it’s classic too.” (That’s a paraphrase despite my use of quotations.)

That idea has really stuck with me because I agreed. I think that’s especially visible in the case of “prog rock” as being like the flipside of the idea of the pops that you see with Leonard Bernstein. I think a lot of people will readily consider “prog rock” or “symphonic rock” as well as “space rock” and “krautrock” (which are technically the exact same thing despite having different connotations, you can find old albums that have Amon Düül and Hawkwind on the same compilation, it’s only, well, probably racists who decided German rock should be its own genre, same issue as with considering the band Novalis as krautrock when they’re not at all space rock, just symphonic rock) to be highbrow even if they don’t consider it “classical music.” Jazz can be considered “classical music,” especially cool jazz, avant-garde jazz, and basically just the kinds of things Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck Quartet played as opposed to like, bossa nova and big band music, which I think are never considered “classical music.” But even when people are taking rock music and making it into something complicated they don’t want to, despite the clear origins of rock and metal as being from gospel and blues and there being plenty of folk-inspired classical music that’s very much considered classical music.

I think there’s just a sort of ghettoization of Black music, even what I’d consider to be Black music by White artists, for reasons that are just sort of racist. It’s like the same complaint I made about how I don’t want to eat terrible Rothschild Gilded Garbage food when I can make some Caribbean food. Clearly, Caribbean food is better than gross rotten milk and rotten grape juice. I don’t equate all forms of aging with rot, some is also Maillard reaction which is literally the opposite kind of thing since it’s the same as burning and burning is often considered a form of purification, but the whole Gilded Garbage mentality seems to be a manifestation of the fact I see luxury as being inherently a form of evil and burning money. Then, if you have rot and you have something equivalent to burning in the same item, that reminds me of the descriptions of Hell as Gehenna and all that… fire and brimstone with the worm that dieth not. Eek. So the lesson is Gilded Garbage really belongs in Gehenna and I hope all the Gilded Garbage can be replaced as we get rid of our annoying tokenistic politics that’s basically racism’s last straw.

I’m not going to say tokenism is, in itself, worse than direct racism, but the thing about tokenism is tokenism is done by people who think they have the crown of creation so to speak, when you have tokenism you think there’s nowhere to go, so tokenism leads to a lot more resistance than outright KKK members everywhere would. That’s also why mutants like in X-Men can stand in for Black people among other things. In real life, you know if there were mutants, they wouldn’t be likely to come from the ranks of Silicon Valley tech bros or Ivy League WASPs or whatever, those are people who are really invested in the status quo and wouldn’t want mutants, they would all come from areas that are moving on up like Africa or Asia. However, I still get annoyed at the interpretations of that as strictly metaphorical. It’s metonymic, since mutants actually are an example of a minority in a context of fiction used to stand in for other minorities that also exist in the content of fiction, and if mutants were real they could still be used that way. It’s not like Shakespeare comparing some prince (yes, it’s about a dude) to a summer’s day where it’s just clearly never ever literal on any level. It’s more like all hands on deck, where you actually want hands on deck because that means people on deck.

More prog rock, because there’s nothing wrong with being White and British, I don’t think we need to be like radical feminists who want to oppress or kill all the men but instead with White people.

Here’s more Curtis Mayfield because we’re moving on up. This is one of the famous album covers where he’s on his back which I just learned today is because he’s paralyzed.

This is also why I think I would almost agree with the Kabas Katz Klan that there are a lot of Nazis on Substack, even though I also think they are being disingenuous and I have no shame in calling them the Kabas Katz Klan, because throwing minorities under the bus because you want to ban nonviolent viewpoints that need to be discussed like TERFs and Zionists (Israel can engage in violence but there’s no less violence in Israel based on whether or not people can discuss the merits and demerits of Jewish states as well as non-state-based plans of Jewish resettlement in the territory like what Noam Chomsky supports, even if some people would call that Antizionist Chomsky always points out it’s Zionist because he’s right) is tokenism, tokenism is racism, and making a racist group might as well be called the KKK even if it’s a different KKK. Margaret Atwood is right in my opinion when she says just ban Nazis. Nazis are advocating violence, which is against Substack’s terms and conditions even if it’d pass the Brandenberg Test. We’re removing people from the site, not charging them with a felony. Same thing as what I think about Holocaust denial, it can be banned from social media so it doesn’t spread without locking the very few people in jail who are well-intended but misguided, real Nazis are doing illegal stuff like lynching people and pogroms anyway.

Enlightened Gatekeeping and Elon Musk (Episode VI: The Return of the Jedi)

So, I think the classical music of America already is mostly influenced by Black music just like Dvořak predicted, people just don’t want to admit it. White performers like Elvis get more famous than them because they’re White even though Elvis wasn’t a racist. I don’t buy the “all White people are racist” Ibram X. Kendi garbage, but luckily that’s mostly gone out of fashion to the extent it was ever kind of in fashion anyway and just seems like it was mostly always a Daily Wire strawman they use to spread extremism. I have, sadly, encountered it in the wild, but only among really uneducated left-wing types, it’s never seemed like a dominant viewpoint and having the illusion it is seems like the only thing that’s ever made it harmful. Then British performers like the Beatles followed by the prog rockers get even more famous than them because it’s just seen as a matter of purity in my opinion. That’s all a myth, Europeans aren’t all a bunch of so-called racially pure people and Americans aren’t a bunch of so-called mutts you racists, there have been people like Pushkin and Dumas in Europe forever, never mind if you just count other European countries as not being racially pure like the fact the Windsors literally were originally the German royal family, the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas. America has different demographics including I’m sure more Jews and more non-White people, Choctaw gave us the word okay after all, but calling Europeans “pure” just means you’re a racist and I’m sure you also idealize Europe and listen to Black music only when White people sing it.

The Choctaw Expression “Okeh” and the Americanism “Okay” | Cheryl Davis\' Art Blog (wordpress.com)

You know this language that we speak,
is part German, Latin and part Greek
Celtic and Arabic all in a heap,
well amended by the people in the street.
Choctaw gave us the word “okay”…

Speaking of what I just said about Europeans not being “pure” despite there being clear demographic differences where America does seem more non-White in some real way and this being an important factor in people’s conception of now British music as somehow being better than American music even when it’s literally American music that Brits are playing, and Black American music at that:

There were no red-headed Irishmen
Before the Vikings landed in Ireland
How many Romans had dark curly hair
Before they brought slaves from Africa?
No race of man is completely pure
Nor is anyone's mind, that's for sure
The winds mix the dust of every land
And so will woman and man

Also a nice line coming back to my view about cognitive evolution being what the “humanists” are trying to prevent with the so-called Singularity and “transhumanism” as promoted by them being nothing of the sort but rather the very last attempt to bolster the City of Man against the onslaught of divinely transhumanized mutants with “Nor is anyone’s mind, that’s for sure.”

And back to Black and White people not being enemies, and for that matter Democrats and Republicans not always being enemies (what happened to Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the latter of who also had a nickname based on Black music: Notorious RBG, having all their bipartisan collaborations? Oh wait, that was rare even back then, the radicalization that Dijkstra attributed to an information glut has been happening for a long time,) a recent example involving Black music is the whole “Fast Car” thing. If you’re looking for the version that got famous, it was this one:

All the single-artist versions by male artists seem to preserve “checkout girl” because of Tracy Chapman, which seems to be a common trend in songs in general so not shocking but still probably going to tick off all the self-styled reactionaries. Not that that was ever on the table, since the sheer existence of a country cover of a Black woman’s song, never mind this actual duet, was going to tick off all the self-proclaimed reactionaries anyway. What a good follow-up to Sam Smith singing about how great Satanism and cheating are, it’s like good always does win over evil after all, but first there’s going to be evil, if the good came first then the evil would be what won. I also like the science-fiction-ish line about the fast car hypothetically being so fast it could fly. Black people and poor White people alike are not allowed by tokenists to want a flying car, that’s supposed to be for Chippy the Elongated Muskrat in their world, but conceptual discrimination is the real discrimination after all, it’s just the opposite kind of thing as to what tokenists and self-styled reactionaries think it is. Chippy isn’t really much of a nerd or geek after all, no matter what kind of image he thinks will make him look the smartest. Yet maybe there sometimes aren’t more important thing to do than not scare the Republicans with glowing eyes because some mutants are Republicans too, the trick is not to become an extremist.