Did Blacks abandon Rock & Roll/Rock music and if so....why do you think that was?? (same for country music)

geechiedan

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“The Masters,” which collects his decades of interviews with rock legends like Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen and Bono — all of them white and male.

In the interview, David Marchese of The Times asked Mr. Wenner, 77, why the book included no women or people of color.

Regarding women, Mr. Wenner said, “Just none of them were as articulate enough on this intellectual level,” and remarked that Joni Mitchell “was not a philosopher of rock ’n’ roll.”

His answer about artists of color was less direct. “Of Black artists — you know, Stevie Wonder, genius, right?” he said. “I suppose when you use a word as broad as ‘masters,’ the fault is using that word. Maybe Marvin Gaye, or Curtis Mayfield? I mean, they just didn’t articulate at that level.”


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What he said about being "articulate" in the music was some bullshit but lets be honest... there really isnt much black support or interest in rock & roll/Rock music and hasn't been since the early days of the genre. This discussion is about how and why that fall off happened and why it persists to this day.


:laptop::laptop::laptop:
 
Abandon?

Crackers changed the rules and took it over once black folks did the ground work making the art form successful.
blacks didnt abandoned it.. The whites stole it like they stole everything else..
I agree that cacs in the music industry saw good thing and moved in but that doesnt change that black audiences migrated away from supporting the few black acts in the genre...again lets be honest..Jimi Hendrix main fanbase was cacs not black...in fact he was often saddened by the lack of black support and he's not the only one.


In Black, White and Living Colour : Guitarist Reid and his band want to break the color barrier wide open

BY DENNIS HUNT
JAN. 22, 1989 12 AM PT

Rock has always been a haven for white musicians. Most blacks, figuring it’s too tough to break into that exclusive club, avoid it. But Reid, 30, has been tenaciously looking for a break in rock since the end of the last decade. He even helped form the Black Rock Coalition, a New York organization that has been chipping away at the iron-clad stereotype of the white rock musician.

But it looks like Reid, with his band Living Colour, finally has his breakthrough album--Epic Records’ “Vivid,” the best black-rock effort since Prince’s “Purple Rain” in 1984.

It’s not what you would call an overnight success. “Vivid” has been struggling to find an audience since April. Critical acclaim has helped keep it alive. So has the attention-getting Mick Jagger connection--he produced the cuts “Glamour Boys” and the stinging “Which Way to America?” So has Reid’s ferocious fight--waged in interviews in the nation’s magazines and newspapers--against racism in rock.


Rooted in Black Music

“I’ve been on my soapbox,” Reid said with a chuckle. “I’ve been trying to raise people’s consciousness. I want them to find a new way to think about rock musicians. It doesn’t have to be some blue-eyed guy with long, blond hair playing it. It can be somebody who looks like me.”

One of Reid’s main points is the paradox of rock being considered white music. Rock music, of course, has black roots--mainly blues but some soul. “I think a lot of kids don’t realize this,” Reid said. “If they did, they might think a black rock musician isn’t so surprising.”

Living Colour also features singer Corey Glover, bassist Muzz Skillings and drummer William Calhoun. By the end of last year, the band’s “Vivid” album had sold about 375,000.

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Buoyed by the single, “Cult of Personality,” it’s lately been bounding up the pop chart, up to No. 52 this week. Not an impressive chart position for the average album--but a veritable triumph for a black rock album by an unknown band.

No amount of publicity would matter if the album weren’t any good. But this one really is outstanding. Apparently as more people hear it, the album is succeeding on merit.

Glover, basically an R&B; belter, can crank up his voice and growl and screech with the best rock singers. Reid, who is considered by many to be the best black guitarist since Jimi Hendrix, fuels the band’s music with his furious, explosive runs that have the buzz-saw textures of the best rock-guitar lines.

Living Colour’s music isn’t straight rock. It’s colorfully fused with funk and metal and spiced with strains of avant-garde jazz. Some of the songs, mostly written by Reid, are angry (“Funny Vibe” features the rap group Public Enemy).

There’s even savage social commentary (“Open Letter to a Landlord”). But the band wisely sidesteps esoterica. All the songs are neatly structured around appealing pop hooks. This is very much commercial rock.

Radio has been the root of Living Colour’s problem. For a long time, album rock radio wasn’t interested. Other black rockers, like the highly publicized Bus Boys, also were largely ignored by radio. In the history of rock, only a handful of musicians--notably Hendrix and Sly Stone in the ‘60s and George Clinton with his ‘70s P-Funk band--have hurdled rock’s color barrier.

In this decade, the success of Prince’s albums and Michael Jackson’s rock singles--”Beat it” and “State of Shock” (a duet with Mick Jagger)--has neither opened up radio to black rockers nor inspired the formation of waves of black rock groups.

But radio isn’t the only problem faced by black rockers. Record companies, knowing how hard it is to get records by such artists played on radio, usually don’t sign them.

Being a black band and a new band is a double whammy, Reid said: “It’s tough for any new band to get air play. If we were a new, white rock band we’d probably have trouble getting our record on the air. But being black makes it much tougher. Radio isn’t inclined to play black rock bands and record companies aren’t inclined to sign them.”

Born to West Indian parents in London but raised in Brooklyn, Reid was kicking around New York for years, bouncing from band to band--notably hard-edged jazz-rock experimenters the Decoding Society, the Contortions and Defunkt--before forming Living Colour in 1986.

After Reid played on Mick Jagger’s “Primitive Cool” album, Jagger, enthused about Living Colour, produced two demonstration cuts which were instrumental in convincing Epic to sign the band.

“But getting a deal wasn’t an automatic thing, even with Mick Jagger’s name as producer on those tracks,” Reid said. “It helped that we’re a good band. But we had to be real good--better than a white rock band has to be--to convince them to gamble on us.”

Reid became a guitarist by default. He wanted to play flute but didn’t have access to one. But, at 15, a cousin gave him a guitar instead. “Having an instrument, any instrument, made me happy then. That old guitar was hard for me to learn to play. It had heavy strings and I had weak hands at the time. I even stopped playing for a while but I picked it up again. I was determined it wouldn’t defeat me.”

Later Reid improved his skills by studying with two jazz guitarists but still gravitated toward rock. “I was influenced by people like Carlos Santana,” he said. “I realized you could play rock and not be white, and bring your own ethnic feeling to the music. I grew up listening to Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix. They were inspirations.

“I had this vision of playing the powerful, rock-oriented music, of being this strong, solid musician who could play whatever he wanted--even this kind of music that black musicians hardly ever played. I knew what I wanted and I went after it.”

Playing guitar, Reid said, isn’t just an artistic endeavor or a way to make a living. It’s also an outlet for his rage:

“If you’re black you have some rage in you. It may be buried deep in some people but it’s there. Playing music has helped me deal with my anger at the position of blacks in this country and the position of black rock musicians in the music business.

“I don’t feel violent and I don’t want to kill anybody or hurt anybody. But I’ve just been so frustrated. I don’t lash out. I don’t get crazy thinking about the problems of blacks in this country. I just play the guitar. I get a lot of it out that way.”

 
The same reason that we stopped break dancing. Once the Hispanics and white folks started breaking it became corny.​
 
The same reason that we stopped break dancing. Once the Hispanics and white folks started breaking it became corny.​
I don't agree with this. When breaking popped off everyone was into it. Breakin declined because when it hit nationwide NYC dudes were like "Ah yall late, this is old."
 
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By 1963, there weren't that many people of any race doing the type of rock and roll that was being produced in the mid 1950s. Before the 1950s were over, Elvis had gone to the army and then to Hollywood. Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis were justifiably ostracized for their diddling with teenage girls. Little Richard left rock and roll for the church. Buddy Holly went pop, and then died. Rock and roll was pushed out of the mainstream by every genre and industry power, including the CMA and ASCAP. DJs, like Alan Freed, who touted rhythm and blues in the first half of the 1950s, were now out of jobs because of the payola scandal. In their place, Dick Clark's American Bandstand pushed pop music (not rock and roll). And so, the marketplace adapted, and shifted away from "rock and roll."

Motown was a huge reason why Black music shifted away from rhythm & blues (and never really fell completely into rock and roll). Barry Gordy met with Leiber and Stoller to figure out how to make pop music and market to more white folks (the biggest market in the industry) to expand their sales beyond the small market of Black consumers. Taking notes from Brill Building songwriters who had been turning out hits using a mixture of various styles, and Black female singers on the vocals, Motown focused on pop-infused productions. Stax followed, shifting their production style from rhythm and blues to "soul", while King Records fell behind, (albeit with James Brown pushing rhythm and blues as far as it could go into the mid-1960s). All three of those labels were doing well by the time The Beatles arrived.

When The Beatles and the rest of the guitar-led bands flooded 1964 and beyond, there was a clear division already there, and it became deeper as the 1960s went forward because there was success on both ends, for everybody...except the old guard of Jewish and white songwriters from the 1940s and '50s, whose careers were all but over after pop music moved away from Broadway and Hollywood, and towards the music derived from the folk branches (i.e. country and blues).


 
You ask a very good question and perhaps it might have something to do with how the music was marketed?

I guess the same question could apply to baseball, which was once very popular among black fans during the same time that Rock and Roll was.



The Moondog Coronation Ball was a concert held at the Cleveland Arena in Cleveland, Ohio, on March 21, 1952. It is generally accepted as the first major rock and roll concert.
 
Chuck berry started the rock n roll shit but everybody thinks elvis pressley was some kind of rock n roll god when he stole moves from chuck had people thinking it was his original moves.
 
Chuck berry started the rock n roll shit but everybody thinks elvis pressley was some kind of rock n roll god when he stole moves from chuck had people thinking it was his original moves.
Black people couldn't catch a break from these leeches.

 
It's not "abandoning".. black people just never really fucked with rock and roll like white people did.
 
Chuck berry started the rock n roll shit but everybody thinks elvis pressley was some kind of rock n roll god when he stole moves from chuck had people thinking it was his original moves.
Actually, I think Little Richard pre-dated and was more popular than Chuck Berry by a couple of years. If anything, he is the one to be credited with the "creation" of Rock & Roll.

And Elvis himself acknowledged that he didn't create the Rock & Roll. He admitted that he "borrowed" from the sound and style of Black performers. Elvis also acknowledged that Rock & Roll is a combination of gospel, r&b, folk and other music. This explains Elvis' success. He was a White man who could sing, dance and sound like a Black man which drove White kids (White girls in particular) crazy. :dunno:

Lastly, Black people didn't abandon Rock & Roll. You can't abandon something that was actually stolen from you... :smh:
 
It's not "abandoning".. black people just never really fucked with rock and roll like white people did.
Not true.
Black people have always loved Rock & Roll.
Why?
- Because they created it. :yes:

But they've been limited/restricted in their appreciation and access for the genre by the music industry itself.
- The music industry stole Rock & Roll from Blacks and purposely marketed it almost exclusively towards White people.
- Music stations further divided the market when they began marketing their music selections along specific sociopolitical & racial demographics by "focusing" on airing select genres: Rock, Soul, Country, Gospel, etc...
- Black people then, more tightly held on to and embraced their other music genres they also created: R&B, Soul, Gospel, HipHop and Rap.
- Blacks (as a collective) have had to more steadfastly safeguard, gatekeep and protect those genres from future White "influencers" by limiting or outright rejecting White inclusion/acceptance. (Teena Marie, Vanilla Ice, Eminem, Michael Bolton, Kid Rock etc...)

So it's not that Black people aren't into Rock & Roll. It's just that historically they've been locked out of their love and appreciation for the music genre that they created...:dunno:
 
We didn't abandon "Funk n Soul"(rock n roll)!!! We just stepped away for an minute and concentrated on Heavy Soul(Isley Bro, EWF, WAR, GEORGE CLINTON, CAMEO and so on) and Hip Hop!!!
 
You expect white supremacy, but not from your own people": Living Colour claim they've been shunned by black entertainment outlets for playing "white people" music


The New York band posted their statement on Instagram following online discourse generated in the aftermath of a recent interview which Lenny Kravitz gave to Esquire magazine, during which the musician suggested that he had been deliberately overlooked at awards shows staged by Black entertainment outlets. In the interview, Kravitz stated, "To this day, I have not been invited to a BET thing or a Source Awards thing. And it’s like, here is a Black artist who has reintroduced many Black art forms, who has broken down barriers—just like those that came before me broke down. That is positive. And they don’t have anything to say about it?"


Living Colour vocalist Corey Glover references Kravitz's comments at the beginning of his own post, which begins, "It’s come to my attention that people responded to Lenny Kravitz’s statement, that black organizations in the entertainment industry never really sought him out. Retorting that they did make effort to contact him but his “people“ said that Mr. Kravitz had no interest. That is false. Whether his people made that statement, I cannot say. Living Colour throughout has made a conscious effort to make ourselves available to places like BET, the Source etc. Mind you this was happening simultaneously to us in the rock idiom."

Glover's statement continues, "Their response to us usually was that we did not fit in their format. Ironic, that was the same response we got from the Rock n roll / white entertainment organizations."

"Celebrating diversity in the entertainment field doesn’t start with the blues and ends with hip-hop. There have been expressions in between. George Clinton Parliament/Funkadelic, Fishbone, Tracy Chapman, Meshell Ndegeocello; even though there has been glancing acceptance of someone like Jimi Hendrix, rocks influence on the diaspora, has very rarely acknowledged.

"Lenny was right," says Glover. "None of us has been awarded let alone acknowledged for our achievements. Living Colour in the past has worked with such historical luminaries as Little Richard and Mick Jagger. We’ve worked with a hip-hop royalty from Queen Latifah, Doug E Fresh, Chuck D & Flava Flav to Run DMC. And yet there’s barely a mention of rocks contribution to what is modern black music, let alone in rock and roll circles.

"It’s been our experience that most people of color have no idea how deep and far reaching the influence of Black people in the modern-day rock ‘n’ roll there are, let alone it’s impact on R&B and hip hop. What we hear is “that’s white people stuff” when in fact, it is not!"

Glover rounds off his statement by writing, "It’s hard enough to live in places where you expect white supremacy, but not from your own people."

Lenny Kravitz has also issued a statement, clarifying that his comments in the Esquire article were not an attack upon 'Black media' or the 'Black community'.

"It is important to me to set the record straight on recent media reports based on an interview I did," Kravitz says. "My Black musical heritage means a lot to me, and I owe my success to my supporters who have taken this journey with me over the span of my career.

"The comment I made was not about ‘Black media’ or the ‘Black community.’ I was specifically referring to Black award shows in particular.

"Rock and Roll is the music we were instrumental in creating and is a part of our history,” he adds. "We must retain our heritage and celebrate that together."


:popcorn: :popcorn: :popcorn:
 
If you wanna be real honest black folks ain't listening to jazz and blues either....for the last damn near 50 years all black people have consumed and supported in any real way has been pop, funk, hip hop, r&b and gospel.

Things that involve heavy instrumentation or is guitar/piano heavy black youth migrated away from decades ago.

The question is was that a natural move or were we pushed/programmed away from it.


anyone care to take a crack at it???
:popcorn: :popcorn: :popcorn: :popcorn:


:laptop::laptop::laptop:
 
No, not at all.

It was never marketed as ours, so, we wouldn’t know what we were abandoning.

I know music companies ain’t sign black bands.

The documentary Electric Purgatory is an excellent documentary that may provide a handful of answers to this question.
 
rock n roll is watered-down R&B. country is watered-down Blues.

It's the same old story, white people steal Black inventions, water them down for white consumption and make a mint.

The Beatles - often referred to as the greatest rock n roll band ever (to my mind they're Pop and always will be) are watered-down Motown. Certainly, damn near all of Paul's bass lines are JJ ripoffs. John's chords are stolen from Cropper at Stax. Not to diminish the Beatles accomplishments. They did some really great stuff but they are overrated and to my point, just watered-down R&B.
 
rock n roll is watered-down R&B. country is watered-down Blues.

It's the same old story, white people steal Black inventions, water them down for white consumption and make a mint.

The Beatles - often referred to as the greatest rock n roll band ever (to my mind they're Pop and always will be) are watered-down Motown. Certainly, damn near all of Paul's bass lines are JJ ripoffs. John's chords are stolen from Cropper at Stax. Not to diminish the Beatles accomplishments. They did some really great stuff but they are overrated and to my point, just watered-down R&B.
Rock n rock.
they demonized it when blacks did it. Stole it. Then made music talking about the devil with it.
Helluva film flam.
 
I don't agree with this. When breaking popped off everyone was into it. Breakin declined because when it hit nationwide NYC dudes were like "Ah yall late, this is old."

That vid you posted is literally what I meant about other people making it corny… The movie Breakin’ even helped make it corny by having that white bitch.
And Exhibit A:
 
Rock n rock.
they demonized it when blacks did it. Stole it. Then made music talking about the devil with it.
Helluva film flam.

whites couldn't really steal the Blues so they "invented" country. That's the best they could do. They stole Jazz and watered it down into Big Band so Black musicians created Bebop solely because they wanted a genre impossible for whites to play or steal. They succeeded.

Chuck Berry and Little Richard put 12 bar Blues over a speeded-up rhythm and invented Rock n Roll but whitey couldn't touch their virtuosity so they called it Race Music, stole it and simplified it so they could play it and called it rock n roll.

But here's the thing - since whitey controlled ALL the publishing and distribution, not to mention the radio stations, they conditioned the minds/ears of young whites that rock n roll was "the thing."
Many whites wanted to hear "the real thing" so you had pirate radio stations playing real R&B. But gradually over time the notion of rock n roll being white america's music won out.

Also remember that the music industry has traditionally been a place for tax dodges, slush funds, money-laundering, and payoffs. Meaning the big boys could care less about who's doing what. They just want the machine to keep turning.
 
whites couldn't really steal the Blues so they "invented" country. That's the best they could do. They stole Jazz and watered it down into Big Band so Black musicians created Bebop solely because they wanted a genre impossible for whites to play or steal. They succeeded.

Chuck Berry and Little Richard put 12 bar Blues over a speeded-up rhythm and invented Rock n Roll but whitey couldn't touch their virtuosity so they called it Race Music, stole it and simplified it so they could play it and called it rock n roll.

But here's the thing - since whitey controlled ALL the publishing and distribution, not to mention the radio stations, they conditioned the minds/ears of young whites that rock n roll was "the thing."
Many whites wanted to hear "the real thing" so you had pirate radio stations playing real R&B. But gradually over time the notion of rock n roll being white america's music won out.

Also remember that the music industry has traditionally been a place for tax dodges, slush funds, money-laundering, and payoffs. Meaning the big boys could care less about who's doing what. They just want the machine to keep turning.
I’ve heard some blues songs that doing exactly how country music sound. They didn’t invent nothing
 
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