Popular Music Since The 1950s As The Exploitation Of Black Music By Essay

Popular Music Since The 1950s As The Exploitation Of Black Music By White Artists And Corporations - Essay Example A number of scholars propose the idea that African-American culture and music were effective expression forms and social inclusion means. Although they originate from the folk music of the African-American slaves, â€Å"the root cause of transnational black identity† (Gilroy The Black Atlantic 1992, p.60), it served as an effective instrument for cultural and social inclusion throughout the 20th century. The introduction of blues, jazz and other black music genres provided blacks a strong impact over American culture and a distinguishing place in a society that was fundamentally closed to black people well into the 20th century (Chiriguayo 2002), (Dwight 1995). In the study The Spirituals and the Blues the African-American scholar James H. Cone (1991, p. 130) argued that â€Å"whatever form black music takes, it is always an expression of black life in America and what the people must do to survive with a measure of dignity in a society which seems bent on destroying their ri ght to be human beings†. The book Blues People is the first real try to place major black music genres as blues and jazz within the setting of Afro-American social history, it illuminates the impact of blacks on American history and culture. Terry Jones (2005) asserts that the blues is a musical opera about life and times of Black America. The blues is the story of Black America in worldly musical form. However, Harrison (1997, p. 18) insisted that â€Å"blues was always a multi-racial music.... The Wikipedia encyclopedia, defines that the term exploitation may carry two distinct meanings: (1) the act of utilizing something for any purpose. In this case, exploit is a synonym for use; (2) the act of utilizing something in an unjust or cruel manner for one's own advantage. Most often, the word exploitation is used to refer to economic exploitation - the act of using another person's labor without offering them an adequate compensation. The Marxist theory is primarily concerned with the exploitation of a whole segment or class of society by another. From this point of view the black music is exploited by whites. Article of Phil Rubio 'Crossover Dreams' (1993) provides a curious vision of the confrontation between black art forms and white performers. In many cases white musicians are motivated by envy or admiration for the emulated black performers. And we see the utilization of African-American culture by whites to find the spirit and humanity, they feel they've lost. It is known that the end of a constant source of interchange and friction should not be seen as the start as 'whites have been playing black music for decades' (Davis 1995, p.84). We are not to locate the first white blues performer. The phenomenon of numerous white musicians taking up the black music is a fairly modern spectacle, beginning in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. One of the first objections to this phenomenon was made by Charles Radcliffe in the UK publication Anarchy (1965). Of course, many people did not consider singing in a black vocal style to be part of blues performance, moreover many feel that whites who have uneasy destiny, for example Hank Williams, sing in their own suffering manner, a distinctively non-black style. We can agree that