John Eden puts on a knitted red gold and green tam, lights up a massive bob marley spliff and plays his selection of dancehall 7s, making that soundsystem airhorn noise with his mouth as soon as he's safely indoors. Even corpsey can do the whole skibbadum bibbidum spike milligan lyric without tripping over his tongue. If we were to form a band how would we go about bracketing that?It's impossible. Its bone deep.
For whatever reasons, and regardless of its merits, asian music is not part of a shared London culture. So attempts to tack it on (sitar on top of a drum and bass beat, whatever) feel forced, conceptual, artificial
You need cultural isolation to produce culturally 'pure' music otherwise it will always be part of a wider conversation and exchange of influence. These are the contexts we are embedded in. Even if I was to make a music somehow miraculously free of American influence for instance, that very lack would be a kind of comnent on American influence. It's already happened, as corpse says, there's no going back unless there is a war
This does bring up the question of why it is (if, indeed, it is) white people haven't come up with any great popular music forms? Including the white working class. Is it just because the lens through which we view music is inexorably tied up with black music?
of course uk drill owes from chopin and yellow mahic orchestra, etc. but it's monocultural when compared to garage or jungle, in a way that current racially integrated music in the uk isn't.
white innovation throughout the 20th century was based on incorporating black influences into something white. when rock died we no longer had that something white. we've got nothing to fuse with migos or harlem spartan influences like post-punks were able to do with funk, reggae and disco.
I think I see what you're saying. What are you supposed to do? What context is there for you. There isn't one. But would you not prefer it if the context was an inclusive junglist style one rather than something as exclusively white as a Millwall pub on matchday?
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