I LOVE MUSIC LOL

I like the post Luka.

But isn't it also a bit of a two way street? Like the rhythm of life is affected by culture too? The rhythm of life wherever you go in the world is more similar now than it's every been before, because of certain processes of globalisation that manifest themselves locally, the decline of manufacturing/manual jobs, rise of precarious labour, gentrification, migration etc. Not to mention even more concrete stuff like the fact that whereever you go in the world the way people walk and talk has been altered by the fact that everyone has a smartphone up in their face all the fucking time.

I mean, obviously this homogenisation takes place at different rates among different social classes/races/etc. The hipster being the prime example of the post-geographical class - you meet the exact same people in Old Street or Williamsburg or Hongdae in Seoul or Aoyama in Tokyo. But then black facebook and instragram memes are the same in both the US and the UK, and black youth pretty much everywhere around the world listen to American hip hop.

There are still local scenes and local phenomena of course. One of the things I really loved about Jackin was how bounded it was by geography, like the 8 or so times I've been up to 02:31 in Birmingham to rave, they've guaranteed played You Want Me by Nick Hannam and Tom Zanetti and the crowd has guaranteed sung every word of it. I've never heard a DJ play it in London ever. But then, going back to Brum more recently, they've also played Tchami - Promises every time, again, the crowd going ham for it and someone telling me it was one of the 02:31 anthems now.. But that's also an anthem in the London deep tech scene, and I've met American EDM fans out in Tokyo who go on about loving 'deep house' like Tchami.

I think one of the reasons that it feels like a lot of music is inauthentic these days is because our social environments feel more inauthentic.
The line between local and authentic and internet/ inauthentic is obviously super messy. But maybe 'local' just needs to exist as a paradigm, something to aspire to, something the best music tends to have - the sense of being routed in people's lived experiences and environment. And maybe if like, something being ripped out of it's local/original environment by the internet feels like a process of de-authentication, is it also possible that global phenomena can gain an authentic meaning when incorporated into a local scene. Is Tchami's Promises any less of an authentic 02:31/ deep tech banger for the fact that it was made by a French EDM producer?

datwun said:

I think one of the reasons that it feels like a lot of music is inauthentic these days is because our social environments feel more inauthentic.

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World is changing - inauthentic is the new authentic. Internet is inseparable from present world, and that is reality, so shouldn't we base our music on the reality? I think it's pointless to battle against internet. This is just transitional phase where things feel inauthentic, but trust me, authenticity will never die.

And besides, isn't it pretty sci-fi when world is networked thru information technology

datwun said:

whereever you go in the world the way people walk and talk has been altered by the fact that everyone has a smartphone up in their face all the fucking time.

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this this a thousand times this

A few things: Music just isn't as important generally speaking to today's (western world) youth as it was 30, 20 years ago, or maybe still 10 years ago - for several reasons but that's just the facts.

Second thing, specifically concerning this (and other) forums - forums and blogs worked well as a) a supplement for the existing music press/websites b) as a good source for information regarding music. From 2010 onwards - when smartphones and 3/4 G networks became ubiquituous - more and more people access the net via smartphones and these devices are not well suited for forums. If things cant be accassed via apps, (especially) young people dont care.

O hand there's the big homogenizer, the almighty (IMO digi-totalitarian) Facebook. So many sites these days offer access via your facebook login, and I suspect a site which doesn't allow this and instead demands you sign up with distinctive login credentials will chase off people simply because of this - meaning a site like that destroys the "Conveninece" factor.

You're absolutely wrong.

luka said:

therefore,a white american, who again, necessrily, inhabits a completely different world to an african-american, rhyming over a beat, will not be making hip-hop,or will at best, be making 'white-rap' or, even worse (becasue of the dishonesty and fraudulence involved) will be making a mimicry, or a forgery.

a white man cannot play the blues

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By the same token, a black man cannot play classical music.

vimothy said:

By the same token, a black man cannot play classical music.

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A lot of classical music are ideas taken from Arabian Musical concepts and just distorted over the years so... If you want to hold Luka's declaration as standard, the collective whites have been doing music "wrong" for millenia and we just presume we've got it right. Not improbable.

For the purposes of Luka's argument, it doesn't matter whether it was originated by Arabs or Europeans.

I think the fundamental difference is that the blues is kind of born out of a unique experience of oppression which the musician is attempting to represent via his music. In this sense the blues is quite self-consciously historicised music. Classical music on the other hand is probably much easier related to such 'universals' as love, passion, pain and thus notionally abstracted from any historical context.
Blues is like the limit case though. I'm not sure you get any other examples as extreme.

vimothy said:

For the purposes of Luka's argument, it doesn't matter whether it was originated by Arabs or Europeans.

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Not true. He was talking about cultures, not races, and in a place such as America where segregation is so vivid, you ultimately cannot produce the same thing as any black American artist in music if you're of another ethnicity. Likewise, classical is possibly just as well an original idea from someone else done wrong.

Now, if you're saying that a black person is immersed in a certain culture he will still somehow be ultimately unable to perform that culture's standards of music? That's debatable. But if he's coming from other cultures with his playing and his thoughts informed by his background, than ultimately it will be different and perhaps not 'right'.

Right and wrong binary shit is corny to utilize though, it's just v. effective in dispatching awful white rappers.

Well I don't think that always holds true. I think thematic content, cultural assumptions are important in determining to what extent someone from a given culture can legitimately 'do' a certain kind of music.
Blues is a powerful example because it is about oppression. I don't know if hip-hop has the same claim because it has expanded its focus from 40 years ago. It's a different beast now. I don't think Riff-Raff is 'wrong' or 'inappropriate' for example. And ultimately race becomes a really weak instrument of judgement because it doesn't tell you in the end what you're looking to find out. Best use your ears.

I don't understand how it can be a bad argument in general, yet still be effective at "dispatching awful white rappers". If you take it seriously, it seems you have to conclude that, "a black man cannot play classical" (or whatever -- "black man" and "classical" could be anything, of course, as long as they don't belong to the same cultural tradition or milieu).

vimothy said:

I don't understand how it can be a bad argument in general, yet still be effective at "dispatching awful white rappers". If you take it seriously, it seems you have to conclude that, "a black man cannot play classical" (or whatever -- "black man" and "classical" could be anything, of course, as long as they don't belong to the same cultural tradition or milieu).

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Because no white man will ever ever have the cultural stigma of being black in America point blank period. He will never, ever know that. I've lived in urban NYC, my best friends as a child mostly went public school in Jamaica, Queens, I've known them for years and I will never ever fully experience that culture despite living alongside them in many a way.

You cannot assimilate downwards, you can only appropriate from such a position. Common sense, right? So if you do not have the subliminal culture that has generated the form embodied within your psyche, you can't do it right. Doing it "right" isn't always the necessary goal, so much good music comes out of someone askewing a genre or style, and therein you find some redemptive value or even something of its own.

But ultimately, if you are not of the culture that sires the artform, you could never hope to perform the art as intended. You would ultimately parody or pastiche, and the best you can hope for is that you move past these to something unique. Like say... Plastician's take on grime for example. Its obviously a #take on grime, but grime recognizes it and adopts it into the whole, saying "Yeah, absolutely" the same way they accepted "Midnight Request Line".

What strikes me as a more recent development is that the people who want to do these takes fail to actually work at trying to allow their work to be accepted by the people thriving within the genres, and instead use their positioning to rent credibility through collaboration. In other words, its the difference between the producer Rynsaman and his Bobby Shmurda refix becoming a popular grime instrumental... and various producers who make grime and rent out Riko for a bit of credibility to their status as producers.

not enough examples in this thread. just massive generalisations.
mick jagger is terrible as a blues singer.
not sure about robert plant either for that matter.

but those are obvious bad offenders.
something about them being british i think is more of a problem than them being white.

also, plastician, and mark one, brought a certain element of 'whiteness' to their beats, similar to how anticon, or eminem did in hip hop. though OTOH, this can also be offputting for rap fans who preferred someone like 3rd bass, who didnt sound all that different to the average black rapper. though this also trades on certain assumed cultural factors and what is considered authentic. most of the time its just about what the listener is comfortable with/expects of an artist of a certain race. tim westwood to thread.

rubberdingyrapids said:

something about them being british i think is more of a problem than them being white.

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Maybe - but are there loads of great white American blues singers? Or any at all? (That's not a rhetorical question btw.)

[Edit: or even any good black British blues singers? I would guess probably not, given the overwhelming importance of reggae rather than blues in British music outside the Stones/Zeppelin etc. blues-rock tradition.]

What about Bowie's take on funk and soul on Young Americans? Is it good "black music" by a white British songwriter/performer, or did he make it enough of his own thing that it can't really be lumped in with the music that inspired it?

Where does Discarda fit into all this