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**this post was inspired by fire’s wrongheaded attempt to bestow credibility as a singer on Beyonce (over Joss Stone) by arguing that Yonce had honed her craft in “the black Southern church” while Joss had learned how to sing by imitating records by black singers. Forgive me if my arguments are a bit anemic and sketchy because these days i have neither the time nor the energy to really flesh them out**
Rockism is above all things about mythology. And rocksim’s favorite myth is the idea that rock is “rebel music.” That’s what rock was in the beginning after all: a vehicle for white kids to rage against the world of their parents. And of all their parents values, the one the distrusted the most was commercialism. As a result, rock (and rockist thought) has remained obsessed with “authenticity” – the idea that the music you are hearing is not a commercial product but a true, heartfelt expression that may or may not just happen to make the artist a fortune which they will pretend to be casually disdainful of.
This is the reason that such a huge premium is placed on playing your own instruments and writing your own songs (and if you don’t write your own songs, at least make sure that you “adapted” them from the songs of some Depression-era Negro singer, who you obviously have a lot in common with spiritually).
This is the reason that rockers deify Robert Johnson, an obscure backwoods guitar player who was probably heard by a total 17 people during his short life and elevate him above more accomplished and well-known bluesmen like Leroy Carr and WC Handy.
This is why rockers from suburban New Jersey, Minnesota and Orange County, California insist on talking like early 20th century Okie sharecroppers. Because if you are white, the best way to rebel against your society is to align yourself with the lowest levels of African-American life.
Traditionally, black people in America have never shared this obsession with authenticity. Why would they? Everybody could see that they were black… they didn’t need to go out of their way to prove to anyone that they were oppressed! If any guiding philosophy drove black music in America, it was Keeping ahead of Whitey.
Keeping Ahead of Whitey had been a central tenet of black music since the days in the cotton fields when the n!ggers had to sing in coded spirituals to keep massa out of the loop of what was going on in the Underground (Railroad) and it continued up to the bebop era when a new generation of intellectual jazz players started spitting new forms of musical gobbledygook to confound the (white) jazz mainstream.
Keeping Ahead of Whitey culminated in Soul music, which drew its inspiration from the Black Church. If you wanted to Keep Ahead of Whitey, you couldn’t do much better than to look inward to the Church, a place that was so unremittingly “us” and which traditionally held much fascination and fear in the white imagination.
The Church was a place that was at the center of the black community, and its music was fairly unique, rejecting most of the stylings of American commercial music… of course, it wasn’t long before Whitey discovered that once you could scrub the music clean of some of the more unsettling elements of the Church such as the spirit possession and the angry shouting (whites tend to interpret any instance where blacks raise their voices as “angry”… go figger), they had some pretty cool sounds.
As a result, the Church became the new center of authenticity in American music. We learned that black singers were viewed as more “real” if we could believe that they were plucked out of the choir of the Bethel AME in East Hamhock, Alabama and that they were in essence untainted by commercialism. At the same time, white singers found that they were bestowed with instant authenticity and gravitas when they backed their songs with a bunch of fat black gospel singers in robes (this gimmick eventually filtered back to black musicians, as exemplified best by Robert Kelly… but we’ll get back to that later)
Eventually, the idea of black church singing became just another easily replicable “authenticity”-bestowing gimmick that could be reduced to a bunch of overdramatic riffs, melismas and vibratos.
The whole “i grew up singing in the Church” became a part of the standard credibility card in the utility belt of any black soul/R&B singer worth their salt. But i contend that it’s a load of bullshit.
I don’t doubt that these singers actually grew up going to church, or that they might have even sung in church, but the fact is that at this point in time the majority of black singers are more influenced by radio/MTV/BET than any kind of “pure” church tradition. In other words, they learn to sing “black” the same way their authenticity-seeking white peers do.
Let’s take Beyonce. Now, i know that she is a devout Christian and probably “grew up in the church” (whatever the fuck that means nowadays) but i’ve read/watched a grip of biographical material on her and i haven’t seen anything that indicates the Church played any central role in the formation of her musical identity.
As SoWhat so eloquently pointed out before, the girl has been singing all her life, but her training ground was NOT the church. It was talent shows, and the very careful study of performers in talent shows and of the major pop stars of the day. The entire trajectory of Beyonce/Destiny’s Child was from day one based on getting a record deal and becoming pop stars. Just like Joss Stone.
There are very few contemporary artists who sound like “pure” gospel singers to me… the only ones who readily come to mind are Faith, Kelly Price, and maybe Lil Mo (and is it coincidental that while all of them are respected for their vocal prowess, none of them are particularly successful on the commercial front?)
And to be honest, i wonder about the existence of any “pure” church singing tradition at this point in general. Especially since over the past decade or so, the Church has actually been drawing heavily from radio/MTV/BET in order to reach out to the disaffected youth and halt the rapid “graying” of the Black Church.
Okay, i’ve talked enough. Discuss.
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The man who thinks at 50 the same way he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life - Muhammed Ali
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