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the only way you can make music that challenges this cultural hegemony
is through lyrics but no one seems to care about them now like you said, but why is is that?
the bit about white ppl falling in love with black music that deconstructs black music;
(swipe)
Mainstream white vernacular and corporate musics appropriate Afro-diasporic musical practices and critical/resistant practices. The strategies that Afro-American musicians developed to critique and subvert classically liberal hegemonies (musical, political, racial) get domesticated by neoliberal aesthetics.
a. For example, there is a tired, often overly simplistic contrast between Western “harmonic” music and Afro-diasporic “repetitive” or “rhythmic” music. Certainly the harmony/repetition contrast has some underlying truth to it (e.g., as a metaphor for general differences in metaphysical and ontological frameworks), but it often gets used in overly schematic and/or reductive ways. However, it is useful to think of neoliberalism as Euro-Western domestication of “repetition” (e.g., in biopolitical administration, statistics, etc.). So it’s not just that Afro-diasporic practices conveniently overlap with neoliberal/biopolitical strategies of organization; rather, one of the advantages of biopolitical neoliberalism is it is a means/medium by which Western hegemony can easily domesticate subversive/resistant Afro-diasporic practices. I think it’s actually really important to think of this as one of the contributing factors to the rise of neoliberalism/biopolitical administration (especially in music).
b. More concretely, looping, cutting, “into the red”—all these elements of hip hop aesthetics that Tricia Rose identifies in Black Noise, stuff you find in dub, techno, house, jungle, etc., get incorporated into neoliberal hegemony. They no longer sound unmusical, they’re ubiquituous features of top-40 radio. See: Brostep. (E.g., this was all stuff Terminator X was doing in the 90s, but then it was still somewhat non-mainstream—PE was not played on Top 40 radio the way Skrillex is. Similarly, this was all going on in Jungle and oher hardcore dance styles in the 90s, but they were absolutely not mainstream in the US, and were still not exactly TOTP material in the UK.)
c. There is also an increased accommodation of black artists in mainstream—use of blacks as “border population” (to use Falguni Sheth’s term) to further other racist-homonationalist projects. Think for example about the increasingly common presentation of African-American male hip hop stars as scions of the globalized neoliberal entrepreneurial class: Flo Rida skydives over the palm island in Dubai (in “Wild Ones”), Ne-Yo’s video for “Let’s Go” traces hetero masculinity in Rio, LA, and Tokyo, Taio Cruz and Flo Rida’s collaboration on “Hangover” is all about transnationalized black masculinities as distinct from Anglo-Asian ones…etc. Certainly black artists subvert these presentations (e.g., with the idea of “entrepreneurial drag”), but they get taken up by mainstream audiences as evidence that neoliberal globalization is not racist because if it were racist, so the argument goes, then black people wouldn’t be allowed to be successful jet-setters. Or, 21st c “xenomania” is presented as different from obviously racist “love & theft” 20th c appropriations of black culture.
http://its-her-factory.blogspot.de/2012/09/neoliberalism-and-contemporary-pop.html
its just easier for white ppl to like, instead of white ppl having to co-opt black music (through mainstream hegemonic culture), black artists are doing it themselves through 'deconstruction' _______________________________________
When discourse of Blackness is not connected to efforts to promote collective black self determinism
it becomes simply another recourse appropriated by the colonizer
http://hardboiledbabesanddarkchocolate.tumblr.co
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