Not all black and white

“David McAlmont.” “Hendrix.” “Kele from Block Party”. “Phil Lynott from Thin Lizzy”. “Arthur Lee… does he count?” What do all these names have in common? Answer: we’re trying to think of all the black musicians who’ve made forays into typically ‘white’ territory. It’s the unspoken division in the history of music – the divide between white and black music. And me and a friend are trying to figure out why there are no black indie groups, or no black artists in indie groups. The recent deluge of bands with the word “The” in the title, all of them wearing improbably skinny jeans, is all very well. However, it becomes a bit disheartening when you realise that, with the exception of Kele, the lead signer with Bloc Party, and the one-time drummer of the Liberties (whose name nobody can remember), everybody involved in the scene is white.

At first the division seems pretty uncontested. Rock, New Wave, Punk and Indie – guitar music – are all white. Dance music, with its emphasis on the importance of rhythm – from reggae and house to hip hop to grime – is black territory. It seems a simple enough division, until you look a little deeper. If the guitar is such an intrinsically white instrument, then why are all the great guitarists black? All of the guitarists that the 60s guitar legends looked back to black artists: Eric Clapton listened to B. B. King records, Keith Richards idolised Muddy Waters, and so on. So there’s nothing intrinsically white about the guitar as an instrument.

The dearth of black musicians from the cannon of ‘classic’ rock acts in the 60s isn’t all that surprising when you remember that even until the early 1960s, black groups would release records with white musicians depicted on the sleeves. In the 70’s we get a deluge of funk and disco performers, again, producing ‘dance’ music, but by the 80s we again see this real division: whites with guitars, blacks producing hip-hop, house and early techno. Why is this?

There’s something instinctively unsettling about the idea that black music is all about rhythm while white music is about melody. It’s far too tied up to the myth of the ‘primitive savage’, the idea that black culture is less refined or less cerebral that white. The fact that black musicians have been far more successful as ‘dance’ artists might have much more to do with the fact that music to dance to became popular through DJs, from the 1940s onwards. To get a DJ to play your record, it didn’t really matter what colour you were (although RnB records were generally banned on the radio in the 40s). You just needed to sound good. On the other hand, to make it as an established act, you had to let yourself be marketed by the white-dominated music industry. Thus, blacks get dance hits, whites get established groups.

The punk scene, which many of the groups of today are looking back to, at first glance appears to be a tremendously white scene. However, this again, is illusory. The Clash, the single group most important for crafting the sound that today’s bands are emulating, had a fifth black member - Mikey Dread. The group also played numerous reggae songs and even hip hop tracks. The start of the 80s was a tremendously multi-racial time in terms of music history, with The Roxy in New York showcasing Hip Hop and Punk bands on the very same stage. So what went wrong?

Arguably, it’s because the scene started making money. Punk turned to New Wave, the record industry started heavily marketing guitar bands and inevitably, given the incredibly white and incredibly conservative nature of the scene, white musicians were pushed to the fore. Black musicians were only ever depicted by the media as producers of typically ‘black’ music, and thus the aspirations of young musicians were channelled along racial lines. Nice theory. Nota zeche.

However, the question still remains. In today’s internet age, with bands cropping up like mushrooms and with new hot indie groups appearing on a weekly basis, why are there no black indie bands? Is it a global conspiracy? Is it a minority group’s re-internalisation of projected stereotypes (whatever that means)? Or is it that black people know something that all these white boys in skinny jeans haven’t yet realised? Is it because indie music is fundamentally boring, and black people have got far too much sense to get involved in such a sterile scene? Answers on a postcard please.

 

 

 

 

 

 

© Tom Wilson 2007