Music blog, by Robert Neville

The two assigned readings from week five that I would like to talk about is the article from slate.com’s Jack Hamilton titled, ”How Rock and Roll Became White,” and video story from PBS News Hour “How the U.S. became the hip-hop nation.” What I find most compelling about Hamilton’s article is that he takes the time to refute each popular argument about cultural appropriation of rock and roll music. There are a ton of ways to argue why genres in music have become so racialized. My theory as a student journalist is that white people had more access to media than blacks, such as radio play and tv time, and thus managed to control the narrative of rock and roll history. “Even in the late 1960s, the exceptional nature of Hendrix’s race confirmed a view of rock music that was quickly rendering blackness definitively other, so much so that at the time of his death, the idea of a black man playing electric lead guitar was literally remarkable—“alien”—in a way that would have been inconceiv...

“When we get here we’re like ‘there’s no community,’ but what we realized was that it’s upon us to make the community.” (Maylei Blackwell, WWR Oral History Archive ) I chose this quote from Blackwell because I feel it encompasses a theme of feminine self-empowerment which connects back to our readings from Tuesday. This week we have been focused on highlighting the forgotten histories of women in rock. Thursday’s assigned material focused on the collaborative work that female scholars and musicians have put together to make a collective history of women in rock. Mahon’s essay on “Big Mama” Thornton provides us with one of the earliest examples of feminine self-empowerment when she talks about the relationship between Thornton and rock icon Janis Joplin. Unlike Elvis Presley, who made millions off of Thornton’s song “Hound Dog” but made no attempt to attribute or play alongside Thornton, Joplin paid tribute to Thornton by having them perform together in concerts. It is unclear whether...