While reading this, earlier in the piece, I was thinking, what about Prince and Chakakahn and Grace? Where I live, New Wave was all colors. (That’s saying something because I live in a fairly white place, and it was whiter in the early 80s.) Then you got to the part about the critics defining. Fuck the critics. I was there and we (the young listeners) didn’t draw those lines. I’d love to see your list of the top (however many) New Wave albums.
I bought a lot of R&B in the 70s and 80s: Earth, Wind & Fire, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, Smokey Robinson, the Temptations, Prince. And then there were all the disco divas, like Donna Summer et al. Maybe because I lived in NYC in my formative years, crossover music was played more on the radio and so my friends and I were buying records of black artists just as much as we were buying The Cars or the Talking Heads. New Wave, to me, was a softened version of punk and a little more palatable to the ear. I can’t think of any black punk artists either, just like hard core rap is mostly black with a few exceptions, like Eminem.
I will say, though, that in watching a documentary a few years ago on the Bee Gees and their wildly popular resurgence in the late 70s with the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack, Barry Gibb did make the point that black disco artists were not nearly as successful as the Bee Gees were simply because of racism. That I can buy, because disco music originated in the black and gay communities.
Ken Burns's COUNTRY MUSIC documentary made this point that, until the 1950s Black Country Music and White Country Music often existed side by side, with the racial divide happening at large gatekeeper venues like The Grand Ole Opry, which for a long time wouldn't allow Black artists to perform, period.
The motivation for creating genres was economic in nature to begin with. If they didn't exist as ID labels, all music would just exist AS music.
This is where I always got confused. Folks would announce that they liked [genre].
I could never figure what it meant.
I like pieces of music that I like. Some I met and didn't enjoy.
While reading this, earlier in the piece, I was thinking, what about Prince and Chakakahn and Grace? Where I live, New Wave was all colors. (That’s saying something because I live in a fairly white place, and it was whiter in the early 80s.) Then you got to the part about the critics defining. Fuck the critics. I was there and we (the young listeners) didn’t draw those lines. I’d love to see your list of the top (however many) New Wave albums.
I bought a lot of R&B in the 70s and 80s: Earth, Wind & Fire, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, Smokey Robinson, the Temptations, Prince. And then there were all the disco divas, like Donna Summer et al. Maybe because I lived in NYC in my formative years, crossover music was played more on the radio and so my friends and I were buying records of black artists just as much as we were buying The Cars or the Talking Heads. New Wave, to me, was a softened version of punk and a little more palatable to the ear. I can’t think of any black punk artists either, just like hard core rap is mostly black with a few exceptions, like Eminem.
I will say, though, that in watching a documentary a few years ago on the Bee Gees and their wildly popular resurgence in the late 70s with the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack, Barry Gibb did make the point that black disco artists were not nearly as successful as the Bee Gees were simply because of racism. That I can buy, because disco music originated in the black and gay communities.
Ken Burns's COUNTRY MUSIC documentary made this point that, until the 1950s Black Country Music and White Country Music often existed side by side, with the racial divide happening at large gatekeeper venues like The Grand Ole Opry, which for a long time wouldn't allow Black artists to perform, period.