Music by Black people > music by white people? If yes, why?
The obvious answer that comes up is that it's a cultural thing- it's about how you were raised, what kind of people you grew up with, etc etc. But what I want to do is delve deeper into what is the american cultural phenomenon of black art culture interacting with white art culture. While it's easy to say oh, it's just randomness in genetics and such, I think that maybe there's some concrete factors that have a clear effect on cultures' expression of emotions and life experience. I think that the following factors have a large and somewhat clear effect on a culture's level of spirituality in their art. You know what I mean by level of spirituality- some music really touches the soul, makes us feel warm, makes us want to dance, makes us want to express some love, and some just really don't. Before I try to get factors, what are the different flavors of spirituality in art? To name a few that come up in my mind- nostalgia, platonic love, romantic love, sexual love, deep empathy with suffering, and many others. I think that the more time spent suffering with other people, the more a culture's music and art revolves more around alleviating the suffering of others. I've seen many artists on youtube say that they make the best art when they're depressed or in a really bad mental state, I've also heard that certain mental disorders make people really good artists, and I'm trying to fit this info in with my theory about suffering and a culture's art. So did Jes Grew happen because black people have had to process more suffering than the white people? Furthermore, what really is suffering, and how do we quantify it? There are so many flavors of suffering- heartbreak, grief, physical pain, loneliness, sickness, and so many others. But even then, there are so many sub flavors of those pains!
In conclusion, I think that art made by black people in America in the last few centuries tends to deal with love and suffering more than white people's music in the last few centuries because they had to deal with more pain and suffering and were forced to deal with the pain and suffering with other people in close proximity due to slavery. Essentially, I think the pain and suffering of slavery on black people caused a different flavor of art and religion to emerge which lots of people deeply connect with, because I think as humans we bond with others much easier over shared negative experiences rather than positive ones. I think the brain prioritizes pain because you can always be happier, but you can't be more dead than dead. Thanks for reading my blog. I hope there's some salvageable interesting ideas!
It seems like you are reflecting something of what Reed describes as the essence of Jes Grew in the novel, when he looks "forward" to the rest of the twentieth century after Jes Grew "dies out" in the 1920s: Reed refers to an indefinable "x-factor" that unites diverse forms of Black music, the element of Jes Grew that is evident in artists like Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Otis Redding (the three he names specifically). In the 1960s and 1970s, the word "soul" was used to identify this "x-factor" that distinguishes Black music from mainstream ("white") popular music. We can debate whether it makes sense, in the postmodern era and beyond, to speak about some metaphysical "essence" that links artists as diverse as Billie Holliday and Kendrick Lamar, but the fact is that Black artists have typically tended to view their own cultural production in terms of a distinctively "Black" tradition in American music going back to the spirituals and work songs during the slavery era, and hip-hop in particular actively celebrates and name-checks this long line of cultural heritage, explicitly placing the innovations of rap and hip-hop (which literally repurpose and revitalize music of the past via sampling) within this long tradition.
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