I am not sure of how conscious a phenomenon is is, but the current fetish of elite whites for putting all things black front and center along with the prominence of Roxanne Gay, Charles Blow, Leonard Pitts, and so on is that black cultural and political power hit its apogee about ten years ago. As the country gets less white, a) the share of the white population that actually wants to put black concerns firs will shrink dramatically, and b) the rising Latino and especially Asian populations don’t hold black culture or history in anywhere near the same regard as whites, and will pay a lot less attention than they are used to. I think the traditional high/low coalition on the left of whites and blacks is starting to recognize this, and we are seeing a last-ditch effort to try and cement the place blacks have in progressive politics/culture into place, but I would guess in less than a generation there is going to be a lot less interest amongst the public at large in being lectured about the importance of black music, hair, and political concerns.

White musicians like Stephen Foster have also had their music misappropriated from the public domain. Ray Charles grew up in Madison County, FL close to the source of the Sewanee River, and had his first hit with this “autobiographical” song.

That’s the whole problem originally behind cultural appropriation–black musicians having their work covered or adapted by white musicians, who then made more money being more palatable to the white general public. (Eminem was guilty enough to write a whole song about it.) It makes some sense as many indigenous American musical idioms like jazz, blues, and rap came out of black culture, and rock and roll had heavy black influences. From the HBD point of view, it’s what happens when musical talent isn’t accompanied (in a statistical sense) by ‘g’–you get ripped off. (Frequently by, ah, other groups with more talent in business…)

Of course, it metamorphosized into Twitter mobs attacking high school girls who wear Chinese dresses to prom.

At some point all the self-flagellation and cultural cringe from lefty white liberals makes me wonder if the whole thing is some sort of displaced BDSM. “Oh, we are so horrible, here are three books about how horrible we are, please tell us how bad we are…” I think it was Derb who brought up ‘ethnomasochism’. And, of course, kink is popular now, though I kind of wonder about all those self-flagellating (literally) medieval monks.

Much of the best American music came from the confluence of a variety of different European, African and Native styles of music. Native influence is much bigger in Hawaiian music, which is a synthesis of, among other things, Native Hawaiian, Portuguese, and Mainland American music, partly because Native Hawaiian music was so much better than American Indian music, and Native Hawaiians love to play music.

There are very few songs which show much Native American influence. One example is Lead Belly’s Green Corn, written about the Indian Green Corn dance. Like many great American musicians, Lead Belly had quite a bit of Indian blood.

Once again, we see that when it comes to gettin’ them dollars, “race” incontrovertibly and indubitably exists, even if only phenotypically. It’s a mere bigot’s belief when one attempts to apply “race” to “bad” stuff.

The specific contributions of blacks to Western culture and science only stand out because they have been so minute. It is pretty much taken for granted that the vast majority of culture and science has been created by whites. It is so much taken for granted that few people really think about it.

A few years ago there was a big kerfuffle over some white girl who wore a “Chinese” dress to her prom. Some random Chinese-American idiot called her out on her cultural appropriation. No one ever bothered to challenge him as to why he was questioning her “appropriation” using the English language.

Blacks, of course, will justly point out that for most of them their arrival here was involuntary, so questioning their use of English would be a bit unfair. But there are plenty of other cultural and scientific inventions they needn’t feel forced to use, such as pretty much every instrument used to create music, not to mention virtually all of the technology used to record and transmit it.

At some point all the self-flagellation and cultural cringe from lefty white liberals makes me wonder if the whole thing is some sort of displaced BDSM.

It’s perfectly commendable empathy for those less well-off than oneself converted into a suicidal weapon by seekers of power.

There were two sides of the story with cultural appropriation of black music by white musicians.

Yes, the white musicians usually made more money off of it. OTOH, the appropriation gave the black musicians more exposure, and led to greater fame.

For example, Chuck Berry’s music was constantly appropriated by the Beatles. Sometimes it was direct covers, esp. George Harrison doing “Roll Over Beethoven”. Other times the Beatles stole parts of his song, most famously Lennon stealing parts of Berry’s 1956 song “You Can’t Catch Me for the Beatles song “Come Together”

Berry was p*ssed, but he knew the Beatles had made him more popular. Chuck Berry and John Lennon even performed together, which helped spread Berry’s fame.

Eventually Berry sued Lennon for plagiarism. They reached a friendly agreement. In Lennon’s “Rock and Roll” album, Lennon covered three of Chick Berry’s songs, including “You Can’t Catch Me”.

My apologies. I put in the same video twice. Bad Paleo! No treat!

Here is the video of Lennon and Berry together. And that is not a cat wailing in the background,

I once read a statistic that as a result of media over-representation, people generally think that blacks make up 1/3rd of the United States. In reality they are about 13% of the populace. Not trivial, but about the same proportion as, say, Malays in Chinese-dominated Singapore. Afro-American birth rates are below replacement level, just like whites. Also like whites, they are leaning toward the dysgenic, unfortunately. The only racial groups in America that even at replacement level are Hispanics and Pacific Islanders-not above, at. No wonder elites are so fanatical about mass immigration. If it wasn’t for that, good luck keeping the population levels artificially up: and wages artificially down, rents artificially high, competition for education, resources, etc so high, etc, etc.

I think Unz was onto something when he suggested that one of the real motives of mass immigration was to flush black people out of major cities, and if that’s the case, it is succeeding: cities have been getting less white, but they’ve also been getting less black.

Interestingly enough, I think the same thing has happened with sexual minorities. Gays are about 1-2 percent of the populace in the United States. Even if we are generous with the amount of closeted cases or bisexuals who aren’t interested in being part of gay culture and decline to be noted as such, I’m willing to bet the average American now thinks there are way more of them then there actually are. I’m also willing to bet that most don’t realize that “camp” gays are a minority within the minority, which I suspect is a result of the media pandering to straight women who love the idea of male friends who share their interests and bring all the benefits of not being other women without bringing potentially unwelcome sexual or romantic interest. In practice, this tends to deeply annoy non-camp homosexual men. “No, I am *not* interested in going clothes shopping, and I’m definitely not interested in hearing about your boyfriend problems…”

You can’t say Chuck Berry couldn’t write a tune. He wrote it over and over and over.

Buddy Rich was a frequent guest on Douglas’s show. But Mike was careful not to invite him this day. If Rich hated country music for being “simple”, imagine what he would say about Berry. Both men were rank assholes, and it would have been fun to watch them duke it out. (And J&Y break out in “Give Peace a Chance”.)

Douglas seems to have turned Yoko’s mike down. At another performance by this lineup, she comes up front to wail out of the blue, and Berry gives her a glare to inform her he’d like to perform Hiroshima on her.

BTW, for those to whom it matters, Mike was a Mick. Douglas was born Dowd, not Demsky.

Gays are about 1-2 percent of the populace in the United States.

I would have thought at least 50%, but perhaps I have been watching too much TV! In truth I have hardly watched any TV in the last 25 years, but gays are probably vastly overrated in all kinds of entertainment media such as movies and TV, so that creates an illusion that they are all around us.

In music it has been standard procedure for decades for recording artists and performers to dress up in androgenous stylings and fashions designed to shock parents, to the point that even Michael Jackson was regarded as kind of normal apart from the single glove, the amputated nose, and the fact that he started life as an African-American, but converted late in life.

It used to be the case that people were obviously gay, like Liberace, but at least had the decency to deny it for public consumption and for the sake of the children and sued people who said he was gay, right up to the time that he died of AIDS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberace_v_Daily_Mirror

For some inexplicable reason the venerable eternally young bachelor boy pop star Cliff Richard comes to mind with this song, which proved to be highly prophetic as far as he was concerned.

As Cole Porter wrote, in 1934:

In olden days a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking
Now heaven knows, anything
goes

That’s Wesley Yang’s theory as well, but I’m not so sure.

This assumes a farsightedness among black elites that isn’t in evidence elsewhere, and raises an obvious question: why wouldn’t they support immigration restriction to head this off?

The more likely answer is that they don’t spend much time thinking about Asians or Hispanics. https://t.co/HAB4Vy4EgU

— David Pinsen (@dpinsen) August 17, 2019

I recall a similar survey where people were asked what they thought the gay percentage was, again massively overestimated. Something like 25%. A delusion that can only result from the MSM.

It’s a perspective that I’d enjoy seeing explicitly articulated rather than just hinted at.

The flaw in the Current Year Narrative in a nutshell. The emotional appeal is enormously powerful at first pass but crumbles under analysis.