Black Music?
When confronted with David Bowie’s accusations, Mark Goodman claims that he, “was in an odd position, because I couldn’t diss the network” so he copped to MTV’s party line, which was that the AOR format excluded many black artists because they weren’t playing rock. As George Bradt, who worked at MTV at the time, explains, “The people at the top had all come from radio stations. They were old-school, white radio guys with an AOR mind-set, probably because in the world of ‘80s radio, AOR was cool” (Tannenbaum and Marks 139). How does a format focused on rock, a genre based on the tradition of African-American rhythm and blues, exclude black artists? The issue wasn’t so much what rock was but what its alignment with white industry had cost. As Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman note in their book American Popular Music: From Minstrelsy to MP3, minstrel shows originating in the early 19th century, in which a white performer donned blackface “were the first expression of a distinctively American popular culture in which working-class white youth expressed their own sense of marginalization through identification with African American cultural forms” (46). This practice, though quite problematic, has recurred throughout both American and British cultures throughout the 20th century. Bob Stanley, in his book Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!: The Story of Pop Music from Bill Haley to Beyoncé, explains that Elvis’ domination of rock’n’roll in the 1950s was predicated largely on recording covers of songs by black artists. Elvis’s creative foundation was laid by Bill Haley , who jump-started “the hillbilly sound by borrowing heavily from R&B” and the jump blues of Louis Jordan and Big Joe Turner (Stanley 10). Stanley’s suggestion that Elvis “accentuated the rough edges, the danger of R&B, turned it from a nudge-nudge sound for streetwise black folk into something that threatened the social fabric of the USA” is hyperbolic because Elvis’ commitment to the social fabric of America is evidenced in his military service and alignment with Richard Nixon (10). However his focus on Elvis’s influences adequately emphasizes the importance of cultural exchange and appropriation to the pioneers of rock. By the 1970s rock’n’roll, once the soundtrack of free love and the 60s counterculture, had largely sold out to the recording industry in exchange for stadium concerts, finalizing the colonization of rock by white mainstream culture that began with Elvis and Beatlemania. It was an era of excess and experimentation that saw the birth of concept albums and rock operas, with varying results. While most attempts at creating a proper rock opera floundered under their own weight (the dustbin of history is littered with progressive rock albums), the idea of creating a complete album as a work of art was at the heart of rock performance and criticism at the time. The school of rockism, which is essentially the championing of album-oriented rock above other forms of music as art, is an inherently racially coded distinction as post-Jimi Hendrix rock was almost uniformly white. Meanwhile, certain soul artists like Marvin Gaye and Sly Stone were creating concept albums of equal and perhaps even greater importance as those by Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin. In his essay “No Apologies: A Critique of the Rockist v. Poptimist Paradigm”, Robert Loss argues that the term “traditionalism” (emphasis mine) would better describe the phenomenon of “policing the present with the past”. However, using rockism in this context is not just valid but preferable since it most accurately describes the specificity of rock’s intentional distinction from other, predominantly African-American genres in the 70s.
