December 17, 2013
Source: Shutterstock
(Which reminds me: if America is so evil, how the hell did an obviously gay and insane black guy who wore makeup and hair spray, banged on a piano and screamed about loving either teenaged girls or Jesus escape being locked up or lynched, then get to be so rich and famous”and old?)
More importantly, blacks consider rock music “white.” Public Enemy famously rapped, “Elvis was a hero to most/But he never meant shit to me you see/Straight up racist that sucker was/simple and plain.” Petulant, yes, but onto something: White artists reflexively laud the black roots of rock, but as far as many blacks are concerned, the genre’s just hillbilly country & western with a different, often English, accent.
Jimi Hendrix has been dead since 1970. Hard rockers Living Colour were and are considered freakish outliers. Death“a trio of iconoclastic Detroit brothers who performed white-boy music in the early 1970s”are now almost forgotten.
When the Hall inducts black artists these days, they tend to be rappers, and then white fans grumble, “That’s not music, let alone rock.”
The debate about what constitutes “real” rock and roll will, er, never die. Some claim the genre’s first song was composed by one Unbleached Ernest Hogan and recorded in 1899.
After all, it’s under three minutes (in fact, it’s barely two). It’s up-tempo. And the “first six notes of the chorus riff are rhythmically identical to the verse from ‘Satisfaction.’”
Hogan’s song made him rich but gave him a lifetime of misery, which is pretty rock and roll in and of itself.
Yet somehow I doubt Hogan will ever make it to the Hall of Fame, even though he was black. The song’s title? “All Coons Look Alike To Me.”
