During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.
Well Yeah, have you seen the Bob Marley Biopic? Whitewashing is precisely why his music is seen as stoner-feel-good-vibes and not the fiery protest music it was. He’s closer to the Black Panthers then he ever was to Cheech and Chong. But that’s not the reality they want you to accept.
Whitewashing is precisely why his music is seen as stoner-feel-good-vibes and not the fiery protest music it was.
Well, I’d say that has more to do with music sensibility. His music used slow tempo, heavy and steady beats, was bass-driven, and melodic vocals. That isn’t angry music for a western audience. Going back centuries, angry western music is fast paced, unsteady rhythms, big changes in volume, discordant sounds and lots of high frequencies.
It’s not whitewashing. It would be very hard to make an angry protest song set to a waltz beat too. The medium is the message, and the medium of steady droning beats is calmness not anger.
That sure sounds convincing for made up nonsense based on your preconceived feelings about nothing substantive at all. Fortunately, I actually have a Bachelors (hons) in Music. A sizeable amount of which involved sitting through 4 years of lectures on Music and Western Civilization, covering roughly 4000 years of Western Musical History. So, I can speak fairly competently with a fair amount of detail about this. A Waltz is dance, when I say that, I mean it belongs to the genre of “dance music.” As in, that was what it’s function was originally. As a dance when you think of a waltz you’re probably thinking of ballroom dancing, which would be the Viennese Waltz. Which is where people without a formal education in music history think the Western Art Music, or WAM (see “High Art”, “Aristocratic”, “Snob”, “Wealthy Elite”) hegemony of White, Germanic, Male cultural dominance begins. This is in no small part because traditional Western Musical Canon has been heavily and selectively codified to be such. East of Germany and Britain gets the worst shake in The Classical Period, in my personal opinion. Opera is huge and obviously, Italy is massively important to the tradition. However, Opera is taught as it’s own separate thing, because the tradition of Opera spans Pre-Medieval Music, through The Enlightenment, Classical Period, Romanticism, Modernism, Post-Modernism and beyond. It is both “Music” and “Theatre” but it is not “Musical Theatre.” Musical Theatre is a true American art-form, emerging from Vaudeville. (4000 years is a long fuckin’ time and I never get to flex on people like this, anyway, back on track). In terms of WAM a layperson’s idea of a Waltz is, conceptually, Chamber Music. It’s all hoity toity ball gowns and bowties and German Tradition, German Tradition, German Tradition. It goes to show you how successful the homogenisation (exclusion of the history and influence of Mediterranean, Balkan, Celtic and Briton music. Despite their obvious connections) of European musical history actually was. Probably one of the most visible cliche’s people get exposed to in media is the “grand ballroom meme.” Think protagonist opening up the Ballroom Doors during a waltz and couples dance in perfect circular unison, maybe they all suddenly stop for comedic effect. Or, camped above the festivities, maybe there’s a sweeping overhead shot showing the Dancing in Unison and it’s always Swan Lake, or The Nutcracker, which were never danced to at a ball like that, ever because they are Ballets performed by Orchestras and NOT chamber music by a fucking viennese String ensembel.
Half of the instruments in those pieces didn’t fucking exist at the time. That’s because movie and film producers know fuck all about musical history which is why people have these misconceptions. In actuality The Waltz, or as it is known in and throughout Europe for many hundreds of years prior “Volte” (lots of variation of spelling), or “slide dance” is a type of dance in 3/4 time with emphasis on certain beats accentuated, or shortened. (N.B. You acttually confuse Beat, Time Signature, Rhythm and Tempo in your comment. By referring to aspects of each of them incorrectly, but this is a history lesson. Not a lesson on music fundamentals). There are tonnes of examples of waltzes which are sinister, macabre or that conjure feelings of anger and despair in the Tradition of Western Art Music. Jean Sibelius’ Waltz Triste, Saint-Saens Danse Macabre. Fuck, if you Google “Angry Waltz”, you get some dude’s school composition project call “Angry Waltz” which is actually not a bad example. If you want to step out of Art Music for a look into folk Music, Norwegian Folk Music has 3/4 dances, waltzes, called Springar which are dances with region specific stress patterns. I know you’ve never listened to someone perform using a Hardingfele, but Springar are not slow and folk dancing can be very fast paced and are inherently a-harmonic at times. Very harsh to listen to if you’ve never been immersed in that musical space. We can even talk about The Waltz as protest music. Look no further than Shostakovich, basically everything he wrote under Stalinism put his life in mortal danger. He would outright flout what Stalin imposed on Composers and the wider Soviet Artistic community. Sometimes he would comply maliciously, just to walk the thin line with Stalin’s ego. If not for his massive cultural import and popularity (he was a genius) he would have been murdered and he knew this. Being an authoritarian government, any art Stalin did not like was grounds for immediate execution of them and their families, or forced labour, or banishment and starvation. Waltz No. 2 from Suite for Jazz Orchestra 2, I know you will know and I want to impress upon you. That the sheer, ungodly weight, of the fear Dmitri Shostakovich lived with everyday under Stalin was absolutely dwarfed by the planetary mass of the balls it took to write music like this under Stalinism. This is slow, nuanced and deeply defiant, most importantly it was protest music under the guise of Nationalism.
Expanding on this, I think you have no fucking concept of what protest music is. Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row is Protest Music, Jimmy Hendrix covering The Star Spangled Banner is protest music. For fuck’s sake my guy Listen to the WORDS of what is being said in these songs. Have you heard For What it’s Worth by Buffalo Springfield lately? It sounds like it was written about America Yesterday. Literally, listen to that song in the context of the Trump regime and Luigi Mangione. I don’t understand why Buffalo Springfield isn’t being blasted EVERYWHERE in the USA right now. Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi is protest music, Green Day’s American Idiot is Protest Music.
His music used slow tempo, heavy and steady beats, was bass-driven, and melodic vocals.
Swap vocal for strings and you’ve just described Prokofiev’s Dance of the Knights to a tee. Does that Sound Angry and Western enough to meet your standard of protest music? It isn’t protest music.
It’s not whitewashing.
It is Whitewashing, it is absolutely egregious whitewashing. Bob Marley was an extremely important political figure, Legend and the Bob Marley Biopic are designed to appeal to white audiences. This is taken from the wikipedia page:
"Despite its generally positive reception, Legend has been criticized for being a deliberately inoffensive selection of Marley’s less political music, shorn of any radicalism that might damage sales.[25] In 2014 in the Phoenix New Times, David Accomazzo wrote “Dave Robinson, who constructed the tracklist for Legend, [said that] the tracklist for Legend deliberately was designed to appeal to white audiences. Island Records had viewed Marley as a political revolutionary, and Robinson saw this perspective as damaging to Marley’s bottom line. So he constructed a greatest-hits album that showed just one face of the Marley prism, the side he deemed most sellable to the suburbs. […] If you’re looking for mass-market appeal to secular-progressive America, you don’t include songs that invoke collective guilt over the slave trade, nor do you address the inconvenient truth that the bucolic Jamaican lifestyle of reggae, sandy beaches, and marijuana embraced by millions of college freshmen, exists only because of the brutal slave trade. […] the songs on Legend offer just a brief glimpse into his music. The definitive album of the most important reggae singer of all time is a hodgepodge collection of love songs, feel-good sentiment, and mere hints of the fiery activist whose politics drew bullets in the '70s.”[26] Vivien Goldman wrote in 2015, “when he does get played on the radio now, it’s the mellow songs, not the angry songs, that get heard – the ones that have been compiled on albums such as Legend.”
The Medium is The Message
YOU are full of crap
Going back centuries, angry western music is fast paced, unsteady rhythms, big changes in volume, discordant sounds and lots of high frequencies.
You have no fucking idea what you’re saying, you’re just stating what you think might be true based on how you feel and you just described The Build up and Drop to Bangarang by Skrillex.
Well, I’d say that has more to do with music sensibility. His music used slow tempo, heavy and steady beats, was bass-driven, and melodic vocals.
Translation: “I have never heard, or engaged with, any of Bob Marley, The Wailers, or Peter Tosh’s music, outside of The Legend track list verbatim and I did not understand the lyrics of those I did hear.”
That isn’t angry music for a western audience.
Reggae IS Western Music, resulting from the SLAVE TRADE you absolute TIT! Have you never listened to reggae?
It’d be nice if someone gets something out of reading this, I really enjoyed thinking about music academically for a while and I hope no one ever listens to this person as an authority about any aspect of musical history, the slave trade, musical theory ever again.
TL;DR In short literally, nothing you said was correct and it was so egregiously, offensively wrong, that I was inspired to write this. As a dude with an education and 4ft long dreadlocks, up yours.
Well, I actually quite enjoy discussing Musicology in detail. I would be remit in pretending it isn’t satisfying to dress you down like that. True, most academics usually get offended when someone who’s never opened a book about a subject, make wildly inaccurate statements about their field of study and tell them their wrong. It’s more about about making sure anyone who stumbles upon this thread never mistakes your confidently incorrect statements as evidence to support a broader narrative based on lies, manufactured by the cultural hegemony of white, corporate, post-capitalist America. You’re free to go back to being wrong now.
During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.
Well Yeah, have you seen the Bob Marley Biopic? Whitewashing is precisely why his music is seen as stoner-feel-good-vibes and not the fiery protest music it was. He’s closer to the Black Panthers then he ever was to Cheech and Chong. But that’s not the reality they want you to accept.
I have not but I may look into it
Well, I’d say that has more to do with music sensibility. His music used slow tempo, heavy and steady beats, was bass-driven, and melodic vocals. That isn’t angry music for a western audience. Going back centuries, angry western music is fast paced, unsteady rhythms, big changes in volume, discordant sounds and lots of high frequencies.
It’s not whitewashing. It would be very hard to make an angry protest song set to a waltz beat too. The medium is the message, and the medium of steady droning beats is calmness not anger.
That sure sounds convincing for made up nonsense based on your preconceived feelings about nothing substantive at all. Fortunately, I actually have a Bachelors (hons) in Music. A sizeable amount of which involved sitting through 4 years of lectures on Music and Western Civilization, covering roughly 4000 years of Western Musical History. So, I can speak fairly competently with a fair amount of detail about this. A Waltz is dance, when I say that, I mean it belongs to the genre of “dance music.” As in, that was what it’s function was originally. As a dance when you think of a waltz you’re probably thinking of ballroom dancing, which would be the Viennese Waltz. Which is where people without a formal education in music history think the Western Art Music, or WAM (see “High Art”, “Aristocratic”, “Snob”, “Wealthy Elite”) hegemony of White, Germanic, Male cultural dominance begins. This is in no small part because traditional Western Musical Canon has been heavily and selectively codified to be such. East of Germany and Britain gets the worst shake in The Classical Period, in my personal opinion. Opera is huge and obviously, Italy is massively important to the tradition. However, Opera is taught as it’s own separate thing, because the tradition of Opera spans Pre-Medieval Music, through The Enlightenment, Classical Period, Romanticism, Modernism, Post-Modernism and beyond. It is both “Music” and “Theatre” but it is not “Musical Theatre.” Musical Theatre is a true American art-form, emerging from Vaudeville. (4000 years is a long fuckin’ time and I never get to flex on people like this, anyway, back on track). In terms of WAM a layperson’s idea of a Waltz is, conceptually, Chamber Music. It’s all hoity toity ball gowns and bowties and German Tradition, German Tradition, German Tradition. It goes to show you how successful the homogenisation (exclusion of the history and influence of Mediterranean, Balkan, Celtic and Briton music. Despite their obvious connections) of European musical history actually was. Probably one of the most visible cliche’s people get exposed to in media is the “grand ballroom meme.” Think protagonist opening up the Ballroom Doors during a waltz and couples dance in perfect circular unison, maybe they all suddenly stop for comedic effect. Or, camped above the festivities, maybe there’s a sweeping overhead shot showing the Dancing in Unison and it’s always Swan Lake, or The Nutcracker, which were never danced to at a ball like that, ever because they are Ballets performed by Orchestras and NOT chamber music by a fucking viennese String ensembel.
Half of the instruments in those pieces didn’t fucking exist at the time. That’s because movie and film producers know fuck all about musical history which is why people have these misconceptions. In actuality The Waltz, or as it is known in and throughout Europe for many hundreds of years prior “Volte” (lots of variation of spelling), or “slide dance” is a type of dance in 3/4 time with emphasis on certain beats accentuated, or shortened. (N.B. You acttually confuse Beat, Time Signature, Rhythm and Tempo in your comment. By referring to aspects of each of them incorrectly, but this is a history lesson. Not a lesson on music fundamentals). There are tonnes of examples of waltzes which are sinister, macabre or that conjure feelings of anger and despair in the Tradition of Western Art Music. Jean Sibelius’ Waltz Triste, Saint-Saens Danse Macabre. Fuck, if you Google “Angry Waltz”, you get some dude’s school composition project call “Angry Waltz” which is actually not a bad example. If you want to step out of Art Music for a look into folk Music, Norwegian Folk Music has 3/4 dances, waltzes, called Springar which are dances with region specific stress patterns. I know you’ve never listened to someone perform using a Hardingfele, but Springar are not slow and folk dancing can be very fast paced and are inherently a-harmonic at times. Very harsh to listen to if you’ve never been immersed in that musical space. We can even talk about The Waltz as protest music. Look no further than Shostakovich, basically everything he wrote under Stalinism put his life in mortal danger. He would outright flout what Stalin imposed on Composers and the wider Soviet Artistic community. Sometimes he would comply maliciously, just to walk the thin line with Stalin’s ego. If not for his massive cultural import and popularity (he was a genius) he would have been murdered and he knew this. Being an authoritarian government, any art Stalin did not like was grounds for immediate execution of them and their families, or forced labour, or banishment and starvation. Waltz No. 2 from Suite for Jazz Orchestra 2, I know you will know and I want to impress upon you. That the sheer, ungodly weight, of the fear Dmitri Shostakovich lived with everyday under Stalin was absolutely dwarfed by the planetary mass of the balls it took to write music like this under Stalinism. This is slow, nuanced and deeply defiant, most importantly it was protest music under the guise of Nationalism.
Expanding on this, I think you have no fucking concept of what protest music is. Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row is Protest Music, Jimmy Hendrix covering The Star Spangled Banner is protest music. For fuck’s sake my guy Listen to the WORDS of what is being said in these songs. Have you heard For What it’s Worth by Buffalo Springfield lately? It sounds like it was written about America Yesterday. Literally, listen to that song in the context of the Trump regime and Luigi Mangione. I don’t understand why Buffalo Springfield isn’t being blasted EVERYWHERE in the USA right now. Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi is protest music, Green Day’s American Idiot is Protest Music.
Swap vocal for strings and you’ve just described Prokofiev’s Dance of the Knights to a tee. Does that Sound Angry and Western enough to meet your standard of protest music? It isn’t protest music.
It is Whitewashing, it is absolutely egregious whitewashing. Bob Marley was an extremely important political figure, Legend and the Bob Marley Biopic are designed to appeal to white audiences. This is taken from the wikipedia page:
"Despite its generally positive reception, Legend has been criticized for being a deliberately inoffensive selection of Marley’s less political music, shorn of any radicalism that might damage sales.[25] In 2014 in the Phoenix New Times, David Accomazzo wrote “Dave Robinson, who constructed the tracklist for Legend, [said that] the tracklist for Legend deliberately was designed to appeal to white audiences. Island Records had viewed Marley as a political revolutionary, and Robinson saw this perspective as damaging to Marley’s bottom line. So he constructed a greatest-hits album that showed just one face of the Marley prism, the side he deemed most sellable to the suburbs. […] If you’re looking for mass-market appeal to secular-progressive America, you don’t include songs that invoke collective guilt over the slave trade, nor do you address the inconvenient truth that the bucolic Jamaican lifestyle of reggae, sandy beaches, and marijuana embraced by millions of college freshmen, exists only because of the brutal slave trade. […] the songs on Legend offer just a brief glimpse into his music. The definitive album of the most important reggae singer of all time is a hodgepodge collection of love songs, feel-good sentiment, and mere hints of the fiery activist whose politics drew bullets in the '70s.”[26] Vivien Goldman wrote in 2015, “when he does get played on the radio now, it’s the mellow songs, not the angry songs, that get heard – the ones that have been compiled on albums such as Legend.”
YOU are full of crap
You have no fucking idea what you’re saying, you’re just stating what you think might be true based on how you feel and you just described The Build up and Drop to Bangarang by Skrillex.
Translation: “I have never heard, or engaged with, any of Bob Marley, The Wailers, or Peter Tosh’s music, outside of The Legend track list verbatim and I did not understand the lyrics of those I did hear.”
Reggae IS Western Music, resulting from the SLAVE TRADE you absolute TIT! Have you never listened to reggae?
It’d be nice if someone gets something out of reading this, I really enjoyed thinking about music academically for a while and I hope no one ever listens to this person as an authority about any aspect of musical history, the slave trade, musical theory ever again.
TL;DR In short literally, nothing you said was correct and it was so egregiously, offensively wrong, that I was inspired to write this. As a dude with an education and 4ft long dreadlocks, up yours.
Wow, man, you sound so angry! I can feel the anger from here! It’s coming off you like… like… like the slow and steady, groovy sound of a reggae tune!
Well, I actually quite enjoy discussing Musicology in detail. I would be remit in pretending it isn’t satisfying to dress you down like that. True, most academics usually get offended when someone who’s never opened a book about a subject, make wildly inaccurate statements about their field of study and tell them their wrong. It’s more about about making sure anyone who stumbles upon this thread never mistakes your confidently incorrect statements as evidence to support a broader narrative based on lies, manufactured by the cultural hegemony of white, corporate, post-capitalist America. You’re free to go back to being wrong now.