This week reiterated some of the main points from last week, but in the context of Miller’s Segregating Sound.

I enjoyed what we started with on Tuesday – where the beat falls. Does it lag with a relaxed or sexy feel like it’s hardly going to make it before the next beat? Or does it push, with the beat feeling very rushed? We can view this racially as well, like many elements of music. African American music tends to lag, while white rock tends to jump on the beat.

I learned about Go Go, which I’ve never heard of before. Apparently it’s an African American DC musical tradition with very long songs and a unique sound.

Benny Goodman Band is the first publicly integrated band. Bands had had white singers with black musicians on records before this, but it was kept hidden from the public.

Once country music became a thing, genre marketing drove people even further apart – white people bought country music and black people bought race records.

Elvis Presley took songs written and performed by black artists and made them his own. This is bad. Like, really bad. He was able to make the music extremely profitable and popular because he was white. These songs were absolutely marketed as his own and the public was blind to the actual creators of the music. Music is really hard to make, way harder than people think it is. It’s so easy for someone to say, “well, if I had the time I could do that.” Well, you didn’t, that artist did. Just because you could, doesn’t mean you did. Also, original ideas for art are created in someone’s mind and yes, you could replicate it, but you could not come up with that thing on your own. The fact that Presley performed these songs as his own (even if royalties were given to the original artists behind the scenes) is disrespectful of the hard work done by the actual artist. And worst of all, that artist could not have made it big because he was black.

Thursday was a bit different. We started by watching the video about the same four chord progressions making up a ludicrous amount of popular songs. You can’t copyright chord progressions, and those four chords happen to sound really good in combination, so they are incredibly popular.

Next, the 1, 4, 5 progression of the blues. I don’t think I would have ever figured this out, nor would I have ever characterized a genre of music by something like this. I hear it very clearly. Blues also has a “call and response” pattern with the lyrics.

Folk music is a 19th century invention. There are isolated societies, unmotivated (and not-at-all influenced by) modernity or commerce. Music is played for one’s own enjoyment, not for sale.

Now to Miller. This book was okay. Perhaps I’m not particularly interested in the topic, or maybe the book was just way too long (I think a combination of both). I fell a little behind in reading this book so I just finished it and my ending thoughts were: “umm…okay?” That’s basically how I felt throughout the whole book. It just felt kinda…bleh. I guess that just means I don’t care about the topic. It is obviously a good book and does a great job of explaining racial divides in music, but for me, it lacked excitement. Additionally, I felt I got so much information from the introduction, and then the chapters on each of the topics were a lot of repetition and reiteration of what was already introduced in great detail during the introduction.

Anyway, whatever my feelings may be about the book, it’s an important subject and I did learn a lot. His argument boils down to a couple of things: there is a lot more commonality in racially divided music than difference, that racial division is a creation of copyright labels, the racial division of music followed the landscape of the political culture at the time, and the “correlation between racialized music and racialized bodies” (Miller, 4).

While I read the book, I frequently thought to myself “well, yeah.” As in, “duh.” As in, how could this have developed any other way? Could music have developed in any other way given the position America was in during the segregation era? Or the still super racist era which followed? So to me it just felt like a history book. A “this is how things were” book, not a book with an argument. I don’t know, maybe I was just distracted while I read it. Also, seriously, it’s too long for its subject matter. It was fine, I guess. I will definitely be donating this book and not be reading it again.

We also discussed some nationalism stuff but I don’t really feel like getting into that right now because I’ve got some serious thoughts on that. But for now, this is enough. If we talk about it again, I’ll touch on it.

-Jessi Russell