I forgot to do this blog post last weekend. Whoops.

In the last week of class we reviewed the major themes of the course to get us thinking about our final project and paper. How might we think about the process of making a song within the topics covered in this course?

I think I’ll write out the major themes here to solidify them in my own head and once I’ve finished I’ll probably have a clear idea of which I’d like to talk about in my final paper. Here they are:

1. The problem of attention – does digital media undermine or redirect our attention? In what ways does it do so? How does the medium influence the message? Use The Shallows mostly.
2. Displacement – think about migrants and how migration influences digital media. This is a powerful creative force. Think about displacement of people in place and time or displacement of meaning like the patterns of language we don’t even see when we do a google search.
3. Racial categories – are they reinforced or undermined in music? Or both? Does music break down barriers or put more up?
4. Enclosure vs. openness – “information wants to be free” vs. “siloing” of information and access. Think about the Cold War origins of computing. Copyrighting, piracy, sampling debates can all be used here. Think Linux or Wikipedia. Is the room for creativity becoming smaller when, say, your favorite childhood song is copyrighted and you need to pay money to use it. Use Witt, Bush, and Miller.
5. Individual vs. Social – can go back to beginning of course with music compression. Music was social for most of human history. Recordings made it personal and individual. What were the effects? Are they good or bad?
6. Restructuring of authority – taking away from the monopoly on information by scholars and giving it to the people. Crowd-sourcing for information. Think T.V. and radio being a limited resource, or books before the internet.

Professor O’Malley said something interesting about pop music regarding repetition. Repetition of certain chords or choruses or whatever. I realized that a lot of the music I find most interesting has the least repetition. Is this against the ways of my millennial peers? Even when songs don’t include a lot of repetition, they still hold my attention because they’re excellent pieces of music. I do, however, assume that I seek out more good music than my peers. I listen to more obscure artists (who are often better – no offense) and want music that is slightly disturbing, depressing, and just really good.

Okay, I think I’ll use the first theme about attention because that was my favorite book of the semester and I think it applies to me very well. I’m going to do a little experiment regarding distraction while I create my song this weekend. I have to think about it a little more, but I want to quantify my distraction.

Happy last blog post!

-Jessi Russell

This week was very entertaining. It was fun to learn about the restrictions placed on radio and TV, but first, Mr. O’Malley reiterated what he wants us to understand from this course – music travels and it becomes political and historical. It’s our responsibility as a citizen of a multi-cultural society to understand this and look into it. The added bonus is that you will appreciate the music even more once you know more about it.

Something about the song “Watermelon Man.” I don’t know…he just kinda played lots of renditions of the tune without really saying anything.

Next, democratizing information. This is great because it breaks the monopoly that scholars had on information and allows for more eyes on a subject which will make it better. However, this also means that garbage can circulate as well. In this way, we have more of a responsibility to filter information than our parents did. My parents never had to have lessons on how to determine a credible source from an incredible one…all sources were credible because they were books. Now anyone can create a website for any incorrect piece of information they have. It’s a new type of responsibility. Should these things be regulated? It’s a valid question. At what point are we censoring? America is not about that life, but what happens when things like the Jade Helm 15 conspiracy spread like wildfire on the internet? Or Pizza-gate?

Speaking of regulation, radio was, and still is, regulated. Radio works like a recording. You speak into a microphone and a vibration of a diaphragm is transformed into voltage which is amplified via vacuum tubes. I think this is right. However, there is a limited range of frequency that radio stations can get a hold of. In that way, it’s a scarce resource, which means it is regulated by the FCC. The FCC was actually created in 1934 to do this very thing. Radio became a public resource because of its scarcity and value. A radio station needed a license to broadcast and had to comply with certain guidelines to attain that license. No obscene material, maintain fairness in political programming, provide public benefit, etc.

When TV really took off, the same type of thing happened. Nothing obscene, contrasting views regarding controversial matters of public interest, etc. The National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters (NARTB) even had a seal which shows would put in with the credits in the beginning of a program to show that it was morally upstanding. The most hilarious thing to me is the married couple in separate beds. I mean, c’mon. It’s a bed for sleeping in this context. It’s two people talking as they’re about to fall asleep. Are you serious? They’re MARRIED.

Then on Wednesday we talked about the evolution of the mass market in America. I hate everything about this. Millenials hate everything about this. Thank god. It’s terrible. An example is the bread industry. Wasn’t it lovely when each town had a bakery and the products were really good and you bought a good loaf of bread when you needed it and a pastry on a Sunday morning walk? Welp, not anymore. Now we have Wonderbread and nation-wide shipping of certain big-name bakeries.

Nabisco contributed to this idea of a mass market with the Uneeda Biscuit. It became a national food. A gross, processed national food. Why do people eat this stuff? Go to a butcher for a cut of meat, the market for fruits and vegetables and spices, and a bakery for bread. Boom. Meal is done. I like good things, and I don’t understand why others don’t. I know – they like cheap things. And if they can pay 20 cents less for a crappy loaf of bread, they’re going to do it. These baby-boomers…I’ll tell ya what. They have such bad taste and their capitalist mindset is overtaking their lives.

Anyway, ranting aside, the biscuit became a national food and was associated with nationhood. People have taken that sort of thing to other industries like art. Researchers have identified the most wanted painting in every country. This is so funny to me, but I get it.

Crowd sourcing in digital media is key. It’s behind Wikipedia and Google. It breaks the structure of the mass market. Google creates something called “collaborative filtering.” This is based on not the frequency of which a certain term is used on a web page, but rather how many times that web page has been linked or cited elsewhere. This creates a ranking structure that is far superior to other search engines because it top-rated pages that were useful to others.

This type of thing contributes to the ways in which we are becoming even more like ourselves. This is a fascinating topic to me and I wholeheartedly agree. It’s becoming easier and easier to be who we already are because of the amount of data people can collect on our habits. It’s been like this for a while, but the internet exacerbates it. I think it deepens the divide between “us” and “them.” It pushes you even more toward “your people.” The zip code breakdown was very interesting to me. Although I’m the black sheep of the family, the information was very accurate for the region I grew up in. It’s definitely not me, that’s for sure. I am now way more associated with the characteristics of Fairfax, rather than Mohrsville, Pennsylvania.

One more thing – in the context of the last thing I mentioned, we talked a bit about what is more important to us as people, our citizenship as Americans or our interests/hobbies/lifestyle choices? In most contexts, it’s our interests that define us and create a better picture of who we are, because most of the people we associate ourselves with are American citizens. However, I spent one month abroad this summer and in that case, what was more important to me was my American citizenship. So I think it is contextual or geographical. Just an interesting thought.

Okay, last week of classes coming up. Looking forward to getting started on the final project and it hopefully not kicking my butt.

-Jessi Russell

On Monday we talked about our final project – thank goodness. I was starting to get nervous. I don’t feel comfortable doing this project, nor am I equipped with the proper technology, but I’m going to do my absolute best.

We can use a MIDI file if we want. If there’s a tune we know we want to use, we can search it and drag it into GarageBand. From there, we can edit it to fit any style or sound we want it. There are so many things you can adjust to make it sound exactly how you want it…even changing individual notes or lengths of notes. It’s truly amazing. You can start with a drum beat if you want to start from scratch. I’ll probably do it this way and build it as I please.

The thing we want to think about when doing this project is how history has played into this music we’re making. Does it have a historical background? Where did the instruments originate? What type of beat does it use and in what kind of music is that beat typically found? How did it make its way into your ears?

I’m going to get started on this project as soon as I can, but right now I’m trying to recover from all the food I ate yesterday. 🙂

-Jessi Russell

A couple things I want to mention before I begin talking about our classes: I was record shopping (remember, I bought my husband a record player for his birthday) last weekend and I found a Bessie Smith album! I love her voice…just beautiful. Another album I found was a mix of African American artists of Virginia from the early 20th century. There was a short essay on the back explaining how the record was assembled and how little recognition these artists saw in their life for their amazing musical talents. However, the drawing on the back of the album showed a mild form of the elasticity of the black bodies in minstrel show posters. Certain features like the jaw were exaggerated, making the people look less human and more animal-like. I just found it very ironic that the record was supposedly celebrating these artists’ work in a way that was non-white-centric, yet the drawing was done in this style. Lastly, I was watching Jeopardy last week and there was a question about Bell Labs! I knew it right away and said confidently at the TV, “what is Bell Labs?” My husband was very impressed with my obscure knowledge.

Okay, now to class stuff. Monday we talked a bit about how American music up until about the 1960s was set to a swing beat. Then replaced by a rock beat around the time of The Beatles. There was very little in-between. Even gospel music followed this beat transition.

Starting in the 1940s, huge numbers of people flocked to New York from Cuba and Puerto Rico (along with other Latin American countries, but mostly these two) and influenced the music. Displaced persons influence musical traditions greatly. This might be why our music has very few chords now. This particular displacement created a Mambo craze in the U.S. What makes the music sound Latin? I couldn’t have told you, but now that I hear it, I really hear it. The clave (“key”) creates that sound that we know so well in Latin music or Latin-sounding music.

“Louie Louie” investigation – that’s funny. They ruled the lyrics unintelligible at any speed or any version. My high school fan section used to sing that at football games along with the band who played it. Funny.

“On the Floor” by Pitbull and J Lo – I heard it from the very first rendition of the tune that we heard. Probably because I listen to that song somewhat frequently on my workout playlist. The point is is that music has an international backstory that comes from displaced persons and/or sampled music. It creates a depth we may not have known about and helps us understand the music we hear everyday. This displacement is an engine of innovation and creativity.

On Wednesday we discussed Witt and some other stuff related to it. First though, Lalo Schifrin – creator of the Mission Impossible theme. A famous Argentinian-American who wrote it to sound vaguely Latin. It does a little, but had you asked me to describe it, I wouldn’t say Latin.

Now Witt. I wish I enjoyed this book more. I thought it would be like the first book we read this semester. I thought I would adore it and fly through it. It was written in a very accessible way which was great. It was written for an audience who knows nothing about the making of music – perfect, because I don’t. 🙂 I did think it was a little too casual, though. The parts I remember from the book are about how what’s-his-name is bad with the ladies, and what the people of Bentley, North Carolina do for nightlife.

I had no idea there was a such thing as an mp2. Who knew? The mp3 won out and it takes advantage of the fact that there are sounds that you can’t hear to make the files small. This psycho-acoustic realization was critical in the digitization of music. The ear is not a microphone, so you can get rid of the crap we won’t hear anyway. Branenburg develops the mp3.

Glover…should he have gone to jail? Someone said he’s an “engine of innovation, not a criminal,” but to me, this cannot be said in hindsight. If someone ignores copyright laws and makes something amazing, then goes to jail, people can’t say they were actually this fantastic innovator and not a criminal. Those things are not mutually exclusive – you can absolutely be both, but your ingenuity does not negate your criminality. The law is the law, and just because something good came out of it, doesn’t mean we can judge this system in hindsight and think we know what we’re talking about.

I was intrigued by the discussion of pitch. Pitch is distinguished by the frequency of the sound wave it produces. A difference in overtone series creates a different sound, despite the fact that they are playing the same note. A saxophone and a flute sound different even when they’re both playing a C. This is what the pipe organ does. You can play a note and then add different overtones to make it sound like different instruments. I did not know about this process at all and I find it very interesting.

That’s all I have time for. Papers and projects due before Thanksgiving must be done for other classes.

-Jessi Russell

I don’t hate blogging, but I do hate the fact that random people or bots or Russians are trying to comment on my posts. I keep marking them as spam, but it’s super annoying to wake up to emails everyday telling me people are commenting on my posts. I guess I could look to see if there’s a way to set it up so that people can’t comment. Super annoying.

This week was weird. We started off on Monday talking about how it is possible to acquire property without taking it by force. According to John Locke, if you “mix your labor” with the land, you own it. He wanted to moralize the English occupation of North America by saying they came in a farmed and stuff, so the land is theirs…as if Native Americans were surviving without doing anything to the land…yeah, uh huh. So, a deer can’t own property because it goes around eating the plants and drinking the water, but it’s not putting the plants there or building something out of a tree.

As far as intellectual property rights go, are ideas property? When do they become property? There are patents, trademarks, and copyrights – none of which I fully understood, and I still don’t, but I’m a lot more knowledgeable than I was before. Why is there a limited term on these? If it lasts forever, the future generations getting royalties are not laboring for those payments. Also, the public good thing. And the fact that it can be made better or competitors can come in and lower the market price for the consumer.

What is a corporation? A legal person. It’s a fictitious legal person. It’s a disembodied legal person. Super strange, but crucial to the American economy. Then there are holding corporations, which is a corporation that can own other corporations. Which is funny because people can’t own other people. I think this is like that chart that shows that like literally ever corporation in America is owned by a total of like 8 holding corporations. Everyone has seen that chart. You know, like Dasani is a corporation and so is Minute Maid, but they’re both owned by Coca-Cola. And isn’t Coca-Cola owned by someone? Maybe it’s one of the actual big ones.

Should intellectual property copyrights be extended? The Mickey Mouse Curve keeps the extension going. When it gets close to falling out of copyright, Disney goes to lobby Congress to extend it. On one hand, intellectual property is property – it doesn’t matter who made it, it matters who owns it. No one tells you how long you can live in your dead grandma’s house, why should intellectual property be any different? On the other hand, intellectual property is not physical property. Perpetual ownership of intellectual property retards innovation, chokes creativity and encloses our common heritage. Think “Happy Birthday” (the song). If you copyright that, part of our common culture goes away because we have to pay money to sing it to our mom.

What I thought was cool was that Disney used a ton of sources that were out of copyright to create a story to make a movie. Then they made billions of dollars. I actually think this is cool. It creates something fun and accessible to a group of people who might not ordinarily run into that piece of work. Like Mulan. I study Chinese history, literature, language, and culture. In my literature course this semester, we read the poem. Then Disney made a movie out of it and brought attention to the story of this brave young girl who did something amazing for her family and country by fighting in the army. I was exposed to this story at a young age and now I’ve been able to read the original source and appreciate it in a different way because film brought me to it first. So I guess I’m against extension of copyrights because it prohibits creativity and new content or content in different forms.

Wednesday was all about sampling. Sampling is interesting and I think that many people who would be in favor of copyright extension would be against free sampling. I think those in favor of copyright deadlines and intellectual property becoming a public good at some point would be in favor of free sampling. I think it’s fine. I guess there have to be regulations at some point. It can’t be the SAME EXACT song with the lyrics changed. I don’t know where or how to draw that line though, but I do know that I think sampling allows us to gain something new from a piece of work that already exists.

We listened to “Hotline Bling” by Drake and heard “Why Can’t we Live Together” by Timmy Thomas. Or Cardi B’s “I Like It” from some other song I can’t remember. I heard that one immediately when I hear “I Like It” for the first time (although I couldn’t name the exact title or artist, I knew I had heard it and that it was sampled).

We talked about how artists use turn tables to do cross-fading and sampling. It’s pretty awesome and I’m jealous of the artists who do this and make it look so easy. By the late 1980s we see digital samplers like the E-mu SP1200 become affordable for many and makes sampling easier.

Then there was this law suit about FUNKADELIC’s song being sampled in the N.W.A. song. I didn’t hear it at all, but then we watched the explanation video and I hear it well. There was this whole thing about how this is not de minimis – not too trivial to be considered. If you ask me, this is the most minimis, but it’s not my decision. It’s a siren, people. It became law that if you sample, you have to pay. Does this enclose creativity? Now an ordinary person cannot afford to license it and use it…is something lost there? Should they just have to create something completely original? Does original even exist anymore?

By sampling, we can re-purpose old art and show it in a new way. Maybe that will even encourage people to see where it came from and appreciate that too. And if it doesn’t, so what? The people appreciate what was made and I think that’s great.

-Jessi Russell

I never skip class. Well, I guess I can’t say that anymore because I kinda skipped class on Wednesday. Not a total skip. I think for it to be an actual skip, you don’t have anywhere to be. I skipped because we had to take my dog to the vet. He has a painful wart on his paw pad and he’s been limping and wincing from the pain. It was breaking my heart and clearly hurting him, so we had to get it checked out and the vet had limited availability. So to take care of my baby, not technically a skip. 🙂

On Monday we talked about the encyclopedia. I am just old enough to remember using them, and my old-fashioned-ness is exacerbated by the fact that I was born and raised in central Pennsylvania (think Amish people – my neighbors are Amish). I didn’t get internet until I was in 7th or 8th grade I think. I vividly remember the floppy disk as a way of transporting my word documents from my home computer to the computer at school. I didn’t get a cell phone until I was 16, and I finally got a smart phone right before I went to college. Anyway, we had an encyclopedia set in my house and I remember reading them for research and when I got bored. My sisters thought I was crazy for that second reason for using them.

The encyclopedia brings up an interesting thought – how is information organized? It has to be categorized and cross-referenced. It’s very complex, and before computers it was hard to do.

Then we talked about Richard Stallman. What an interesting dude. I find him very interesting and forward-thinking. Essentially he created a platform for new computing software that is open to the public for correcting and advancing the product. He argues that the best way to get the best product for the most people (value theory much?), is to leave it open. Copyrighting is the enemy, in fact, he swears by his “copyleft,” that is, to leave things wide open for anyone to use and improve. He argues for the four freedoms of software – run the program for any purpose, study how it works and change it how you wish, redistribute copies of the program to help your neighbors, and improve the program and release what you’ve done to the public.

Then we talked about this in the context of Wikipedia. It operates under the belief that because anyone and everyone can add to it, you are getting the best and most information possible (so long as you cite it). Experts (or just nerds) of any subject can start a new page or edit an existing page. I love Wikipedia. I have learned so much from that site, it’s ridiculous. I honestly believe I would be dumber if I didn’t spend significant time on Wikipedia.

The downside to this whole “information should be free and changeable” thing is (1) that if someone makes something great that will benefit others, shouldn’t they get paid for it? And (2) in this way, there is no filter on information. Wikipedia has hired editors so that nothing inappropriate, false, or not cited is published. We talked about the DC shooting in the pizza place, or the recent anti-Semitic Pittsburgh shooting. These incidences occur out of false, diluted, or exaggerated information online. If information was controlled in some way, these things might not happen. But then we’d be going against our internet freedom of speech that makes us American and not The Great Firewall of communist China.

We were assigned a digital scavenger hunt for Wednesday, which I did, but then missed class. I chose to search mambo. I wonder if I can figure out how to insert the Ngram in here. I’m not familiar with blogging and I’m not fantastic at computer-ing. Anyway, there’s a little spike around 1830, then a bigger spike from 1857-64, then a bit wavy, then a HUGE  spike in 1956. This is really when the term took off. Then a dip, then a consistent rise until 2000. Since then, a slight decline.

For the Library of Congress newspaper digitization source – why does it stop in 1963? Newspapers still exist. From 1789 (where it begins) to 1963, there are 1127 results. From 1830-1963, there are still 1127. I think it’s fair to say that this word really started to pop up at that time.

In Mississippi from 1830-1963, only 3 results. In Connecticut, 6. Fourteen in Pennsylvania, and a whopping 306 in New York. Seems to be a more northern musical tradition.

This is fun. I found a children’s book called Under the Mambo Moon by Julia Durango about a Latino family where the girl is celebrating her quinceanera. Judging by this book, mambo may be a Latino musical tradition.

I’m going to keep digging into this, but I want to get this published so I can get to work on my paper due on Monday. I’ll look at some more books and jot down some quotes to see if I can gain some more knowledge on the genre. I’ll edit this post when I do so.

-Jessi Russell

We only had one class again this week, but the information we did get to cover was super cool.

First we reviewed where this class is going. I understand how students would have difficulty following this class or want more information about the organization of it. For whatever reason, I’m not really minding the (what seems like) lack of organization and the variety of topics we’re covering. I’m trying to be more chill about my academics while upholding my normal A+ work. *Note: I’m sure the class was very well thought out and is on the best path for what we need to cover.

We returned to the question of “who controls information?” And whether information becomes useless if it is not shared. I get this. Information wants to be free, and it is not beneficial if it’s not. Controlling information won’t make you or the society richer. We all prosper if information can be shared.

Then we moved on to talking about what the causes of the civil war may have been. Could it be more complex than just slavery? Sure, but I’m not certain it is. I have not studied the civil war in detail, so I guess I can’t really say. In discussing this topic, we took a look at some primary sources to determine whether or not African Americans fought in the confederate army against the union. Some documents say that was the case, and that something like 3,000 soldiers in the army were black. Seems suspect. There are photos too.

So what’s the point of this discussion? It’s that nowadays, we have access to *every* piece of information via the internet. This means that lots of information we find is under-researched, cropped, twisted in an advantageous direction, biased, etc. Because of this extraordinary resource available to us called the internet, we now have a moral responsibility to determine what information is valid and what is not. We have to think a lot more about the sources of our information, whereas in the past, information came from print sources which were credible. We now have the moral responsibility to interpret and validate the sources we find because now primary documents can be found to create an argument, and falsified in doing so.

That’s all I have for this week.

-Jessi Russell

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

This week we only had one class because of the Columbus day interruption.

We started off by talking about how white people clap on the wrong beats. I’ve never heard this before. I have excellent rhythm (if I may say so myself), so I’m not sure if I’m guilty of this, although I am white. Apparently this comes out of the traditions of European music emphasizing beats 1 and 3, while Afro-New World music typically emphasizes beats 2 and 4. Who knew? Not me. Our pop music almost always emphasizes beats 2 and 4. Mr. O’Malley is right…once you hear it, it’s hard to not listen for it when you listen to music.

The displaced third beat. I couldn’t hear this at first, maybe the first 3 examples. Then we listened for it in swing music, and I heard it there. Now there is a mashup of those African traditions of emphasizing beats 2 and 4, and the European traditions of the displaced third beat which constitutes modern pop music in America.

The genre of R&B is often traced back to “The Great Migration.” Following the abolition of slavery, black people in the south could move where they wanted to go and lots of them ended up in Chicago for employment opportunities. Chicago became a place of southern food and authentic beats that would become R&B.

We learned that race records began to pop up and the market was nostalgic black people who urbanized and missed the countryside. I think Bessie Smith is amazing. Oh my lord did she give me chills listening to her beautiful voice. She was a vaudeville singer, but came to be known as the mother of blues. She often sang risque lyrics too. Apparently she bled to death after an accident because the hospital wouldn’t accept black people. That’s not sickening at all (sarcasm).

We heard a lot from Muddy Waters. Also fabulous. He became increasingly famous after recording music on the plantation with the gate…Stonewall Plantation? That might be wrong. Moved permanently to Chicago, but sings about wanting to go back. There’s a big market for the music of nostalgia. Mississippians are the largest emigrates to Chicago.

“Folklorists” are an interesting group of people. They are comprised of people who seek to uncover sounds not produced for money like unmediated folk music in Appalachia, for example. I think it’s cool. When I went to Radford University, I attended a weekly blue grass/folk music live performance and open mic. It was amazing to hear small groups or individuals who just want to make music for its own sake. Last night I walked my dog and there was a man playing the guitar on his balcony. These types of things make my heart so happy.

Oh, and spectacle lynching, but I won’t get into that.

-Jessi Russell

This week was emotionally taxing. I just…ugh. These topics make me so uncomfortable, and while I know they need to be discussed, it’s just really emotionally exhausting. I don’t know how much of this I can relive, so this might be a short entry.

Minstrel shows. At first I thought Mr. O’Malley was saying “menstrual shows,” and I was very confused. I’ve never heard of them. The tradition of applying blackface and performing song and dance went on for decades and became one of America’s favorite forms of entertainment. The advertisements for the shows often displayed that white actor’s head shot and then a picture of them in blackface with overly pronounced features and body language. There’s almost a plasticity, which dehumanizes black people even more.

How in the world is “Yellow Rose of Texas” still the state song of Texas? Yikes. Someone needs to get on that.

I already feel tired writing what little I have. I have so much empathy. I understand these things permeate society today. I have a hard time handling race issues and I’m still learning what my privilege allows that not all are afforded. Okay, I’ll try to go on.

I learned that Irish people were labeled “colored” for quite sometime, but then the tradition of blackface almost helped bring attention to their whiteness. In that way, the minstrel shows helped invent white as a race, and propelled it above “colored.”

I think one of the strangest things I learned was how there was an impersonation of a black person singing, which then became the typical white folk sounding voice (think Hank Williams), and it’s completely devoid of its connection to black singers. Just very strange. I don’t really know what to think of it. Is it cultural appropriation? Probably. Commodification of black culture? Sure. Most of all it’s sad and embarrassing.

We went on to talk about Hawaiian influence in music, namely the steel guitar. With that we talked about how music is saturated with politics and history, and buying music is a racially-charged activity.

Lastly, de-skilling. I mean, yeah. This seems really obvious to me based on the world we live in. In my favorite coffee shop there is a machine that brews pour over coffee. It can do 5 or 6 at a time with perfect pace and precision. Did that used to be someone’s (or 2 people maybe) job? Of course. Did it take lots of jobs to make that machine? Absolutely. Jobs aren’t going away, they’re just changing in nature.

Despite our changing workplace, we have an instinct of worksmanship. I believe this 100%. I want to cook things. Would it be a hell of a lot easier to order take out? Yep. But I want to make it by hand. I want to put the time into something and have the pleasure of knowing I did that. (And I can eat it too, so win-win.)

Alright, that’s all I can handle for this week. I’m about to start reading Segregating Sound tomorrow so wish me luck and I’ll try not to cry.

-Jessi Russell