Oh my fucking god I just wanted to say how otherworldly bad music is right now (pop has always been stupid to varying levels but oh my fucking god they have raised the stakes). I just listened to a bunch of pop tracks from various genres and I literally think I’m about to die. Rock, country, indie, folk, hipster white rap, whatever you call home, is aggressively bad. It’s like Walmart made a gun that can shoot cum and blood and piss and shit and puke into your soul. We are so fucking fucked. I want to saw my own head off.
Doesn’t adequately factor in music made by subjects of empire, or non-pop forms of genres stolen from said subjects of empire. You fundamentally left out underground rap here, which tracks directly back to slave chants and hymns. Or are you going to tell me that the (admittedly manifold) fuckeries of mainstream ‘rappers’ represents all emcees, real and fraudulent from the dawn of the genre til now?
The truth is that I don’t know enough about how Black people experience music on a communal level vs an individual level to compare by virtue of well, not being Black. Speaking as someone who’s not Black looking from the outside, I would say that Black people have preserved the more communal aspects of music, which would push back against treatification, which is about turning a once communal artistic activity into a completely consumption-focused individual one. In general, Black people and most POC communities are more communal than white people who are thoroughly atomized.
There are certainly elements that plainly points to a more communal understanding like how the performer/audience divide is either non-existence or a lot blurrier. You can’t really DJ in a hermetically sealed bubble, club music exists within the context of a communal activity (ie dancing with others), and so on. This means that music isn’t exclusively conceived as a commodity to be consumed. The fact that Black music has a strong regional component to it is also clues to it preserving more communal aspects. Regionalism exists because (most) Black musicians aren’t fully pushing out commercial products tailored to the lowest common denominator nor are they completely atomized musicians producing music from their garage by themselves. They exist as a community of musicians within a locale, which leads to the music they produce having a particular sound and vibe. This regionalism is also reinforced by the (Black) audience gravitating towards music from their region.
Now that I think about it, hip hop in its original conception during the 70s was completely untreatified. It ultimately came from the Black grassroots, even if the final package was done by a particular Black DJ, and you couldn’t easily sell hip hop because hip hop as a cohesive whole constituted four elements, one of which was technically illegal. The treatification began when those four elements were split up into atomized parts, and those atomized parts were then further commodified so that they can be packaged and sold to white audiences who don’t understand the cultural context from where they came from anyways.
I guess my initial post failed to consider how Black musicians have tried to consciously create untreatified music, with hip hop being the most recent example, and how a lot of the drive towards treatification has a racial component as well, namely music being watered down for the sake of being sold to atomized white audiences.