Comment on My world is so much better because of immigrants
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 4 days agoI don’t think that logically follows.
Music genres that came out of poor black sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta could have just as easily come from middle class black manufacturing workers in Congo or Nigeria, if the continent had been integrated with the industrial west back in the 19th century rather than raided and plundered for 400 years.
Hell, maybe it would have come from middle class American Natives in the Mississippi Delta. Or Chinese rice farmers in a country not ravaged by opium. Or Iranians not ground under by the Shah’s dictatorship. Or Austro-Hungarians who weren’t cannibalized to fight the Napoleonic Wars or the 30 Years War that caused the Caucasian Exodus across the Atlantic.
The Peace Dividend reaped across the Gulf Coast and the Mountain West that gave us modern western music could have been collected anywhere.
rumschlumpel@feddit.org 4 days ago
That’s counterfactual, though, and there’s little chance that immigration wouldn’t have been involved somehow in your scenario(s).
They might have invented interesting musical genres, but I really doubt any of them would have invented something that closely resembles 1950s-1960s era black music. Maybe one of them could have invented techno, but jazz, soul, blues and blues-derived rock music as we know it? I highly doubt that.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Immigrants approaching the US from a position of common interest, a la French foreign investors or Chinese manufacturing interests or Saudi oil companies. You won’t just have people crossing the Atlantic to (be made to) make music, you’d have them coming over to distribute it under home-grown record labels and on contractual terms that favored their domestic interests.
Maybe they’d have made something just as compelling, but different. Maybe they’d have made something better. It’s very hard to say. But the claim that you have to whip people and chain them up to synthesize European folk melodies with African base rhythms seems at once absurd and sadistic.
If music history has proven anything, it is that great art flourishes when people have more leisure and more material resources. The Blues and Jazz traditions that eventually gave birth to modern Rock were the consequence of a rapidly expanding middle class. And that came out of unionization, urbanization, the modern entertainment industry, and the eight-hour work day.
Absent prior centuries of pre-industrial slavery and emiseration, we may have achieved this musical tradition sooner and developed it more fully, before the 21st century flattened and assembly-lined its production.
rumschlumpel@feddit.org 4 days ago
Cool, I never made that claim. They probably needed to immigrate to a western country to invent it, that they went there as slaves is a different matter.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 4 days ago
How do you think Africans came to be in the New World?