Comment on My world is so much better because of immigrants
rumschlumpel@feddit.org 3 days agoThat’s counterfactual, though, and there’s little chance that immigration wouldn’t have been involved somehow in your scenario(s).
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.
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 3 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 3 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 3 days ago
How do you think Africans came to be in the New World?
rumschlumpel@feddit.org 3 days ago
I did write that they came as slaves, but that’s not the necessary part. I’m starting to think that you just really want me to be racist, facts be damned.
Yeah, because american rock music already existed, and USA and UK have a long shared history. Inventing rock music without close personal proximity is much less likely, and inventing a style is one thing but popularizing it is quite another. It wouldn’t have gotten as popular in the USA and Europe if all the early blues and jazz musicians were in Africa.