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Comment on My world is so much better because of immigrants

UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

there’s little chance that immigration wouldn’t have been involved somehow in your scenario(s)

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.

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 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.

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rumschlumpel@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

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.

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.

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- UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  
  Cool, I never made that claim.
  
  How do you think Africans came to be in the New World?
  
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  - rumschlumpel@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.
    
    Brits didn’t need to immigrate to the US in order to learn about American rock music.
    
    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.
    
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    UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    
    you just really want me to be racist
    
    I don’t think you’re racist. I think you’re clinging to this idea of the Transatlantic slave trade as some kind of necessary evil.
    
    It wouldn’t have gotten as popular in the USA and Europe if all the early blues and jazz musicians were in Africa.
    
    Cultural traditions have cross-pollunated without mass migrations on plenty of prior occasions. The Silk Road didn’t need to move legions of displaced people in order to bring food, clothing, and music into the Mediterranean. Neither did Dutch traders need to flood into Japan in order to convey their art and technology.
    
    The idea that you need a mass resettlement in order to mix musical traditions doesn’t bare out in practice.
    
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