Still thinking about Dylan, and also about the relationship between African American music and the way it has influenced white music, in a sort of colonial way. Black music grew out of slavery and the hardscrabble life of sharecropping, and the whites essentially exploited and marketed it. One question that nags is the one-way street aspect of that relationship ie. that it's black music that has influenced white music and not the other way around. In fact, as one friend asked, can you name a single black artist who has been influenced by a white artist? Take the most influential white songwriter of the post-war period, Bob Dylan. Virtually every white singer-songwriter of note has been influenced by him, but can you name a single black songwriter or performer who has? The answer is, if there are any, they are most certainly the exception that proves the rule. In fact, has there ever been a black songwriter or performer of any importance, or a poet, or a novelist for that matter, that was influenced by a white? It's hard to think of any. The cultural influences of blacks have been blacks, and what has inspired them is exclusively the black experience.
And then it hit me, rap duo Run-DMC doing Aerosmith's mid 70s hit 'Walk This Way'. I remember the first time I heard it. I hated it. Thought it was garbage, a joke. In fact, the story goes that the duo themselves thought it was a bit of a joke. Rick Rubin (white, Jewish) co-founder of Def Jam records, had the idea. The duo had heard the infectious powerful 'Walk' beat cause it had been widely 'scratched to' in the dance clubs for years. But they had no idea who Aerosmith were, and had never heard the song's lyrics, later calling them 'hillbilly jibberish'. "Me and Run thought Rick (Rubin) and Russell (Simmons) were trying to ruin us," said Darryl 'DMC' McDaniels. Well, he could not have been more wrong. The collaboration was a smash hit, and even managed to resurrect Aerosmith's floundering career. So what does Run-DMC doing Aerosmith's 'Walk This Way' have to do with anything? It's a watershed moment in American culture is all: a black rap duo taking a white song, which of course derived from R&B, and turning it back into a mega-hit rap song that opened rap music to a broad white audience. The move heralded the beginning of black artists appropriating and exploiting white musicians (who had exploited and appropriated black music) to sell their music to whites. The practice of sampling 'white' songs, including everyone from Steely Dan (Kanye West, De la Soul) to Led Zeppelin (Ice-T, Schooly D, Puff Daddy) subsequently became popular with rap and hip-hop artists.
So why do I think this is a watershed moment (if a moment has to be pinpointed, in truth it was probably an evolution)? It signified more than just blacks turning the tables on whites. I think it represents a cultural (even a political and economic) shift - blacks transitioning from a community in crisis due to segregation and oppression to a community being culturally accepted, even embraced, in mainstream white society, which in turn precipitated another sort of 'crisis' among black artists. This new 'crisis' elicited the expression of ambivalence in their music about acceptance by whites. I am thinking now about the way hip-hop artists rapped about the symbols of wealth, status and fame. I perceived in that a discomfort with these symbols of white society. Under the guise of celebrating the money and power they were achieving, they also seemed to be asking what it meant. At the same time that they celebrated it, they satirized it. So the struggle for cultural acceptance shifted to the struggle about it. Many hip-hop artists took a step back and started singing about experiences that were much closer to the 'traditional' ones, gang life, oppression by (white) authorities, ghetto poverty, exploitation etc. To be influenced by white culture would be tantamount to identifying with the oppressor, and this became very problematic for some. That was in the 80s. These days the era of the singer-songwriter is long gone. Hip-hop music is the predominant, most profitable and most influential music of our time. It is now the de facto mainstream of the industry, unless you're talking about that 'hillbilly jibberish' music.
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