Kavekk wrote:
Why is a black man's music owned by his culture (whatever that means)?
I'll take a stab. We like to over-generalize our personal feelings to our 'cultural group?'
Just for fun, let's stick with the Nirvana/grunge thing as a 'white people' example. Take the more rural areas of Western Washington in the 80s and early 90s. It was an area suffering from the inevitable decline of the traditional logging and fishing industries which had been powering along unsustainably for years. There's high unemployment, and a general feeling of hopelessness with many people as their towns are more or less shutting down around them. Suddenly there are no good jobs around, and there really isn't much hope of finding anything without moving out of the area, leaving your family behind, etc. Heaven help your prospects if you're a youth growing up in that area. So out of that you get this "dark, gloomy, woe-is-me" Seattle sound that was particularly reflective of the local culture at the time. So does it seem particularly weird when some silver-spoon Disney Princess takes up a grunge song? Are there people who would get offended by it? Um yeah, but seriously try defining a universal cultural boundary there or something.
It's not exactly black and white...
Okay, awful pun I know...
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That monster in the mirror, he just might be you. -Grover