I was just listening to the sountrack to Treasure Planet, and I couldn’t help but be amazed at how cool the music is. There used to be a lot of music from white people back a few decades ago that was cool like this.
It’s worth mentioning, that Japan is still basically living in this era. Anime still makes music sort of like this, but usually more cheesy and less cool.
Anyhow, this is one of those genres (Rock or Rock n Roll) that black people supposedly sort of invented. But it’s impossible to imagine black people making music that pulls your heart like that. Black music, at its best, is like the Temptations, where it is cute and high-energy, but ultimately kind of limited.
When whites adopted Rock n Roll and Jazz, they took experimental genres that were rather jagged and annoying to listen to, mutated them into a variety of forms that were quite different (if even particularly inspired at all by the originals of the genres) and made them actually work.
White people have made such a vast array of music. The world is always copying it.
It’s interesting that black people get so much praise for music, just because they dance and yell authoritatively. Even though their music is kind of annoying and people listen to it far less until the music industry just shoves it down our throats like they’ve done with Rap in the post-Trayvon Martin/post-Bush era.
When you look at music that was good enough to become sountracks for Disney movies, you have stuff like Owl City, Phil Collins, Goo-goo Dolls. It’s white music. Not to mention the standard Disney songs and the classical parts of the sountracks.
But there is absolutely no praise or recognition for white people’s music. None at all. We hear all of this praise and recognition for any and every other race’s achievements, but none for whites.
Yeah black music is shallow. Even “deeper,” “more complex” stuff like Igor or Cosmogramma amounts to little more than pretty candy. The best musicians of all are Japanese.
Treasure Planet was my most watched movie when I was a child, it’s very nostalgic to me. It’s a uniquely great animated movie.
What you describe is a society-wide issue, and applies to so much more than just music: black people’s everything is overrated, and white people’s everything is underrated. This is because of differences in standards. White people, despite being disparaged on every front in popular culture, are still held to much higher standards than everyone else. If you are a creator who’s white, you must be a once in a million talent, or an already acclaimed creator to be promoted at all. Some publishers will refuse to publish any and all writing by white male writers.
One serious result of this phenomenon, is that you should not trust black doctors and medical workers. Because of affirmative action, they don’t need to meet the standards that others do to be qualified for those jobs. But in other areas, it’s unfortunately becoming more and more rational to also dismiss black people’s input to creative projects, if you think they were promoted despite the lack of creative merit (they likely were).
In music, one of my favourite things is when the melody itself tells the listener a story - you could argue that all melodies do, but only classical music and a handful of the modern day genres do so with intention. I haven’t noticed any black musicians doing so (but I’d be happy to hear examples to the contrary). I think that any musician can do so, but perhaps some genres are indeed limited in this regard.
I have a reflexive, violent internal reaction to hip-hop, trap, and the like outside of memes and meme compilations. It actually kind of pisses me off that Soundcloud rappers think their music deserves respect.