Yeah, but even that “young, talented iconoclast” stole everything he knew from more talented people who did it better
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I’m personally a fan of Carter, but if a phone recording emerged of Carter using incredibly offensive antisemitic language with other powerful elected leaders I would be forced to reconsider the man and his legacy. It might even force me to consider uncomfortable questions like “were Carter’s criticisms of Israel really driven by a desire for peaceful resolution or were they actually driven, at least in part, by personal prejudice?”
Something tells me most Nixon and Reagan fans won’t have any such period of reflection.
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I understand his importance in popular music, although I think plenty of others who influenced him were more important (all the earlier rockers). I’m still not a huge fan. YMMV.
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Oh, I’m not a big fan, but I used to activly sneer at his work the way many make snice comments about nickelback. There are certainly other early rock and rollers that I prefer.
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Well, “stole”? Elvis wasn’t really a songwriter, just a performer. Tunes he did that were written by R&B musicians (Roy Brown, Clyde McPhatter, Arthur Cruddup, etc.) were still credited to them on the record (as opposed to Jimmy Page claiming he wrote Willie Dixon songs), if those artists didnt get paid blame the record company accountants not Elvis personally.
As I see it Elvis was a necessary evil, a photogenic yokel who made it OK for white kids to listen to music from the other side of the tracks, if he didn’t exist we would have had to invent him. Any beef we might have with Elvis is really a beef with the sad realities of America in the 1950’s.
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Necessary to who though? I don’t think “entertaining white kids too prejudiced to like the same music from a black face” is that compelling a cause.
It would be an overwhelmingly compelling cause if you were a white music executive, but I don’t think it was “necessary” to everyone else.
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You’re right, not “stole”, more like Columbused. Black people had been playing that music for decades, only better. Then Elvis comes along and white folks discovered something new! No, no, not the original artists, just the Elvis covers. The original artists still rarely performed outside the chitlin circuit, and many died penniless.
It was always okay. If society says it wasn’t, then fuck society.
I’m okay with that.
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depressing article in slate about how it’s worse politically to call someone racist than it is to actually bE racist https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/08/ronald-reagan-richard-nixon-racism-monkeys-tape-jimmy-carter.html
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Oh this again
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i mean. it’s not an excuse to give up. I really don’t think that’s the point here. The point is carter was right. Reagan was a racist POS. I think it’s a condemnation of the media who turned it around as a criticism of Carter. in this instance. I mean the article quotes david brooks as saying reagan wasnt racist. Slate is not siding with David Brooks. It’s pointing out he was wrong. It’s time to call racists racist.
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Well, I know it is a very , very low bar, but…
(you know where I’m going with this, right?)
I’m afraid I missed the part about Pat.
Nixon was an unapologetic wife beater
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It’s easy for us to look back at 1950’s America and say “it was always OK to listen to black music”, but it wasn’t for a lot of communities.
American culture in the 1950’s was too rigid and too conservative, and I think for kids to suddenly hear Elvis’s milquetoast version of R&B opened up their ears so that the charts would be more open to black artists in the future. You can look at the Billboard charts from 1955 to 1965 and see the progression-- when Elvis first hit cornballs like Mitch Miller and Pat Boone were still chart toppers. I’m trying to imagine a mechanism where white America comes around to black music without someone like Elvis to break down the door for them, I suppose it’s possible but requires giving white America a lot more credit than it deserves.
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Maybe, but it seems to me that the black-led Civil Rights Movement deserves a fuck ton more credit for making whites in general see blacks as more human.
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True enough. I see American culture as a web or maelstrom, with competing forces and lots of different aspects that contribute to “whatever happens next.” I don’t think Elvis is anywhere near as important as MLK (and can’t believe I even have to say that) but I don’t think he’s really the embodiment of all white America’s worst aspects either. Elvis-hating is just so simplistic. I don’t even like his music, but I recognize he had an impact on our culture that I personally think resulted in more benefit than harm.
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Elvis made it safer for white kids to listen to a new generation of majority white singers.
Don’t make more of that than what it is.
Elvis didn’t just knock out the “Pat Boone” types, he also pushed out groups like the Platters, and mostly just re-styled an earlier system where lily-white close-harmony groups (think the Chordettes) sang styles of popular songs first made popular by black soul and gospel groups. There have been many generations of music where you can see the “help” that a genre of music gets when a “Great White Hope” “allows” white people to access black music without black faces. It sounded revolutionary to teen Baby Boomers, because it was a new style of music, but it wasn’t a radically new system. Jazz, Gospel harmonies, etc. all sounded revolutionary and “too black” to earlier generations, and each had white people make ten times the coin when they directly modelled themselves on earlier black groups.
The people who most benefited from that crossover were 1. white america, who got to listen to a fresh style of music without seriously addressing their prejudices, and 2. white-owned and run music companies who were able to strip mine the struggles of the earlier generation and offer it as somehow better when it came from random white kids.
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Yeah, I’ve never been a real fan of the “music did the real work of desegregation” considering I’ve known a fuck ton of people who love black musical forms who were also racist or held segregationist views. It’s the political and social movements that did the heavy lifting, even if the music helped somewhat. Radio was always a desegregated space, because no one could see your skin on the radio. None the less, during the age of radio (20s-30s), where both blues and country got airplay, American was at the nadir of racial intolerance…
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My dad sold records in Englewood (South Side of Chicago) during this period when I was a kid. Later he opened a second site in a store downstate. I think the only artist the two stores had in common was Elvis, who remarkably did sell in the Chicago store.
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