ilanin

Day 25's prompt is "A song by an artist no longer living", which was always going to be a rock and roll piece because it's about the only major part of music that I really like I've not dropped in on yet. By "rock and roll" I am referring to the culuturally fusionist blending of boogie-woogie, country, and rhythm and blues which first appeared in the Southern US in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and not the wider genre of music that evolved from it in the 1960s and beyond. The problem is that while I wrote "fusionist" above I could equally well have written "appropriative"; quite a lot of early rock and roll represented the performance of black American music by white artists, sometimes to the extent of being the same pieces of music. Pat Boone pretty much made a career of covering Little Richard (to be fair to Boone, had he not done so, far fewer people would ever have heard of Little Richard or his music; it's a simple fact that music played by a White American could get wider distribution and airplay than that produced by a Black one). That's not to say there weren't "white" elements in rock and roll, because there were, but overall (like a lot of the 1950s) it's a somewhat problematic subgenre. The thing with this is, where do you stop? The music of the Beatles and similar groups which defined the early 1960s comes from a secondary fusion, that of the rock and roll of the late 1950s with the skiffle craze popular in England at the time, and from that starting point it's not particularly difficult to condemn the entire genre of rock music, which seems somewhat unreasonable.

All of which goes some way to explaining why it is I picked a Chuck Berry song out, despite weirdly feeling that Berry (who died in March of this year) is somehow 'less dead' than my original thought of Buddy Holly (who died in a plane crash in 1959...you've heard the song, right?)



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