HarmonicaMick
322 posts
Jun 16, 2015
10:14 AM
|
Your post is so loaded with questions that to answer them thoroughly and thoughtfully would require a fairly lengthy dissertation.
I'm opting for a shorter answer.
First off, I think that your title is based on a false premise, as it presupposes that a racial identity is required in order to play the blues in the first place. That has already been discussed at length in another thread - not mine, by the way, the title of which was deliberately misleading - so I won't fill up the server with any more copy in that regard.
As to 'ownership' and 'claim', the premise is meaningless; unless, that is, someone wishes to manufacture such a claim in an entirely solipsistic, and therefore pointless, way. How can anyone own vibrations in the air, whatever patterns they form, or whoever likes dancing to their beats?
As for any emotional content that I inferred you were attaching to playing the blues - in the last paragraph - as they relate to the sounds themselves, that is also meaningless.
When I was a music undergraduate, we had some fella visit - can't remember his name for the life of me - who gave a lecture on meaning and nuance in music.
I was sober, awake and taking notes, and I remember that he said according to one American study, an awful lot of what we play is not and cannot be written down; instead, it is what musicologists refer to as 'aural tradition'. In short, it's just an academic way of saying we mimic the sounds we hear. It's almost as true of Beethoven as it is of the blues: there are just too many variables to accurately write down on paper what is going on. I can mimic that just as well as a black man, or a green man with yellow spots.
As for Ms Dolezal, I can't really comment on her, other than to guess that she might be a couple of cans short of a six-pack. In truth, I find the news so phoney these days - pretty much for reasons a laid out near the end of my thread - that I hardly watch it anymore, and as such, have not heard what she had to say.
However, there are parts of the UK where very few white kids are left, and they do appear - except for their skin colour, obviously - to be more black than white: they talk in that wholly false, imitation Patois, with the odd mini-gangster phrase thrown in; and they join in on the gang culture of the towns they live in.
After the UK riots in 2011, one of our very stuffy, but extremely intelligent historians over here, Dr David Starkey said, on the BBC's Newsnight, that '... the whites have become blacks." and got the PC bullies calling for his dismissal as a result of saying what he actually thought.
I have no idea whether a similar thing, if true, has happened to Ms Dolezal or anyone else.
|
