Having worked on the paper this weekend, I thought I would flesh out some ideas with respect to the readings from previous weeks that I was not able to address before. First, however I'd like to talk about the a chapter of Beneath the Underdog in which Charles Mingus is given a lesson in Judo by his Japanese friend Noba Oke. Charles had just been bullied and rescued by Noba, who brought him into the back room of his grocery store to teach him some self-defense moves with his brother. A couple of crucial lines stood out to me: "Train your eyes and reflexes to respond to the law that governs your opponent's mind and body. Forget yourself. Your life depends on what your enemy is doing." (48). This was striking for several reasons. I was thinking about writing using social and artistic othering as the crux for my argument regarding identity as a "mobile process" (Frith), and I feel like Mingus is able to define himself through music only in the context of having been forced to do so after the whites commodified previous black art forms. It's out of necessity to invent a musical expression to maintain social distance (to stay in the margins as The Germs point out in "What We Do Is Secret") that gives blacks aesthetic power over whites. You must abdicate your own sense of self and surrender it to the process of self-exploration so that new avenues of expression may be experimented with. He mentions on the next page that "the man who attacks is at a disadvantage." This makes sense both practically as well as in the context of my argument. It is the socially otherING people (the oppressive white people) who, upon forcing blacks to find new outlets of expression and identity, find themselves always wanting to be a part of the in-crowd. But because they're whites, it makes it really difficult to embody a mode or 'style' that is distinctly and unmistakably black. These things I found interesting in that chapter....
As for other readings, I found a similar tie in the reading by Wondrich in which he states that when "too much pop as happened" it signifies a deviation from the original intent which was spontaneous and contained "complete abandon" and reckless energy. Also, "hot music" is synonymous with black music, which COULD NOT BE MORE TRUE! All of the biggest dance beats, house music hits, club music is made by blacks or at the very least in what many would consider the black style. I suppose one of my concerns now is that whites are so successfully adopting black styles and performing them alongside blacks (Drake and Eminem), I wonder where (if the cycle of othering contintues) blacks will take popular music next...? Or is a black president a harbinger of a society where social othering is completely a thing of the past and thus artistic othering will cease to be imperative. Will another group take its place? I don't know. I guess this is living history and who knows where trends will take us (I hope it takes us back to a less electronic-sounding time...but that's just me).
In other News, my friend goes to UCSD and he told me about this: http://www.bet.com/news/UCSDRacialIncident . Basically the N word was sent out to the whole student body and people are pissed. I definitely see how that would be offensive, but they're saying how UCSD has a huge race problem...which I think is no more true for them as it is for SC or any other school. It's funny how a school can be painted in such a negative light and tainted by one moron's outburst when it could have just as easily happened anywhere else (and I'm SURE racism is more rampant at other schools...). I also think UCSD's first offense regarding a frat having a "Compton Cookout" is no more offensive than Trailer Trash themed parties I've seen at SC where people dress up like slutty hillbillies. I know it's not really musically-related, but it's musically-related, which is something.