Black innovation?

[celticdale]

glad some people found my post useful - i guess it was worth spending time writing a long one.

anyways, Hollywood has also been remaking loads of 'foreign' films with white American actors/actresses... So yeah, colour of skin definitely does seem to have impact on ticket sales in film industry as well.

'skin colours don't matter' is a nice and appealing slogan, but you can't confuse how you wish the world to be with how the world is now.

Another difficult issue is - try to imagine that you are working for a big hollywood film production company and you are given the script for an ultra-commercial romantic comedy and asked to cast actors/actresses; do you think YOU will be colour blind in picking the cast while keeping the ticket sales in mind?

Depends.. Is Halle Berry or Beyoncé up for the part?

How about if you were casting for porn movie? Surely you will have preference for what skin colour actors/actresses you prefer? How about when people choose advertisement models?

It all depends. Right now the light-skinned, mixed ethnicity thing is in vogue as far as women. Jada, Halle, Beyoncé, Tyra..
Mainly because many suburban caucasian men find them 'exotic' and sexy.

I think skin colour preference is inevitable at the moment. I'm not sure about future, but one thing for sure is that skin colour preference does exist in large scale and if people can make better profit using this they probably will..

yeh but it can work both ways.
My current acting headshot.

I think in the future we'll all be nice and brown or tan. I look foward to it. History shows that we'll come up with some other reason for hating each other, though.

[pooshka]

Lady J -> Well what you said is basically what I meant - for whatever the reason, 'skin colour' do mean something to buyers, be it end consumers or media production people or whatever. All I'm saying is that like it or not, skin colour certainly is a 'factor' to be considered, both for end consumers who choose what to buy, and for marketing people who think about 'what to sell', and of course, for people who try to sell to these marketing people so they can be sold further to the end consumers ('sold' here isn't meant in any insulting way - if you have a better expression please let me know).

[celticdale]

I though Les Paul invented the guitar?

naw...he just invented the les paul.


(and multi track recording!!)

And tape delay, right? I think he was the first to do that.

[jebudas]

Now obviously in the past there have been disgraceful acts that stand out because of their race (Ahem, Vanilla Ice), but overall, people just take what they like, combine it what they want to hear, and make something new.

Isnt music just continually growing? Arent we influenced by everything we hear (white, black, purple, etc)? If that's true, how can anyone take full credit?

[celticdale]

Lady J -> Well what you said is basically what I meant - for whatever the reason, 'skin colour' do mean something to buyers, be it end consumers or media production people or whatever. All I'm saying is that like it or not, skin colour certainly is a 'factor' to be considered, both for end consumers who choose what to buy, and for marketing people who think about 'what to sell', and of course, for people who try to sell to these marketing people so they can be sold further to the end consumers ('sold' here isn't meant in any insulting way - if you have a better expression please let me know).

Depends on how you use it, right? Marketing targets a group of people and that's okay while police target a group of people and that's profiling. Points of view can differ.

Time to go to bed.... but first I'm going to kiss LadyJ's picture goodnight!

[Sascha Franck]

or why unscrupilous sites like this sell ' Celebrity Skin Whitening Pills"

Maybe Jacko knows...

Re: Blues. It didn't need a guitar at first as it originates from the work "shouts" and songs of some cotton picking slaves. Don't think the poor f**kers got enough money to get them a guitar anyways... (actually, some body percussion stuff seems to originate in that area as well).
In fact, the guitar, while originating in africa (and later, in the form we know it today, from spain and italy) seems to be the "white part" of the whole blues thing as it seemed to be used mostly for country and western styles at first. But of course it just fitted in nicely as it was rather cheap and transportable.

And tee boy, many of the original african things that could be called the ancestors of blues are indeed in 4/4 - and they even allready seem to ustilize the 2+4 backbeat quite sometimes. At least that's what I remember from the documentaries we watched during music history classes at the conservatory.

[Mr Arkadin]

Re: Blues. It didn't need a guitar at first as it originates from the work "shouts" and songs of some cotton picking slaves

Which brings us round to my original link to the Channel 4 programmeGospel Truth which gave strong evidence that the early Black American slaves were influenced by Scottish folk music. Personally i don't give a monkey's, but it gives a different perspective and i wonder how many people would accept this it even if it was conclusively proved?

[Sascha Franck]

Wow, is there some automatic word filtering happening now?
I wrote f**kers instead of f**k.

[Sascha Franck]

Bah, indeed. That pretty much sucks.

[Metanol]

theres probably some mad underground shit going on right now in brazil and india and who knows where else and none of us have a clue about it

most of the worlds music doesnt even get recorded

i know where... you were close when you said india but it will take someone American to big it up. blow it up and make it a household word and sound.

i have heard the future and will have it on my pop album

In the world maybe about 1 billion people listen to Bhangra pop, but its not big because in west it is not selling much?

[Gridlocked]

I though Les Paul invented the guitar?

naw...he just invented the les paul.


(and multi track recording!!)

And tape delay, right? I think he was the first to do that.

Yep! Sorry, carry on...

[Lady J]

theres probably some mad underground shit going on right now in brazil and india and who knows where else and none of us have a clue about it

most of the worlds music doesnt even get recorded

i know where... you were close when you said india but it will take someone American to big it up. blow it up and make it a household word and sound.

i have heard the future and will have it on my pop album

In the world maybe about 1 billion people listen to Bhangra pop, but its not big because in west it is not selling much?

It's not Bhangra I'm talkin' bout but something else from the east. Beside's, Missy and others already blew that up but unfortunately they didn't really educate people on the origins of the music and that's a shame because there is such a large south asian community in the US who's music would have suddenly gotten a lot more attention.

Point of fact. When I do what I set out to do, i plan to have four people from (un)said country on stage so people get it, get where this fusion style partially comes from and everything. i dont want to give away the store. im excited though. and it aint gonna be using people as props like someone's Harijuku girls either...

[luCiPHer]

glad some people found my post useful - i guess it was worth spending time writing a long one.

anyways, Hollywood has also been remaking loads of 'foreign' films with white American actors/actresses... So yeah, colour of skin definitely does seem to have impact on ticket sales in film industry as well.

'skin colours don't matter' is a nice and appealing slogan, but you can't confuse how you wish the world to be with how the world is now.

Another difficult issue is - try to imagine that you are working for a big hollywood film production company and you are given the script for an ultra-commercial romantic comedy and asked to cast actors/actresses; do you think YOU will be colour blind in picking the cast while keeping the ticket sales in mind?

How about if you were casting for porn movie? Surely you will have preference for what skin colour actors/actresses you prefer? How about when people choose advertisement models?

I think skin colour preference is inevitable at the moment. I'm not sure about future, but one thing for sure is that skin colour preference does exist in large scale and if people can make better profit using this they probably will..

well, but acors in hollywood movies are not all "anti black", choose a recent hollywood movie at random, you will find at least one character that is a likable black person, and a "strong woman" as well, sometimes it's a black strong woman

imagine, something really BIG, like matrix, without morpheus and trinity, they would have burned down the studio

[gambaytheunspoken]

British rock has far less blues influence in general and American rock [I don't like] is tainted by blues influence.
Just to be clear, these are my labels

You obviously aren't going very far back historically with your 'british' rock (which paid a great deal of homage to blues at a time when in america it was still considered 'black' music - in the pejorative sense).
So i'm quite clear that these are your own labels.

Bones is obviously a very silly man with a lot of silly unfounded opinions that makes him, well, Bones.
I remember seeing a film clip of Paul Macartnery and John Lennon shortly after their arrival in the US in the early 60's and some reporters from Time and various big media asked them what their plans were, and they said they were going to visit Muddy Waters and I think Johnny Lee Hooker (I'm paraphrasing, the original quote has much more panache), and these white reporters didn't know who Muddy Waters and these other blues musicians were. So if some like Bones want to attempt to divide music between less black-influenced versus more black-influenced, good luck to them, it just shows an incredibel form of outright blank ingnorance. To illustrate in a very superficial way: just the instrumentation in your average "white" rock band was a black innovation: trap drums, guitar, bass. People like Bones, and there are many like him, are just historical illiterates.
ciao!

[gambaytheunspoken]

Teeboy wrote:

But no matter what, jazz and blues are firmly rooted in European music.

I write: give an example. Have your ever examined your typical twelve-bar blues progression? Nothing like it exists in European music. From a Euro-theoretic perspective, the twelve bar blues doesn't make "musical" sense, but it works. Bop musicians in the 40's borrowed liberally from people like Debussy, some of their chordal progressions, but it also went the other way. Consider Debussy's "Golliwog Rag."

Ciao!