I was born five years after Hendrix's death, and although I don't care much for his music, I am not surprised by all the racial politics surrounding his career and whatnot.
Does anybody remember the rock group "Living Color" that cam out in the late 1980's? They were a black rock group that had a few songs that got radio airplay, such as "Cult Of Personality" and "Glamour Boys". Then they disappeared from the mainstream music scene. As far as I knew, only Whites raved about them. Same for Tracy Chapman. She was a singer-songwriter in the folk genre who had two well-known songs: "Fast Car" and "Give Me One Reason". Okay, so what is the point of all this? Consider this: when black artists step out of the established R&B/Hip-Hop barrier and record music of a different sort, they are going to be stigmatized, more or less, by blacks but praised by Whites, and therefore they will be labelled "sell-outs" and whatnot. It is from my knowledge that Hendrix joined Band Of Gypsies as a half-hearted nod to "black power" that was prevalent at the time; perhaps he had felt some degree of guilt playing and associating with non-black artists. This type of "guilt" plagued Whitney Houston. Up until her meeting with Bobby Brown, she was sort of a Dionne Warwick of the 1980's, a black singer who wasn't easy to pigeonhole. Her music was R&B enough to make the pop charts and pop enough to make the R&B charts, as well as the AC chart. Her music was sassy, emotive, and polished and helped represent Arista records in the mid-1980's. Eventually, she got hit with the criticisms of not being "black" enough or whatever, and then in an attempt to make good with her peeps, she meets Bobby Brown and then it is downhill from there. Not only does she lose credibility and gloss, she is just another pothead "diva".
If you read articles regarding Nile Rodgers and Chic, Rodgers once said he only formed Chic in order to get a record deal, because disco music was the only kind of music that could get black artists a recording contract. He had formed a punk group called Allah and the Knife-Wielding Punks prior to 1977, and it went nowhere. There is no doubt that Rodgers was yet another artist involved with disco who also suffers from the guilt syndrome so common with disco artists.
This is very off-topic, but I would be interested to hear from anyone who is an aficianado of doo-wop music. This genre which develped from mainly black vocal groups of the 1930's-1950's became very successful and provided some of the earliest R&B/pop crossover successes in popular music. Ironically, these days the overwhelming majority of doo-wop listeners and aficianados are White (predominately of Italian descent), as are the recently formed doo-wop groups.
"Everyone knows the real reason why you got that part it was the time you spent on that casting couch"--Antoine Merriwether
"Excuse me, Miss Thing, but both of us spent time on that couch"--Blaine Edwards
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Originally Written by Nano
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