“All American music is Black music.” The focus on Black Music Month continues as music journalist and theGrio writer Matthew Allen joins Michael Harriot to analyze society’s relationship with pop music and Black artists’ influence on the genre.
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Michael Harriot [00:00:05] So what does going pop mean? Why is it bad to go pop? Are you a sellout if you go pop? Well, we’re going to talk about that today. And that’s why I want to welcome you to theGrio Daily, the only podcast that’ll tell you why going pop is just going white. It’s Black Music Month and we’re going to talk about that and other things with one of my favorite writers at theGrio, Matthew Allen, who is the music critic and columnist at theGrio and who knows more about music than I do. So I had to invite him on here because he’s smarter about music than I do. So I want to welcome you Matthew, to theGrio Daily.
Matthew Allen [00:00:49] Thank you very much for having me, Michael. I’m honored.
Michael Harriot [00:00:51] Today, we’re going to talk about going pop or the idea of going pop. So, Matthew, first of all, there’s two things. What do you mean when you say going pop or Black people or Black musicians went pop, and then what do you think that does popular culture or people mean when they say the same thing, especially when they say it derogatorily?
Matthew Allen [00:01:15] So let’s start with the reverse. So when people say Black people are going pop, they have this broad idea of pop music being a very specific type of genre with a specific type of sound, just like people perceive jazz to be a very specific type of sound, the same way that people perceive rock and roll to be a specific type of sound, the way they perceive hip hop to be a specific type of sound. In actuality, pop music is a homogenous, it’s not a homogenization. It’s really more of a marbleization of several different genres coming together and converging. In my opinion, at least when Black people tend to do it. I think one of the interesting things about the society deeming Black people as being sellouts because they’re going pop is because when they hear white people doing pop music, they’re hearing a sanitized, as you said, a sanitized version of Black music. A perfect example would be a song like Hit Me Baby One More Time by Britney Spears.
Britney Spears [00:02:18] Oh, baby, baby.
Matthew Allen [00:02:20] You know that there’s a lot of Black influence in that song, even though it was written by Max Martin, a Swedish white man. So they perceive that to be a sanitized or homogenized version of Black music. And so that’s not really appreciated by a lot of Black people in the community. So when they see Black people making music, that’s sort of a caricature of something that they’ve made before, they’re going to see it as, Oh, you’re doing this just to carry favor with a white audience or a wider audience, because, you know, pop music is from popular music, whatever white people deem to be the best, just because there are more white people in the country than anything. I have an issue with that because so much of pop music today derives from the innovation of Black musicians. And so that makes it a little bit more complex.
Michael Harriot [00:03:18] Yeah, I think it’s more complex. But okay, so let’s look into this. Let’s dig into that a little bit. Right? So I think this two different ideas of pop music. One is just the surface idea of what’s popular. I think that, like no one would disagree that there are artists who will, because of their need to or want to expand their audience or for money or just because of their influences will kind of sanitize their music specifically to make it appealable to a whiter and necessarily wider audience. Now you have to base that on the idea that all music, all American music is Black music, right? Yes. But even from its beginning, you talk about jazz, you talk about blues. As soon as white people heard it, they took it and did something white to it. Right? Like they took jazz, they took out the improvization, right? They too blues and took out the pain and just, you know, used the guitar with it. Even when you talk about Hit Me Baby One More Time and those Swedish producers, right? What they’re doing is they basically figured out the algorithm of Black music and turn it into a math problem and say, Hey, we can make a hundred these if you need them, right?
Matthew Allen [00:04:41] Very much so.
Michael Harriot [00:04:41] And is based on an algorithm that Black people created, but they’ve sanitized it and monetized it for white consumption. Now, here’s the problem with that whole argument, right? What they’re stripping out, what they’re sanitizing, what they’re doing to make it palatable to white people is taking away the pain, the culture, all of that slurry soup that makes Black people produce these kinds of pieces of art that speak to our existence and our history and our culture. They take that out to make it appealable to white people. And we can notice that. Right. Yeah. And which is on the like, which is, you know, the white man spitting in your face. None of that is in the music. It’s just with an algorithm. And I think that’s what people mean when they say, go, go, pop. And I think, like, the two ideas can coexist at the same time. What do you think?
Matthew Allen [00:05:43] Those two ideas absolutely can exist at the same time. I mean, every contemporary American genre of music was pioneered by African-American artists. I mean, basically, you can trace everything back to ten or less people in terms of contemporary 20th century popular music or any contemporary American genre. Ray Charles. Sam Cooke. James Brown. Louis Jordan. Louis Armstrong. Chuck Berry. Robert Johnson. Big Mama Thornton. It all leads back to those people.
Michael Harriot [00:06:20] Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Jelly Roll Morton.
Matthew Allen [00:06:22] Yeah. Jelly Roll Morton. Louis Johnson. Ant Ammons. It all goes back to those people, you know, those ten, that pocket of ten people who made those innovations. The Thing about Black music, Black people making pop music is that so much of the important aspects of pop music, you know, swing, shuffling drums, syncopated rhythm, you know, chord and bar structure that comes from the innovation of Black artists, particularly going all the way back to, like I said, to Jelly Roll Morton, to Scott Joplin, to Louis Armstrong. Louis Armstrong as the reason why there’s improvization in pop music. Listen to Careless Whisper. You hear that saxophone solo. That’s because of, that’s because of Pops Armstrong. So, yes, the sanitation of the Black aspects of it from a thematic standpoint and an execution and attack standpoint, that’s really where a lot of people are having the issue with in society is the execution and the attack. You know what I’m saying?
Matthew Allen [00:07:36] Like some guitarists who are trying to make a pop record in the studio will play it very straight. They’ll just play the notes on the page, whereas a Black musician might do a little bit more flare. And that has to do with just the origin of where they come from. Culturally, culturally, white American music derives from the European music that relied very heavily on classical arrangements and things that were very structured. And so much of Black music is from West Africa, which depends a lot on improvization particularly vocal improvization and rhythm. So you bring those together and then you get pop music. But the foundation of that derives from the latter in terms of the syncopation, in terms of the rhythm, in terms of a call and response. So they can coexist that. Yes. When you take out the cultural subject matter and the execution and attack from a musical and an instrumental and a vocal aspect and strip that. That’s the sanitation of Black music. But the basis of of that that’s left in terms of the swing, the syncopation and, you know, and everything of that nature and the rhythm, there’s still Blackness in the very root of it. It’s just been stripped back. And so when Black people say our community says, oh, Lionel Richie or whoever or Michael Jackson, Tina Turner or whoever they pick that day are doing pop music, they’re like, can’t we think that maybe they’re just trying to, you know, do what they’ve been doing to us all along? I mean, pop music exists because of minstrelsy. I mean, you know, things like Turkey in the Straw, which is like which is the ice cream truck song. That’s from minstrelsy. That’s from people, white people wearing Blackface. You know, that’s where that comes from. You know, Old Susanna and Old Dixie, that’s the foundation of American Pop from slavery days. So it all harkens back from that.
Michael Harriot [00:09:42] Join us next time on theGrio Daily for episode two. If you like what you heard, please give us a five star review. Download theGrio and subscribe to the show and to share it with everyone you know. Please email all questions, suggestions and compliments to podcasts at theGrio dot com.
[00:10:02] You are now listening to theGrio’s Black Podcast Network. Black Culture Amplified.
Being Black: The 80s Podcast [00:10:07] The Eighties gave us unforgettable songs from Bob Marley, De La Soul and Public Enemy. Being Black: The 80s is a podcast docu series hosted by me Touré, looking at the most important issues of the eighties through the songs of the decade. A decade when crack kingpins controlled the streets but lost their humanity. You couldn’t be like no soft, smiling, happy go lucky drug dealer. You had to suppress that. It was a time when disco was part of gay liberation. It provided the information to counter narratives that were given to gay people by the straight world. This is the funkiest history class you’ll ever take. Join me, Touré for Being Black: The 80s on theGrio Black Podcast Network, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
