In 2017, identity is the topic at the absolute center of our conversations about music. Watch a mere silhouette of a human being dancing to music, and you can immediately guess things about who they are and where they came from. How else do you create a situation in which, after decades of hip-hop’s being the main engine of pop music, it can still be a little complicated when nonblack people rap? That vexed thing we call “identity” leans its considerable weight on all kinds of questions: which sounds comfort us or excite us where and how we listen to them how we move our bodies as they play. Then all of this changed, and we decided to start thinking of pop music not as a folk tradition but as an art we started to picture musicians as people who invented sounds and styles, making intellectual decisions about their work.īut music is still, pretty obviously, tied to people. Even when it was played in a condescending ethnic-joke burlesque of who those people actually were - even when it was pretty aggressively racist - the notion remained: Different styles sprang from different people. There was a simple notion behind all this stuff, and it was the belief that music, like food, came from someplace, and from some people.

You had your “Latin” numbers, your Hawaiian ones, your “Asian” songs - light ethnic pastiches laid out cheerily, like an international buffet that serves falafel one day and schnitzel the next, never too bothered about how accurate the recipes are. A nation that considered itself very space-age and worldly enjoyed quaint spins on sentimental Italian music (“That’s Amore” and its pizza pies) and Trinidadian calypso songs about hard, simple labor (“Day-O” and its bananas). Sometime in the 1950s, the mainstream saw its last great gasp of this habit. This was how we reckoned with our melting pot: crudely, obliviously, maybe with a nice tune and a beat you could dance to. And of course there were the minstrel shows, in which people with mocking, cork-painted faces sang what they pretended were the songs of Southern former slaves. Some were sung in a spirit of abuse others were written or performed by members of those groups themselves. Vaudeville acts, for instance, had tunes for just about every major immigrant group: the Italian number, the Yiddish number, the Irish one, the Chinese.

+ Spit Out the Bone Metallica Full TrackĪ strange thing you learn about American popular music, if you look back far enough, is that for a long time it didn’t much have “genres” - it had ethnicities.

24 Your Best American Girl Mitski Full Track.

19 Trolley Song Cécile McLorin Salvant Full Track.17 Side to Side Ariana Grande Full Track.15 Copper Canteen James McMurtry Full Track.

13 Hold My Mule Shirley Caesar Full Track.11 Barok Main Mica Levi & Oliver Coates Full Track.2 You Want It Darker Leonard Cohen Full Track.

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