"Blacks Invented Rock Music"

Show me in traditional African music, anything faintly resembling Jazz, Ragtime or Blues: it does not exist. At the absolute most is the percussion. The rhythms of early Jazz can already be heard in Anglo-Saxon operettas of the 19th Century. It is true to say that there have been some magnificent and even revolutionary black performers of Jazz, though more rarely in Rock'n'Roll with the possible exception of Chuck Berry. What is undeniable is that whites have promoted all phases of its evolution. Like it or not, that's just how it is.

Now can we put this silly myth that "Blacks invented Rock'n'Roll" to rest?

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This is pretty anti-Semitic of you desu

It was a mixture of negro spirituals, European folk, African polyrhythms and western melodies and scales. Anyone who says otherwise deserves an L

Show me how it is in anyway linked to Traditional African music.

You can't.

WE WUZ ROCKSTARS N SHEEEEEEEEEIT

What are the song structures of the negro spiritual
What are polyrhythms

Turn on your brain

>Black people ripped from their own land and culture and undergo generations of abuse further stripping them of their original culture
>Why can't I find a clear and obvious example of similar music from their traditional ancestral origins?

Talking Heads perfected African music

It also includes Hawaiian slide guitar and some other things not of those origins. Blues wasn't a genre that had a remotely unified format until the mid 1920s

Any attempt to attribute it to any one race is futile and a sure sign of a racialist trying to talk you into accepting the white man's burden or this weird meme that black people are superior culture creators, which is common among people who believe, but do not admit, that they are inferior in other aspects. It was ideas being bounced between two peoples detached from their homeland. Rock music can not be attributed to one race.

It can only be attributed to one country.

This. And not only that, Rock music is Southern music before it was anything else. Same with Jazz and the Blues.

This. To say that it was 100% one race would imply that music developed in complete isolation which is culturally improbable if not impossible

youtube.com/watch?v=4cCwpDdFVXg

sounds pretty much like blues to me

ITT: white boys trying to make excuses for liking black genres

>Blacks Invented Rock Music
that's a fact, cunt. groups like vu, the fall or stooges adopts the direc and simple 50's rock. the beatles never existed

>Turn on your brain
S O Y

>The rhythms of early Jazz can already be heard in Anglo-Saxon operettas

What in the actual fuck are you even talking about

>The rhythms of early Jazz can already be heard in Anglo-Saxon operettas

''Why won't people respond to my thread? I'm not stupid!''

>Anglo-Saxon operettas of the 19th Century
No they can't. West African and European rhythmic values are completely different. In European traditions all rhythmic values are either reached by adding or subtracting from whole numbers or by the division of something by a half. The only real exception is the triplet. Even the earliest examples we have of jazz are clearly indebted to the non-symmetrical rhythmic values of West African music.

>West African and European rhythmic values are completely different.
You should provide sources before saying this kind of bullshit. Because if that was true western music notation shouldn't be able to describe Jazz/blues music, and it is.

>Because if that was true western music notation shouldn't be able to describe Jazz/blues music, and it is.
>and it is
Nice control of the English language there. It can't. That's why jazz people talk about swing (although that word means whatever the fuck people want it to mean). Swing is in this respect the aspect of jazz rhythm that can't be conveyed in notation. Western notation only provides an approximation of jazz rhythm. It's literally jazz 101.

>It can only be attributed to one country.
The UK?

Swing can be perfectly conveyed by notation and explained by Western music theory, it's basically triplets with the half note muted together with a consistent rubatto.
If they usually just use normal quavers and put a "swing" indication in jazz sheet music is because it's a pain in the ass to write and it makes it look too clogged up.
You can find swing-like rhythm in several classical compositions of the 19th century, the most popular being the 32nd piano sonata by Beethoven. It wasn't anything new.

There are degrees to swing. It isn't one thing. It also only accounts for some of the differences in rhythm between African and European music. It's not just the and of the beat being played late. If you subdivide the and you will find it also isn't symmetrical.

>it's basically triplets with the half note muted together with a consistent rubatto
>consistent rubatto
>rubbatto
And here you freely admit that the notation doesn't reflect what is actually happening so you have to add in rubato (spelled with only one t). Rubato as a marking doesn't give exact information to the performer. So even if someone added it onto every note it was needed it wouldn't provide the information on what to do. Also rubato means an increase or decrease of tempo. Swing doesn't mean it's speeding up or slowing down. To try to use rubato in this instance is incorrect. If it isn't written (and why on Earth would anyone ever try to do that) then you are saying that the performer must do things that are not notated to achieve the desired result. You are in effect saying that the rhythmic system of western notation is unable to do exactly one of the things I am saying it is having difficulty with.

Bump for interesting discussion

>And here you freely admit that the notation doesn't reflect what is actually happening so you have to add in rubato (spelled with only one t). Rubato as a marking doesn't give exact information to the performer. So even if someone added it onto every note it was needed it wouldn't provide the information on what to do. Also rubato means an increase or decrease of tempo. Swing doesn't mean it's speeding up or slowing down. To try to use rubato in this instance is incorrect. If it isn't written (and why on Earth would anyone ever try to do that) then you are saying that the performer must do things that are not notated to achieve the desired result. You are in effect saying that the rhythmic system of western notation is unable to do exactly one of the things I am saying it is having difficulty with.
Expression markings are a part of the sheet, and often as important as the music itself.
Every single classical piece has expression markings to indicate the performer how to play the piece, and yes, they all have a degree of subjectivity exceptuating tempo. Music is a performing art, not even classical performers want to be told how to play every piece down to each minute detail, so it's best to leave a certain degree of freedom to them while still clarifying the intent of the composer.
That doesn't mean musical notation is limited, that simply means that if you're not going to feed the sheet music to a robot or an extremely autistic individual, it's quicker to just leave a vague indication that'll be inmediately understood and accept that it'll be understood somewhat different by each performer.
"Swing" is exactly that, it refers to a type of syncopation and rhythm that can be perfectly defined, but it's not written down because there's no point, since just leaving the expression will be enough for every performer and you won't need to shit up the sheet that much.

*Paul Simon

You are holding different positions at the same time. First you argue that western notation can accurately do jazz rhythms and then argue that it doesn't matter that they can't because performers don't like to be told on what to do too exactly. Jazz rhythms can only be approximated in western notation. Triplets, dotted rhythms and alternating notes of varying length can sometimes replicate this but not necessarily. Your best attempt is convoluted and won't even work in many situations. There are rhythmic patterns that western music cannot notate with accuracy.

>that can be perfectly defined, but it's not written down because there's no point, since just leaving the expression will be enough for every performer and you won't need to shit up the sheet that much
There is a big difference between string players only needing key bowing markings and being able to infer what to do, and this example. If you wanted to you could do all the bow markings. You couldn't write out in full the rhythms of many pieces of music from African derived genres not because the performer knows what to do but because the notation itself cannot accurately describe what is happening. It's only an approximation.

I feel like we have gotten off track. My original point was that these two traditions have different understanding of rhythm. You are arguing that West African sense of rhythm is not different to western music. Your point seems to be that because something can be notated in western notation it is therefore not different at all from western music. Even if it were true that western notation could do what you say it does that doesn't mean that they aren't different.

No I don't, western notation can substitute all expression markings (exceptuating tempo) with exact replacements in term of rhythm, if it's not done is because it'd be an inmense pain to do so and no composer or performer cares about faithfulness to that degree, as simple as that.
This goes for syncopation (which was already done before jazz/blues music came), and the "swing" rhythm (which was too already done in a primitive version).
African and European rhythm isn't all different. You keep trying to give this "mystic" and weird quality to African rhythm when it just isn't there. The difference between Africa and western music isn't in the rhythm per se, but in the focus in percussion. African music is tribal, primitive, and mostly meant to be accompanied by dance, so there's a great focus in percussion. All primitive music in all areas of the world started being highly percussive, because that's what comes easier to us as human beings. Western art music at that point had centuries of development and had forgotten those roots long ago.
While western art music was starting to explore dissonance and entering the modern period, blacks in America started using western theory and instruments to go back to the most basic human impulse: the rhythm. They didn't invent something new, they just turned the focus back to percussion. If that exploded in popularity was because in the interwar period, western art music became brainy and almost unlistenable to normal audiences. Too experimental and dissonant. Jazz/blues was the entirely opposite, instead of focusing on complex experimental stuff that sounded like shit they just went back to the roots of all music: percussion. And it catched hard because rhythm ithat comes by instinct to all of us. We all inconsciously begin shaking our heads and moving our feet when we hear a simple but catchy rhythm, it's just how things work.

Soy jokes are how you know you've won an argument.

Nice. This about nails it, too.

I'm going to have to take this right back to the start because this is getting so far off track. West-African rhythms (and many of the genres inspired by it) are built out of cross-beats and swing. This is fundamental to this style of music. Let me quote myself, this being the quote that started off everything.

>West African and European rhythmic values are completely different.
I probably misspoke here. Perhaps it would have been better to say something like West African and European rhythm is completely different. Let's ignore everything about notation. In western music you have evenly divided measures with beats falling in completely even places within the measure with there only being one rhythm.
This is fundamental to the vast majority of western music. West African music is built off of uneven beat lengths falling with heavy reliance on polyrhythms. These sycnopations aren't an addition to the rhythm as they would be in western music. They are as fundamental as the "first" rhythm. This is the fundamental state of their understanding of rhythm. It's clear that from the very bottom of it rhythm is very different in both traditions.

You are literally saying that because there are rare examples off certain forms of syncopation and swing in western music that therefore West African music and western music are the same rhythmically. You are saying there is no difference between music that is fundamentally polyrhythmic and music that has a polyrhythm in it.

>You keep trying to give this "mystic" and weird quality to African rhythm
I have never once done anything even remotely like this.

>Western art music at that point had centuries of development and had forgotten those roots long ago
>They didn't invent something new, they just turned the focus back to percussion
This whole tangent has nothing to do with anything.

yeah he never gives a single example
/thread

>This whole tangent has nothing to do with anything.
It reframes the entire debate as to whether or not black people "invented" Rock, Jazz or the Blues. It's less of a question of "invention" and more a question of changing the focus.