Refuting the myth that Black American music/culture is "Europeanized".

[FIFTY ROUND DRUM]

I did not expect this thread to take me where I was taken

 

[Apollo Creed]

 

[IllmaticDelta]

I did not expect this thread to take me where I was taken

 

[The Amerikkkan Idol]

I did not expect this thread to take me where I was taken

This is lowkey one of the greatest threads on here.

 

[Sankofa Alwayz]

Azealia Banks is Trini. Isn't that interesting? She feels she can speak on black American culture when she isn't even apart of it lol. And then talks down on it and flip flops. She's a fukkin moron. And she's an example of what OP was talking about.

This. Outside the music, fukk Azealia Banks

 

[Sankofa Alwayz]

@IllmaticDelta @Diasporan Royalty

On the topic of music, myself being from the DMV area this got me thinking...Is GoGo music more of an exception to the rule? It’s a fusion genre of Funk and Soul music that’s very percussion-driven with significant drum patterns and polyrhythms of the Lower West African Forest Belt region but it also has the call-and-response and string (and a couple of wind) instrument influences of the Upper West African Sahelian/Sudanic region. One of the most signature sounds of GoGo music is also the usage of cowbells.

And if it mean any clues, most of us Black folks from the DMV have ancestral ties to the southern/Tidewater/Chesapeake region of VA and the Carolinas (particularly northeast NC all the way down to the Low Country of SC as a good number of us including myself have distant relatives who are of the Gullah-Geechie people).

 

[IllmaticDelta]

@IllmaticDelta @Diasporan Royalty

On the topic of music, myself being from the DMV area this got me thinking...Is GoGo music more of an exception to the rule? It’s a fusion genre of Funk and Soul music that’s very percussion-driven with significant drum patterns and polyrhythms of the Lower West African Forest Belt region but it also has the call-and-response and string (and a couple of wind) instrument influences of the Upper West African Sahelian/Sudanic region. One of the most signature sounds of GoGo music is also the usage of cowbells.

And if it mean any clues, most of us Black folks from the DMV have ancestral ties to the southern/Tidewater/Chesapeake region of VA and the Carolinas (particularly northeast NC all the way down to the Low Country of SC as a good number of us including myself have distant relatives who are of the Gullah-Geechie people).

gogo music is just a type of funk and the gogo beat-groove actually came from the black church. the call and response traits are of the same type you hear in many afram musics but the timbales/bells is from outside the main culture.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

don't remember if I posted this but just in case



Steve Smith :: Confessions of a U.S. Ethnic Drummer

MD: Did you consciously put yourself into a scholarly frame of mind to do this project, "Drumset Technique/History of the U.S. Beat"?

STEVE SMITH: That mindset of exploring the history of U.S. music is just something that I've been living for a long time, so I've been in that headspace for quite a few years.

MD: Then this project was merely formalizing something that you've been thinking about anyway?

SS: Yeah, exactly. I guess the place to start is the Vital Information album "Where We Come From." Before we did that album back in 1997 I had spent some time investigating Afro-Cuban music. I realized I could learn the patterns of that style of drumming and I could play it to a degree but I didn't really play it well, in my opinion, because I didn't grow up in the culture. I realized that the best musicians of the genre are literally all from Cuba or Puerto Rico or somewhere in the Caribbean and most of them know the history of their music and culture. This inspired me to focus on the music of my own culture and use that same approach. I had to admit that as a U.S. drummer I didn't know a lot about the origins of my own music. I knew some jazz history and I had lived through '60s rock and the fusion era but I didn't know a lot about early jazz or the early rhythm and blues, blues, country and gospel and all that. And at a point I really started seeing myself as part of a lineage, a U.S. ethnic drummer playing the percussion instrument of the United States -- the drum set.

MD: And that triggered your whole investigation of the past?

SS: Definitely. I wanted to be informed about my own past and what I was connected to. I became very engrossed in learning about the whole U.S. music scene in general and the development of the drum set in particular. So now I really do see myself as a U.S. ethnic drummer that plays all the different styles of U.S. music, not that I'm a unique person doing it because I think there's a lot of guys doing it but they may not have identified themselves as that. It's been helpful for me to think of myself as a U.S. ethnic drummer. It's a bigger perspective than "a jazz drummer" or "studio drummer" or "fusion drummer."


MD: It's like the machine was emulating Gadd, and then the next generation emulated the machine.

SS: Yeah, it's a real twist and a real shift. And so, to me, there's not a lot of new drum vocabulary since the '70s, the emphasis became execution -- perfection. Different music's have developed since then but a whole lot of new vocabulary isn't necessary to play it. You can pretty much recycle everything that developed up until the '70s to play the music. For example, drum 'n bass is basically funk drumming speeded up and hip-hop is funk slowed down. And both come directly from James Brown, it's still essentially the same rhythms and beats that the James Brown bands developed in the '60s and '70s. So even though some things have evolved and changed, it remains the same. Hopefully some new things will evolve but for the most part the lion's share of the vocabulary is already there for drummers.

MD: What were some of the surprises that you had in researching the early years...even the African connection. Were there any revelations about how this music developed as you found out about it in your research?

SS: I think what was significant to me is that in the United States there's no hand drum tradition, which in fact led to the drum set becoming the rhythmic voice of the African American community. Whereas, if history had played itself out differently and let's say we had a hand drum tradition in the United States, the drumset may have never been a necessary invention because we would've had a whole percussive orchestra just with hand drumming. But because of the no-drumming laws that were enforced during the time of slavery, the hand drum tradition that develops directly out of African drumming was squelched in this country. It is true that slaves in New Orleans were allowed to play hand drums once a week at Congo Square. But when you look at that in the scope of how long slavery existed in the United States, which is from the 1500s until the mid 1800s, Congo Square only represents about 40 years in the scheme of things. It began in 1817 and lasted until the mid 1850s. I think in some ways the significance of Congo Square has been a bit overemphasized. Congo Square had the drumming legally but there were other places in Louisiana and all over the South that had the African polyrhythmic percussive concepts still being practiced illegally or underground for the entire history of slavery in the U.S. There's a great book by Dena Epstein called "Sinful Tunes and Spirituals," which is a documentation of everything she could find on the African polyrhythmic concept surviving in the United States throughout the years of slavery. She found that people kept the African pulse alive in many ways such as playing washboards, jawbones, beating sticks on the floor, or stomping their feet on the floor. Even some African hand drums or African styled drums that were made in secret here in the U.S. have been found.

MD: And you make an interesting point in the DVD about the polyrhythmic style of "patting juba" leading to the development of the drumset.

SS: That's another percussion instrument, so to speak, that was developed in the U.S., where the person is playing with feet and hands, incorporating all the limbs just like the drumset. It's an African polyrhythmic concept and it was eventually applied to the drumset, which is the only percussion instrument in the world that uses all four limbs. So in effect, the slaves being deprived of hand drums set the stage for the African American community to embrace the drumset. Without hand drums they were forced to adapt to the European percussion instruments that were available in the1800s, the snare drum and the bass drum, so they were comfortable with the individual instruments that would make up the drumset. I find it real interesting that basically the invention of the drum set is the invention of the bass drum pedal. After that happened in the late 1800s, basically the drum set wasn't used for any other purpose than playing jazz, which was a creation of the African American community. So when people first played the drumset they wanted to play with that concept -- one person playing a snare drum and a bass drum with that African American swing rhythmic concept. The drumset could've just as easily been used in a symphony orchestra but it wasn't. It had some applications in, say, vaudeville and maybe a few situations here and there other than jazz but they never took off as playing concepts. The playing concept that we now take for granted is essentially an African American concept of how to use the instrument. This concept has been so thoroughly assimilated into the culture that most people don't even think about it or question how it came to be. Today the drumset is an instrument that's been accepted all over the world but it is quintessentially a U.S. instrument that developed from our unique history and culture.

Steve Smith :: Confessions of a U.S. Ethnic Drummer (part 1)

 

[IllmaticDelta]

gogo music is just a type of funk and the gogo beat-groove actually came from the black church. the call and response traits are of the same type you hear in many afram musics but the timbales/bells is from outside the main culture.

...aframs did have hand drums early on before they were banned.....although they were banned, the memory and the feel most likely lived on

Akan Drum on Display at the British Museum

The Akan drum is the oldest African-American object in the British Museum, brought from West Africa to the Colony of Virginia as part of the slave trade around 1735. ‘Akan’ refers to an ethnic and linguistic group from West Africa which includes the Fante, Asante and Akuapem, and its culture is most apparent today in Ghana. Display open through 10 October 2010.

The drum was acquired by Sir Hans Sloane, whose collection formed the basis of the British Museum when it was founded in 1753. Broadcaster, playwright, and British Museum Trustee Bonnie Greer has been involved in the creation of the display, and it focuses on two main themes – the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the origins of African-American music.

The first part of the display describes the journey of the drum from West Africa to the Colony of Virginia, relating the suffering and displacement of peoples as a result of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

This journey would have typically included the practice of ‘dancing the slaves’, where enslaved Africans were forcibly exercised on board the
slave ships, a practice in which it is likely this
drum would have played a part.

The second part of the display examines the massive influence of African and African- American music on most popular music from the 20th century onwards, including jazz, blues, R&B, and rock ’n’ roll.

The drum is one of the objects featured in the British Museum and BBC Radio 4 series A History of the World in 100 objects

Devorah Romanek, from the British Museum, explores the journey and influence of the Akan drum, in a lecture on display in Room 3, on Friday 8 October, 13.15 in The Stevenson Lecture Theatre. Free, booking advised, limited places reserved for Members.

Image: mage: Akan drum. Made in West Africa and collected in the American colony of Virginia probably between 1710 and 1745

Akan Drum on Display at the British Museum - Museum Publicity

 

[CASHAPP]

breh our history is just

The genius American slaves had was just

Meanwhile a country whose main culture is reggae, dancehall and trackstars will come at us for having no culture

to OP for keeping the foot on the neck of people who try to hate on Black Americans.

IF they think this is something, wait until the 2020s, they haven't seen nothing yet.

 

[CASHAPP]

Southern Soul Music will make a huge return for Black Americans soon. Picture Aretha Franklin in the 60s

We make our best music in times of strife. Right this second the only thing stopping that from blowing up is all these major labels . But one person will set off a firestorm.

 

[Brer Dog]

Azealia Banks is Trini. Isn't that interesting? She feels she can speak on black American culture when she isn't even apart of it lol. And then talks down on it and flip flops. She's a fukkin moron. And she's an example of what OP was talking about.

Remember a video of her talking about wanting reparations or some shyt like that. Maybe she's half AA.

 

[CASHAPP]

Remember a video of her talking about wanting reparations or some shyt like that. Maybe she's half AA.

She is, she was born in Harlem.

 

[Neuromancer]

Subs

 

[The Amerikkkan Idol]

Southern Soul Music will make a huge return for Black Americans soon. Picture Aretha Franklin in the 60s

We make our best music in times of strife. Right this second the only thing stopping that from blowing up is all these major labels . But one person will set off a firestorm.

I doubt it.

I don't think the musicians exist for that to happen.

You have whole generations of kids who can't sing, dance (well), play instruments, or even rap (well).

We used to have the church grooming waves of Black musicians, but not anymore.