The first couple of rap singles came out in 79, but the music was totally unrecorded for 3 or 4 years before that.

They are. They're just played mainly on bass rather than guitar. And if you're saying it's all about the guitar riff, then what about Jerry Lee or Little Richard? There may be formal differences in how those riffs are played but a reliance on them definitely isn't what separates RnR from funk, or reggae, or ska. For all their differences, it's their emphasis on simple repetitive riffs that, if anything, unites them.


I always thought RnR was a product of an African-American tradition coming together with a hillbilly/country one that had its roots in European folk - going back to stuff like shanties. The argument that people like Elvis simply stole 'black music' for a white audience is true in some ways (mainly in terms of marketing) but ignores the musical history of European settlers in America, and the different conditions that informed their culture. A song like It's Alright Mama isn't just a simple continuation of the Blues tradition, even though there are obviously key elements of it in there. And many of its other influences (yodeling, shanties, etc) predate the blues/jazz tradition.

Demonrail.. rock and roll was invented by black folks.. country fried white folks were influenced by it later but in its infancy it was black music, same with jazz, blues, and even rag time

Uhh.. I'm not sure I really get- or am on board with- the premise of this thread. Like, at all. Personally I think "ROCK" music is pretty god awful. The Hall of Fame is a really expensive joke. It exists as a tourist attraction, and all the rules about eligibility are bullshit.

Personally I think that the REALLY culturally significant bands (BEATLES, Dylan, Velvet Underground) should just get exhibits in the fucking Smithsonian. At least that would be a respectful, non cheese-ball, overpriced gift-shop way to honor them. Having Kiss and Van Halen stink up the air around them is just insulting.

But I guess I would put these guys in ASAP if I had my own personal music and pop culture museum...

The Velvet Underground
Sonic Youth
Stooges
Captain Beefheart
Can
Tom Waits
Kraftwerk
Joy Division
The Cure
Leonard Cohen
Lou Reed (solo)
Brian Eno
Hüsker Dü
Television
Big Star
T. Rex
Stone Roses
Spacemen 3
Replacements
New Order
Aphex Twin

reggae, funk, ska, etc are primarily driven by walking bass lines and syncopated drums. riffs come from the blues, where the 16 bar motifs are repeated until the song is over.
piano riffs (little richard, jerry lee lewis), sax riffs, guitar riffs, etc. I think the riff is the basis for rock n roll. remember piano and sax were the first rock n roll lead instruments.

there is a straight line from chuck berry to AC-DC and beyond, of riffage.

none of this is value judgement, just discussing the components of the genres.

you don;t think KISS or Van Halen are culturally significant but TRex and Stone Roses are?

Too many white males on that list bro. Fuck preferences, you gotta think of the big picture.

"But, who will teach the kids about Bo Diddley?" - Dr. Johnny Fever

I was sort of half fucking around earlier. It's not really anyone's fault that the history of rock has mostly been cracker dick waving. If cracker dicks make all the records, of course lists like this will be heavy on cracker dick.

---

The Ronnettes
The Supremes
The Slits
The Raincoats
Go-Gos
Banannarama
The Bengals
Bikini Kill
Sleater-Kinney

I dunno. How many worthy chick bands did I miss?

So cracker grrls rectifies the situation?

2 out of 9 groups feature colored folk. A little more than 20%. I'm comfortable.

Is there an all-black riot grrrl band?

4 non blondes do not count

@evollove Patti Smith?

Wow nvm I'm retarded you asked for ALL chick bands Uhh have you ever heard of Dolly Mixture? They're first album is really cool

This.

And now for some examples of chalk and cheese:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho_Od3o9OLg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBXU2t4hodo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCjspyo-_aI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eB8CMN-jX_g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IPEQNYD6oI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgm7F30EN50
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD-VvbGa8H4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqZceAQSJvc

Yeah, I thought it was widely acknowledged now that the thing about white people stealing rock n roll from black people was kind of a reactionary response to the idea that Elvis invented RnR, or whatever, and that the true was that rock n roll was actually the result of harmonious biracial exchange.

Rock and Roll invented by black folks, adapted by white folks. This whole, "it has European" influences is a bunch of revisionist bullshit..

White people had their music, black people had theirs, and the black folks was better so the white folks started to become influenced by it. Personally I just don't hear any European influence in late 19th century and early 20-th century black music, period.

The very scales and polyrhythms which typified "black" music was vilified in European musics.. That European music also had "call and repeat" doesn't inherently mean that black music was influenced by it, indeed, the style of white American "call and repeat" was very different from the Africanized versions in black music.

If we're talking about AFTER the 1950s then there is a lot more borrowing, but if we're talking about music in its proto-developing stage, the physical divide of segregation did indeed dissuade cross-cultural mixing of the music.

It is a matter of historical fact that black folks pioneered rag time, then blues, then jazz, then rock and roll, then soul music.

I thought it was rock only... or something. And yeah- I know Parliament/Funkadelic and aphex twin are not rock, but they're both close enough to the rock trends of their respective eras. Parliament and Funkadelic played with some rock-type bands and Aphex Twin was on Alternative Nation lol.

Originally I had a 50 artist list, but so many of them were either totally not rock or already in the fucking HoF that I went through and clipped them.

it was at that point that I started wondering what the fuck I was doing. By the time I got to the question of "to Kanye or not to Kanye" I was like, "fuck it this is just a huge list of artists I like that aren't my favorite artists... I've wasted like fifteen minutes on this shit. Is my time worth so little?"

...

I guess I still don't understand. If anyone wants to know my favorite bands, I'll happily oblige. If anyone wants to know who I'd put in the R&R HoF if it belonged to me, I guess I'll answer, but don't tell me it can't overlap with my faves. And if it HAS to be rock, then what I put is the best I can do because I don't give a shit about rock, really.

Sure I love SY and Unwound and Sebadoh and Swans and the Fall and Joy Division, but those bands can all be described more accurately by the words "not rock" than "Rock n' Roll" which makes me think of ...well... Van Halen.

This thread merely points to the continuing reality of structural racism in the entertainment industries..

Everybody keeps saying, "We're talking rock" then mentioning some non-rock genre more or less better represented by black folks. The reality is that there isn't necessarily a lack of black punk, metal, or rock bands, its that these bands don't get the kind of coverage and exposure which bring them to the spotlight. We can't name them because a racist structure has prevented our exposure to them..


So black folks are as involved in rock music as any other group, but the system itself favors selling this music as a non-black entity!

Also we see the dynamics of social racism, many of our scenes are not as integrated racially as are our societies, so there isn't enough interaction to create more bands with black folks represented, because socially blacks and whites aren't getting along as rosily as we'd hope! In fact, many studies are finding we are inching back towards social segregation which is kind of scary :(

I'm rather certain that early forms of what would become known as "the blues" preceded Ragtime, which was itself basically the earliest form of jazz.

Actually I'm nowhere near certain... I just kinda think that.

That is true, there is a proto-blues which predates elements of rag time music. I just used rag time because Eurocentric music buffs always try to say how rag time is some kind of synthesis of European and black American musics, ITS FUCKING NOT!

Rag time significantly predates Jazz in its origins in the 1880s.. Its the sheet music form of rag time that comes about in the early 20th century when it was more popularized into the mainstream by a whiter audience

Once, someone put on some old folk music from Ghana for me. It was the blues, more or less. No harmonic changes, but the scales were very bluesy.

The slaves then came over here. Some dude in the cotton field sang out, "Baby left this morning/Feeling so damn sad."

The others in the field repeated/responded, "Baby left this morning/Feeling so damn sad" while dude thought of a rhyme. "I tell's ya all/Best bitch I done had." This call-and-response format lasts to this day.

So, there's that.

But this was all very basic stuff, musically speaking.

In thinking about "European" music, it's easy to think of "classical" or "opera" or something, but there is a long and rich tradition of the popular song in Europe. The form was particularly popular in the eighteenth century, as reasonably-priced pianofortes came on the market and there was a demand for ditties. This tradition existed in America as well.

A lot of the songs used endless variations on I-IV-V changes, which we all know and love.

And then at some point, the black music and the white music slowly made love and had a baby.




No, but they seem really interesting.

Is Liz Phair eligible, by the way? Not a huge fan, but if RHOF brought up Green Day, Phair doesn't seem an outrageous suggestion.

You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to evollove again.

About this cultural rasicm...I been long time aware that in my record shelf most of the albums are made by white people. Jimi Hendrix & Fishbone have been long time one of my big favourites, but the rest of my big favourites are white. Even I have quite a long time loved Howlin Wolf & John Lee Hooker, I think highly them influenced Captain Beefheart, Tom Waits, Dr. John & Nick Cave are better. And I don´t feel any bad conscience about it, it´s just the way this world has been. The music people recommended me when I was young, the reviews I read etc. were mostly just from white people. So I have grown mostly round the music made by the white. If there never had been racism in the world, the sitution in my music taste probably would been different.

But anyway I think it´s quite the same who the music I like has made, the most important think is that I like it because it sounds me just absolutely great!

I get what yr saying Mortte. "If it's good, who cares who made it?"

But when one group dominates cultural production, other voices tend to get silenced, or at least muffled.

For example: it's all well and good for Robert Plant to implore, "Squeeze my lemon til the juice runs down my leg." But it might be interesting to know how the chick feels about squeezing lemons. Might end up with something like PJ Harvey's "I'll rub it til you bleed." Now that's interesting.

music may be blind but the business of selling music is definitely not.

So true.

I would LOVE to go back in time and sneak into the executive boardroom of a major label as soon as RUN-DMC had a hit with "Walk This Way."

Oh the confusion! "White people don't like rap. Black people don't like guitars. Why is this thing a hit? It makes no sense! What the hell are we supposed to do now?"

I think the present time has been domination of the monoculture that has nothing do to any ethnic groups. All the music of major record companies sounds the same from black to white artists.

From the Elvis times it has been common, that big companies never have anything interesting. Elvis also started from small company and when he caught audience, big company chased him. Nowdays all interesting artists are in small labels or make everything themselves. Big companies seem not to be interested small companies artists even they might have commercial potential. Big companies just have formats where every artists just had to fit. I just don´t like this time where formats are everywhere, it has nothing to do with creativity.

The business of marketing music is.as.affected.by the structural racism underlying society.. racism determines exposure not the sound itself.. further in the 50s and 60s there was in fact a systematic effort to market white artistswwhose music sounded similar to black artists or even worse, have white artist cover black artist's material.to deny the black artists the exposure.. further social racism has segregated our local music scenes which then inherently segregates how we.are.exposed to new musics.. its.not that elvis or mick jagger were necessarily racist themselves but rather how we.in the mainstream were exposed to their music.at the dirct expense of black artists because of a racist.industry

Rock out with your cock out.

We should try to start a "fringe" rock hall of fame, including acts that we love but that are too weird or small for the Rolling Stone assholes to care about. Everyone list 5

I nominate

Sonic Youth
Misfits
Unsane
Fugazi
Dinosaur Jr

Yeah, you're avsolutely right.

I think there's a relatively widespread misconception about what Ragtime actually was, in terms of sound and style. The truth is that when one digs into the history of jazz, it becomes evident that Ragtime had multiple incarnations... It was probably the first musical movement created by black artists to be co-opted and appropriated by whites. So people hear the word, and think of the classical European composers who were influenced by Scott Joplin's work, or the countless "revivals" that resulted from Hollywood "tributes" to Joplin.

Ragtime is wiki-fied as being March music + syncopation. But before jazz theory even existed, it was a significant part of black culture. But it was happy, and that meant it didn't make whitey feel guilty (not that Whitey was prone to such feelings at the time). But it was pretty legitimately stolen by cosmopolitan cultures, right out of the heart of New Orleans.

The nitty gritty elements of ragtime and its origins (which had more to do with black piano and guitar players of the early 1900's than with American March music) are pretty obviously snubbed by the music historians who are responsible for writing academic texts on jazz and folk music. The public legacy of the genre tends to treat it as a 3 parts white to 1 part black style of music. Which is bullshit of course.

I took some jazz theory classes in my day. Guess how many music majors, of the hundreds I encountered, knew the name Fats Waller? Anyone? Ok, I'll tell you my count: zero. And I'm referring to fucking seniors here, not the average liberal arts fool trying to pussyfoot his was through human diversity requirements. I mean, the kids who studies jazz specifically. And yes, I'm definitely generalizing here: my experience isn't necessarily everyone's experience, but damned if I wasn't the ony student who ever raised a hand when a teacher asked that question. One of the biggest pop stars of his time; really one of the first pop stars ever.

Ughz.

Wait, is there a rule about the number of years since the artist's first record?
Like the R&RHoF uses the 20 year rule... ?

Because my answers would depend on that.

Assuming there is a 20 year rule:

Sonic Youth
Flaming Lips
Joy Division
Tom Waits
Spacemen 3 (or Spiritualized)

... Unless "non-rock" artists are eligible.
... Ahh! Lists need better parameters than this. Haven't any of you seen High Fidelity?

This just may be your best post ever!

I dunno. Is it so wrong to say whites simply enjoyed the music? Wanted to play and compose such music? Is this a bad thing? Isn't that actually kind of a beautiful thing, how music transcends race?




This sucks and happens in every artistic field, I've found. Crazy, but some artists don't care about their history.

Evol, not its.not wrong to say white fans of black music just liked.it. BUT we still have to.acknowledge that whether with rag time at end of 19th century, jazz and blues in early 20th century, or.rock and roll in the mid20th century that the music industry was.racist.with a.more nefarious agenda of exploitation and denigration

Waits is already in official R´N´R HOF (believe it or not).

My list:
Sonic Youth
Damned
the Birthday Party
Bad Brains
13th Floor Elevators

is the Cramps rok n rol? perfect for this carnival and circus season. enjoying some bob dylan too. stuck my fist in a goats pussy, got a hickey from the worlds ugliest tattooed lady/lovely lady and got major cotton candy mouth high behind the 'shoot a flaming mustache and get two mutton chops for free' stand.

it all smells good. fair nights and autumn apples deluxe peppermints. anybody ever had an elephants ear? funnel cake fun!!

Cramps is just great!!! Really don´t believe they will never be in Hall Of Fame (not even death of lux caused that).