Where do you start when you hear everything at once?
Yesterday’s speech was given to a general (not exclusively religious) audience, and so I wasn’t dreading the eventual onset of offensiveness that inevitably spills from the mouths of most other famous preachers. In fact, I quite enjoyed the romp. It was funny (check out the part beginning @ 3:05 in the above clip).
What got me most, though, was the music lesson (beginning @ 5:40). Sure, a musicologist would want to nuance Wright’s words a bit more, in an effort to be critical of the race-based generalities he discusses as if they were absolute truths. Still, it’s not often we get the chance to hear (ethno)musicology mentioned in the mainstream media, let alone the chance to hear time signatures discussed and solfege performed as if both were shared components of American cultural practices.
Wright’s pretty much right on this one, doncha think? I know James Brown liked to think he shifted the beat of his band to “the one,” but that doesn’t jive with where we clap, does it?
Tangents for the Chasing
I think his Boston accent is pretty off, and this is a fairly rambling romp, but whatever, it’s far from denounce-n-rejectable.
As for the musical stuff, by shifting the beat to the one, didn’t James Brown make it even more pleasurable to clap on the 2 and 4?
Nice to get an ethnomusicological shoutout tho! Even if he used it to play up difference rather than to, say, show what is shared in common — or moreover, what makes African-American music precisely that (i.e., hyphenated). Plus, we really gotta chill with these generalizations. I’ve seen plenty of black folk clap on the downbeat and white folk on the backbeat. Shonuff –
I don’t have perfect pitch, and I forget accents quickly, too. Regardless, I’d still take your word on the Boston accent. Hell, it took the computer voice on the Cambridge bus to teach me that “MunAHbin” was spelled “Mt. Auburn.”I “get” the pleasure — even uplift — that comes from clapping on offbeats. My point is that I don’t think JB clearly shifted the beat-stress to “the one.” It’s a big band: the interplay of beat stresses is no small part of what makes it fun to dance to. I think stressing “the one” was more a reference to what today we might call the “tightness” of a band, and which way back we might’ve labeled “hardest working.”I hoped it’s clear I’m not down with these sorts of generalizations. How we clap depends primarily on musical context. As you said, the speech “was far from denounce-n-rejectable,” so I felt free to celebrate the rare example of MSM broadcasting someone singing/performing/conducting/talking us through his personal, if over-generalized, music(al) analyses.
Actually, re: James Brown, I’ve seen compelling evidence (and from Ron Radano at that) that points to the way that the bands interplay, despite the various accents involve, do create a propulsive drive toward the one. When you add up all those one- and two-bar ostinati (ahem, riffs), they all converge back on the downbeat. Whether that’s appreciably different from what was happening in rock and soul pre-JB is another question, though.