“Defending the Coalition against Blaxploitation”

Not that they need much defense, seeing as the “Coalition against Blaxploitation” page was deleted from wikipedia.

It seems that fat white people, by way of gavels literal and figurative, have effectively, partially through blaxploitation, completely removed the concept of the black artist from the ’60’s/rock and roll movement. We’ve come to associate African Americans with stupidity and confrontation, where musical progress of this era conjures up white images, like Bob Dylan and girls with flowery hair. This when actually Bob Dylan once spent an entire interview blabbering about Chuck Berry: he’d be like, “No, no, you don’t understand, everything started with Chuck Berry.” This in fact reminds me of a Pete Townsend interview wherein he references Muddy Waters: “He taught us all how to play.” Indeed, just listen to some of the early stuff, like “I Feel Like Going Home.” It’s palpable, pliable, flagrant inspiration on wax. A lot of stuff by these early Negro artists makes some of the white hippy stuff resemble a flaccid fashion show.

Have the cinematic aspects of blaxploitation bled into and corrupted the semantics of hip-hop? I’d say without question. Just on facebook today this dude posted this thing about the real “American cool.” People’s minds have been molded to require images of physical manifest action, occluding satisfaction at a simple common good. What’s morally wrong about “coolness”? Nothing, other than the fact of the casing of a human being belying the emptiness therein, and the possible droves of millions inspired by such vapid pop culture. Anyway, I’m glad to see Actress and Flying Lotus, two African American musical artists, inundating the last hurrah of musical genre — electronica, and doing so in an incredibly easy and honest way, fitting of the prevailing standard of dignity wielded by blacks as a general rule, throughout our country’s artistic history.

 

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