Why does black people never want to rock?

and back to the original point of blacks that rock, there's also danko jones.

http://www.fallofrome.com/malted.jpg

Ethnic minority Pavement fan contest - who can beat Mauritius?

No, no, Pinefox, all I meant was something like ... various groups of people and "communities" have various musical lineages, sometimes with some overlap, sometimes not. We're typically unsurprised by this; it's perfectly natural to us that a 60-year-old Alabama black woman might listen to gospel, or that a 50-year-old stockbroker in New York might like the Rolling Stones. But a lot of rock listeners -- indie listeners, in particular -- actively fret about about black people in particular not being as involved in the indie scene. My question was: why do they fret about that, and not, say, the fact that just as few (or fewer) black people are interested in Christian country? And I know that when I fretted about not seeing a lot of other black indie fans, it was because I still thought of indie as somehow better than and smarter than and "above" other musics -- which results in this sense of "disappointment" in everyone else for not getting that. As soon as I was old enough to realize that that "better" was not only subjective but culturally conditioned, this ceased to be an issue.

Isn't it natural to concern yourself with your own scene rather than one you have no interest in or knowledge of? Maybe Christian country fans do worry about the lack of blacks in their scene? (Assuming even that there is such a lack; I wouldn't know.)

(Another way of putting that last bit is something like this: when you were 13 and you and your friends were discovering and "turning one another onto" the Pixies or whomever, how many black friends were you swapping those tapes with?)

Which, incidentally, describes the other source of fretting over the racial crossover of hip-hop, apart from the top-level issue of mainstream America having to sort out its images of and relationships with black people: note that hip-hop was, up until its big pop crossover, equally horizontal, equally reliant upon a peer to "introduce" you to it. Hip-hop has gradually conquered that and made itself pop, in this reciprocal circle of white kids buying more and more of it. Indie rejects conquering it, and thus can't really make inroads beyond the "peers" of current indie listeners. The only way it will pick up bigger black listenership in the US is as white kids start hanging out more with black kids -- and not just the white kids who are already disposed to pick up on the black musical samizdat, as opposed to the other way around.

I haven't made a post in five days, and that's the best I could come up with for my comeback. Lame....

but I guess I could still be called a Paki, and um:

"whoa whoa whoa there! generalization city!" - agreed. a rather gargantuan generalization, right?

Unless you meant I was generalizing about the ethnic difference part, in which case I'm not so much asserting that as suggesting it. I know it's partly true for me: growing up with this sense of "difference" being hung around you can surely give you a little nudge toward a musical genre that bills itself as the "different" one.

all this begs me to ask, nabisco: what ethnicity are you? not that it's important

I hear Pervez Musharraf's a big fan. He hated "Terror Twilight", but then, didn't everyone?