Itunes, Billboard, and the marginalization of black music and black audiences in America

the summer "california gurls" came out i was working somewhere with radio on 24/7 and i never heard the snoop verse

balls: "California Gurls" was in Columbus, "Payphone" was in New York, not sure what stations though. Agreed that "Promiscuous" is particularly absurd since it is actually a real 'duet' in the sense that the two performers are characters addressing each other in the plot of the song. Though I always did like the idea that Adam Levine was actually trying to call Wiz Khalifa, explaining why the latter seemed so grouchy in his verse.

Aside from the whitewashing, which is noxious, these edits are also dumb and annoying just because they often wreck the structure of a song, effectively chopping the bridge and dropping you back into an endless verse-chorus rotation. Reminds me of some dude pointing out the "Born to Run" epic effect imparted by the often-omitted portions of "Semi-Charmed Life." The version of "No Scrubs" without the rap always feels like a chore to me for this reason - okay, okay, you don't want any scrubs, we get it!

Oh I just remembered a really wild recent example -- I always heard "The Way," the hit by white R&B singer Ariana Grande featuring white rapper Mac Miller, on pop radio with Mac Miller's verse intact. when the local urban station picked up on the song a few months later, they'd only play it with Mac's verse edited out. the rap station took the white rapper off the song!

I only heard the Snoop-less California Gurls on the Hot AC station.

otherwise everything since i've encountered has been like the odb'less version of 'fantasy' where it's a disappointment but it's ultimately just a normal radio edit of the song, if you didn't know what was missing you wouldn't know it was missing.

― balls, Saturday, February 1, 2014 2:50 PM Bookmark

The ODB version was a remix, the ODB-less version is just the original.

i loved your tweet about that song
https://twitter.com/reverenddollars/status/402614350998827008

last run of posts = wow america is even more fucked up than i knew. boggling at you all. why has there not been a revolution?

give me mac miller verses or give me death amirite

It is quite depressing the state of radio in the USA atm

Revolutionary zeitgeist atm is the exclusive province of white ppl afraid for their guns and with a deep hatred for universal health care

Mac Miller verse perhaps edited out to save audience from having to wince at that line about American Beauty and Bruce Almighty

yeah juicy j is edited out of "dark horse" on the hot ac station

rappers getting edited out of pop songs happened even when music by black artists ruled pop music

when i was a kid i distinctly remember hearing a version of "young'n (holla back)" on the miami pop station that was like 1.5 verses with the chorused looped double the amount of times it appears in the original

hell I even remember the lame rap in Black Box's "Strike It Up" getting excised

america is even more fucked up than i knew. boggling at you all. why has there not been a revolution?

revolution began in seattle last night; will steamroll eastward. until: socialism.

http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.1600078.1391405583!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_635/super-bowl-seattle.jpg

rappers getting edited out of pop songs happened even when music by black artists ruled pop music

obviously this is true but i posted that b/c i had made a post wondering about whether he would be edited out of that song earlier upthread, + the hot ac station (that i assume is pretty normal among stations of that format) now regularly plays rap in the form of flo rida and pitbull and yet it still does this w/ katy perry songs, even this one whose production is pretty shamelessly rap-influenced. it's just bizarre to me.

rap in the form of flo rida and pitbull doesn't count

or the black eyed peas

yeah they are like basically saying c&c music factory was rap cuzza freedom williams

I heard "Dark Horse" for the first time today, starting during Juicy's verse and was like "YEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH" and then screwfaced so hard when Katy Perry came in.

that is hilarious

this week is probably the first time there have been 3 black artists in the top 10 (as the main artists, not featured acts) in a while: Beyonce with Jay-Z at #2, Jason DeRule with 2 Chainz at #4, Pharrell at #8. of course, the rest of the top 10 also includes A Great Big World, OneRepublic, Passenger and TWO Lorde songs.

First time since April, when "Stay", "Started From the Bottom", "Love Me" were in the top 10.

And as I noted on twitter, Beyonce is now only the third living black female artist to have a top 10 hit in the 2010s.

goddamn

wha??

rihanna
alicia keys
beyonce
?

wait, hang on, nicky minaj too

Alicia Keys has not had a US top 10 hit in the 2010s

probably thinking of Empire State of Mind which was 09

ahhh yes

she charted in the UK later on that i think?

there were other black women who cracked the top 10 in the UK, i.e. emeli sande, alexis jordan

And Girl on Fire peaked at 11.

fun fact: alexandra burke had three UK top 10s in 2010 alone

And Girl on Fire peaked at 11.

this is crazy to me, i felt like every radio station in the world was playing this song on nonstop rotation for like 4 months

that one had a really long tail but not that high of a peak

man i just uh... fell into a wikipedia rabbit hole reading about the billboard charts and their relation to AT40

i'm out now, everything intact

that wiki's on fire

Apologies if this has been asked/mentioned in here already, but has anyone looked at whether the same is happening in Canada? American culture is so pervasive that I'm sure it's affected us here in the north but to what extent is what I'm wondering. I could check myself but in case someone has already done it...

canadian radio is us radio modulo black people + shania twain, basically

do u live in canada murg? i live in quebec so my view might be skewed. don't know any good articles about it but a lot of rap songs that were hits in the US didn't chart very high here, even during the golden era c 2003

Yeah, I'm in Calgary.

The Canadian charts are generally a lot "whiter" than American charts, though we have had things like "Girl on Fire" get into the top 10 and Rihanna's Stay and Will.I.Am's "Scream & Shout" both got to Number 1.

Actually it looks like several singles from Will.I.Am's latest album charted higher in Canada than in America, with #ThatPower peaking at 6 and Fall Down at 15. Ugh.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/26131830

Actor Chris O'Dowd has claimed black contestants on The X Factor leave the competition early because the "viewing public is racist".

The Bridesmaids star said he was a "big X Factor fan".

He added: "Generally my favourites go out in the first few weeks and, of course, because the viewing public is so racist, all the black, strong singers go out in round five."

The 34-year-old was speaking to the Radio Times when he made the comments.

Last year The X Factor contestant Hannah Barrett said she had been "disappointed" by the racist abuse she received while she was on the ITV show.

She said she felt it was important to address the issues of race and appearance in the music industry.

"You do see a lot of women who are black but just lighter. I think it was kind of hard for everyone to think she [Hannah] is fully black, she's proper dark."

She also said the problem was not limited to the audience of the show.

"In the charts now you have light-skinned people, light-skinned women, that everyone's attracted to."

She added: "There's hardly, really, a black woman everyone's attracted to as much."

Hallelujah singer Alexandra Burke became the first black contestant to win the show in 2008, while Leona Lewis, who triumphed in 2006, has a black father and white mother.

Pharrell's "Happy" is a strong contender for a Hot 100 #1, currently at #2 behind that Katy Perry song.

Huh, I haven't heard "Happy" on the radio at all, but "Talk Dirty" suddenly seems omnipresent.

I've heard it twice in the last week. I suppose it's "surging," to use Billboard parlance.

Heh, and after the talk about KUBE in Noz's comment section, they're JUST NOW adding "My Hitta"