Why does black people never want to rock?

I'm just going to stare at this phrase for a nice long time, in the hopes that it will somehow disappear with my withering glance.

Jesus, what a question! Christ, what a fuckwit!

Surely no-one has said anything like this? It sounds rather like an inflammatory position you've set up to attack. (Hey, an inflammatory straw man: that's apt.) I suppose it could be, though, that I've not read the thread carefully enough and have missed the bit where someone did say it.

..oh, yeah. Mos Def. He doesn't really understand rock, does he? That song never fails to amuse and irritate me, especially since in the course of his telling us that what we like is no good he fails, himself, to rock at all. The thought of the Rolling Stones attempting to rock like...Nina Simone (give me a break, even I could find a more sensible name that rhymed) is repugnant to me. That's what he'd LIKE? Same goes for his lame arena-rock band (saw 'em, hated 'em). And Living Colour, undermixed guitar, bass and drums, overmixed Pompous Ass vocalist. Saw em THREE times, never liked 'em once (they were always openers, and deservedly so). Had a few good studio tracks. Body Count? Got better during their stay on earth, nearly approached Biohazardish-bare-competence. Funkadelic? Yup, rocked. Didn't get all uppity about it, either (none of that "look, we can rock too! In fact, we're better than you! Nyah, nyah!")Bad Brains? ROCKED effortlessly and proudlike. Does anyone here remember a Philadelphia band called Pure Hell? Had kind of a Bad Brains hype going on but I never did hear them. I think the original post here wasn't THAT bad - the question is, to me, why are so few ALL-black rock bands? Sure, there are great African-American rock artists scattered hither & yon, but overall, they seem not to embrace the rock-BAND format. Is it suspicion of a white format? Starmaking machinery that tells them only one member must be the star? I know plenty of musically openminded black folks, but they don't listen to rock. Everything else is fair game, it seems.

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....

^^^ I see one guy in the discomusic thread asking the question but no one takes him up on it (unless I'm missing something)

Down to it, it's a good naive question to ask. And the last points I've just skimmed over are very sensible.
Cultural / race divide is its own answer, as music is closely linked to education, heritage, identity. There hasn't been much white presence in some genres that retain a strong black majority even to this day. You just have to ask black artists what they were listening and admiring to as kids. There's already been much talk elsewhere about the woman side of the history of music (how many listeners even approach 'equality' there ?), which is a similar social question.

hell hath no whining like the whining of an entitled dude who believes in “real rock” pic.twitter.com/E583DZ692E

— maura 🎙 johnston (@maura) December 12, 2017