It seems like we might be going into a rockism rant, doesn't it? That was my reaction, at least, to Jody Rosen's column on Slate discussing the fact that NPR seems to be incredibly attached to music by white artists, at least as evidenced by All Songs Considered's list of Best Music of 2009 (So Far). The exceptions to NPR's taste for music by white artists is music by black artists which fit the rubric of DORF, standing for:
Dead
Old
Retro
Foreign
Basically, what Rosen is pointing out is that you can't expect to hear much contemporary black popular music on NPR nor should you expect to see it on NPR-sponsored "best of" lists. The black music that NPR does tend to play will be by someone like Tracy Chapman, Solomon Burke, or Youssou N'Dour. This is certainly true, and Rosen picks out a good acronym that describes a phenomenon that, as he discusses, is prevalent not just at NPR but in music festival programs, your neighborhood Starbucks (what's the plural of Starbucks, by the way?), and the mainstream press in general. I'm not sure that this is something to be lamented or made fun of--as I think Rosen is at least hinting at doing. I think it's just something to be understood. NPR isn't going to be playing Lil Wayne. Hot 97 probably isn't going to be playing Grizzly Bear.*
Now that we've got that cleared up, we can watch "Dorf on Golf."
*There may be a future post on Grizzly Bear, too.
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Black... or working class? Because I think she's missing out on another category of "acceptable black music", namely humanities-educated middle-class black music, from Raphael Saadiq to The Roots to TV on the Radio in previous years. On the other hand there's a distinct lack of working-class white music on the list too.
Bourdieu, of course, claims this is because "taste" is defined in antithesis to what working class people like. While I do see the racial factor, and certainly the privilidged rockist discourse, I think there's a great deal of truth in that.
Taste being defined as the antithesis of what working class people like is a neat little shorthand. It gets complicated when someone like Lil Wayne or maybe Jay-Z acquires covert prestige, usually in the name of authenticity. The interesting thing is that authenticity is working in a couple of different ways here. It's clearly operating in the DORF rubric that Rosen discusses. But then there's also authenticity involved in listening to contemporary working class black popular music--an authenticity that looks down on Rosen's DORF rubric and its folk purism but doesn't realize it represents an equally problematic engagement. Go back 70 years. I mean, whether you were a white listener to William Grant Still or Billie Holiday, there were still very likely some racial discourses you were participating in. These discourses are clearly more benign these days, but I think they're still at work.
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