Pet Sounds and Race

[The_Beach]

Rock N Roll did come from Jazz!

I never and still dont look at it this way! Look at Little Richard he started rock & Roll. The Beach Boys even said that in their song "Do You  Remember" "Little Richard made it and Dick Clark brought it to life!" By the Beach Boys did a song together with Little Richard. The Beach Boys did many Chuck Berry songs another great rock N Roller that will never be forgotten I believe he is still rocking his music once a month!!They did ROCK N ROLL MUSIC, Ring Ring Goes The Bell, Johnny B Goode and toke the riffs of Rockin in the USA for Surfin USA!

It's not that it is more geared towards White more so that the Blacks are not as interested in Rock N Roll. When Rock N Roll started they were more into soul and now it became rap.

So can you Historicizing the Blackness of Rap?

Everyone get offended too easily and are trying to find something out of nothing even if it happened 50 plus years ago.

[♩♬🐸 Billy C ♯♫♩🐇]

Personally, I hate the term "whites" for white people and "blacks" for black people. Sounds derogatory. Actually, I long for the day when it will be just "people"....

[The LEGENDARY OSD]

Personally, I hate the term "whites" for white people and "blacks" for black people. Sounds derogatory. Actually, I long for the day when it will be just "people"....

Hopefully in our lifetime.

[♩♬🐸 Billy C ♯♫♩🐇]

Amen to that!

[Kurosawa]

Pet Sounds is not an album that any person other than Brian Wilson could have made. It is so intensely personal that only he could have made it. It has nothing to do with race any in any way, shape or form. And it's also not really a rock album.

Also, part of what is in the article claiming that no black musicians are seen as auteurs is absurd. Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Quincy Jones, Prince, and several rap artists (admittedly my knowledge and interest in rap is minimal) are among black musicians who are seen this way.

[undercover-m]

What the hell did I just read?

Camus's "The Stranger?" You need to give us hints.

I guess I'm supposed to be reading this. Bubs & I tried to read it together but I guess the rest of summer got in the way.

But yeah, it shouldn't be weird or wrong to talk about race & music—are most of the lead singers of the bands I listen to white? Yes. Do I care? Not really. Would I like to see more diversity? Sure.

I only have the energy to skim this right now, but I'm tired of people actively seeking out what's politically incorrect in things that clearly aren't blatant offenses. It makes people who are actually trying to achieve political correctness look like assholes, and it riles up everyone else. Basically, it's stupid and unnecessary.

Pet Sounds remains a powerful album that anyone can relate to; not sure what would compel someone to believe it suggests anything racist.

[thorgil]

My only comment on that article is: a -1 for the HUMAN race (like it was needed!).
But I know there's a hamster...

[JK]

Peter Reum's comments are apposite:

http://petsoundsforum.com/thread/801/60s-white-sounds-pet?page=1&scrollTo=10644

[Senator Blutarsky]

I wont waste my time reading this article.

The color of the letters in the comments are white, is that also a racial component?  If you look hard enough you'll find racism in everything.

[William Bowe]

The evil of things like "cultural appropriation", like "microagreessions", "intersectionality" and "safe spaces" are concepts propagated by fascists.

No, they're concepts propagated by Marxists. I don't think it will do to co-opt fascism as an all-purpose insult. I'd say the same to those who apply the term to Donald Trump, who I'm quite capable of disliking without lumping him in an inappropriate category.

In any case, the brand of sociological criticism on display in this article is not entirely to my tastes, but I don't think posters here need be quite so defensive about it. The author stresses that Pet Sounds itself is not racist, and that his concern is with the white-rock-album-as-cultural-touchstone, a notion external to the album itself.

[thorgil]

I don't think there is a real Marxist alive.

[William Bowe]

"There are more fuzzy-minded one-worlders, pasty-faced peace creeps, and bleeding-heart bed wetters in America now than there ever were in 1954. The redskis have infiltrated the all-important exercise-video industry, not to mention movies and TV.  Academia, too, is a veritable compost heap of Bolshie brainmulch.  Beardo the Weirdo may have been laughed out of real life during the 1970s, but he found a home in our nation’s colleges, where he whiles away the wait for the next Woodstock Nation by pestering undergraduates with collectivist twaddle when they should be thinking about better car stereos." - P.J. O'Rourke.

[thorgil]

Personally, I hate the term "whites" for white people and "blacks" for black people. Sounds derogatory. Actually, I long for the day when it will be just "people"....

More than derogatory, I consider them wildly inaccurate. Nobody is really white or black. Nor yellow, nor red.

[JK]

Captain Beefheart puts it rather well:

"I’ve watched what they’ve tried to do to [Ornette Coleman], and I tell ya, I don’t like it. I don’t think they’re trying to do the same thing to me because I’m a white boy, you see----which is ridiculous because everybody’s coloured or you wouldn’t be able to see them. I mean, really, I don’t feel that I’m any colour, and he doesn’t either. He just wants to play."

Source: http://www.beefheart.com/a-study-of-captain-beefheart-by-patrick-carr/

[clack]

We may ridicule it, but this is the kind of thesis ( acclaim for Pet Sounds as a rockist construct of white privilege) that can stick in today's political climate. If PS ever again tops a Best Albums of All Time list, I bet accusations of racism will be leveled.

[WickedWaters]

Pretentious academic drivel...

[HeyJude]

Um, yeah. I'm pretty sure this reeks heavily not only of "click bait" in terms of its place on the internet, but also reminds me a great deal of those college exercises in writing an essay by picking a type of criticism from "Column A" and a topic from "Column B."

It's like tackling feminist criticism as it relates to Ringo's 1982 album "Stop and Smell the Roses".

Or tackling religious criticism as it pertains to "Goin' to the Beach."

Or political criticism as it relates to the Beatles' "12 Bar Original."

You can apply any type of criticism to any topic/subject and blather on about something or other. There are a bunch of other reasons I think this essay is silly (for one, I sense the author thinks the "Pet Sounds" album specifically was ubiquitous throughout pop culture in the US in 1966; I don't think it was taken note of nearly as much back in 1966 as the author seems to imply), but ultimately this thing reads very much like one of those in-class essays written purely for the exercise of being handed a specific topic.

[thorgil]

So, they specifically train people to write pretentious (and absurd) academic drivel. No wonder they keep on doing that for the whole of their academic lives...

[Emdeeh]

Juat ran across another article in a similar vein that talks about a new book by Jack Hamilton, Just around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination:
http://www.cleveland.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2016/09/race_and_the_rock_hall_how_ign.html

Maybe this book is why we're seeing articles like the PS one, which I think is an academic excercise in stretching one's case to extremes.

[rab2591]

OK, I finished the article, and while reading the last paragraphs I was kicking around my big-picture response. I had it! Then, as I read the little bio at the end, it was too good to be true: the author got his Master's in English in 2016. My overarching comment was going to be something saying the article was superficially impressive. It cited relevant material, it had a good amount of historical information, and as I said earlier, there were and are racist and racial aspects of pop music. But the whole thing felt like an assignment to me. I feel like if you told me to write a paper about how Pet Sounds contributed to institutional racism, I could have written this article (without believing much of it). Maybe this guy really does believe it. I assume so. But his conclusions throughout seems intellectually lazy if so. He's playing to an academic bias, as if he's making sure to reach the right conclusions and use the right phrases and citations to ensure this would be acceptable to an academic advisor or professor.

The only issue is that it's bullshit. It's a cleverly assembled article without much substance. A person could discuss the topic far better than this author did, far more convincingly.

That's exactly what I thought.  It reads like an essay I would write to sort of pull the wool over the professor's eyes, knowing he is not familiar with what I'm writing about.  Make it long enough, use enough references and the right phrases and he's bound to give me a good grade, even if the point I'm trying to make doesn't really pan out at the end of the essay.  

Aside from that, it goes along with a trend I've been noticing.  Maybe it is being amplified by social media, but I've been noticing more instances of "white people shouldn't do this" as if white people aren't allowed to mix with black culture.  It's ironic that these people are actually calling for reverse segregation, such as the UCLA students that want their own "Afro-house" for black students only.  

Exactly. I never ever thought I'd see my favorite album being used as a tool for such backwards thinking.

Just 16 years after Pet Sounds was released the number one selling album of all time was made by an African American. Two of the top four selling albums are by African Americans. Yet we're supposed to peg Pet Sounds as the album that led to "institutionalized prejudice" towards African American rock music? I think the writer specifically chose "rock" because his argument would make even less sense if he were covering the other genres. Jazz, RnB, pop, hip-hop - what race dominates those genres? African Americans. And does anyone complain? NOPE. Music evolves, that's all that happened. Capitol Records was not run by a group of southern Alabamian Klan members - it was run by people who looked at dollar signs.

It's telling that at a time when there were still colored-only bathrooms scattered throughout the USA it was the record companies that were releasing African American hits that lit up the charts. If anything, the record companies gave America a glimpse at a culture foreign to us, and we liked it and wanted more of it. It's also telling that the most famous rendition of 'The Star Spangled Banner' was done by an African American rock artist at the most famous gathering of rock musicians ever.

[guitarfool2002]

All I can say is consider the source. Pop Matters was the platform on which this gem of inanity was published, by an author who saw fit to join this forum and flat out duck and dodge any direct questions about what he had published to the point of pissing off most readers:

For die-hard Beach Boys fans, there is a very special kind of knot that appears in their stomach each time someone decides to drag out Brian Wilson for another go-around. You know that feeling when your elderly grandparent is wheeled out by your overbearing aunt to make a speech at Thanksgiving dinner—that “Oh, just let him eat his jello in peace!” feeling? It’s a bit like that.

Now it's this. I won't personally insult or try to degrade the writer of this one. I would ask directly if the author of this new article would be able to summarize what he wrote or what he was trying to postulate specific enough to Pet Sounds to zero in on that album out of literally dozens of other "classics", in a sentence or two. If that is not possible, then whatever hypothesis he's trying to either make or prove in this column holds no water with me.

[Magic Transistor Radio]

I recall watching a documentary about an all black heavy metal (or was it punk?) band from the 70s. They were quite good, but they never got pushed because they 'weren't supposed to do that kind of music' apparently. Perhaps there is a double standard because there seem to always be white people doing rap, r&b, etc, but you don't see many all black rock bands very much at all. My guess is many have tried but record labels wouldn't sign them.

[GhostyTMRS]

I see this purposely stupid drivel is already being passed around on Facebook and the like. I seem to recall a similar article/thesis last year trying to paint Pet Sounds as racist. That article got traction for about an afternoon and died a quick death once everyone started to think about it. Interest in this will fade away soon enough.

[Magic Transistor Radio]

OK, I finished the article, and while reading the last paragraphs I was kicking around my big-picture response. I had it! Then, as I read the little bio at the end, it was too good to be true: the author got his Master's in English in 2016. My overarching comment was going to be something saying the article was superficially impressive. It cited relevant material, it had a good amount of historical information, and as I said earlier, there were and are racist and racial aspects of pop music. But the whole thing felt like an assignment to me. I feel like if you told me to write a paper about how Pet Sounds contributed to institutional racism, I could have written this article (without believing much of it). Maybe this guy really does believe it. I assume so. But his conclusions throughout seems intellectually lazy if so. He's playing to an academic bias, as if he's making sure to reach the right conclusions and use the right phrases and citations to ensure this would be acceptable to an academic advisor or professor.

The only issue is that it's bullshit. It's a cleverly assembled article without much substance. A person could discuss the topic far better than this author did, far more convincingly.

That's exactly what I thought.  It reads like an essay I would write to sort of pull the wool over the professor's eyes, knowing he is not familiar with what I'm writing about.  Make it long enough, use enough references and the right phrases and he's bound to give me a good grade, even if the point I'm trying to make doesn't really pan out at the end of the essay.  

Aside from that, it goes along with a trend I've been noticing.  Maybe it is being amplified by social media, but I've been noticing more instances of "white people shouldn't do this" as if white people aren't allowed to mix with black culture.  It's ironic that these people are actually calling for reverse segregation, such as the UCLA students that want their own "Afro-house" for black students only.  

Exactly. I never ever thought I'd see my favorite album being used as a tool for such backwards thinking.

Just 16 years after Pet Sounds was released the number one selling album of all time was made by an African American. Two of the top four selling albums are by African Americans. Yet we're supposed to peg Pet Sounds as the album that led to "institutionalized prejudice" towards African American rock music? I think the writer specifically chose "rock" because his argument would make even less sense if he were covering the other genres. Jazz, RnB, pop, hip-hop - what race dominates those genres? African Americans. And does anyone complain? NOPE. Music evolves, that's all that happened. Capitol Records was not run by a group of southern Alabamian Klan members - it was run by people who looked at dollar signs.

It's telling that at a time when there were still colored-only bathrooms scattered throughout the USA it was the record companies that were releasing African American hits that lit up the charts. If anything, the record companies gave America a glimpse at a culture foreign to us, and we liked it and wanted more of it. It's also telling that the most famous rendition of 'The Star Spangled Banner' was done by an African American rock artist at the most famous gathering of rock musicians ever.

My take on this is that Barbara Ann, which also sounds 'white' sold better than God Only Knows.

[guitarfool2002]

Again, just consider the source which published it. And the rest falls into place.