O Greg Tate, num texto do Village Voice sobre o Michael Jackson quando este morreu há uns meses, lançava uma hipótese que é algo assustadora:
The scariest thing about the Motown legacy, as my father likes to argue, is that you could have gone into any Black American community at the time and found raw talents equal to any of the label's polished fruit: the Temptations, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson, or Holland-Dozier-Holland—all my love for the mighty D and its denizens notwithstanding. Berry Gordy just industrialized the process, the same as Harvard or the CIA has always done for the brightest prospective servants of the Evil Empire.
Ontem, no Guardian, numa peça sobre o Numero Group – fiquei com imensa vontade de, quando tiver dinheiro, comprar a tal última compilação de luxo que sai agora dessa editora de reedições obscuras –, o Simon Reynolds fala do mesmo:
The music industry is a harsh, cruel business at the best of times, but it seems particularly so in black music if only because – from Detroit, MI to Kingston, Jamaica to Bow, E3 – there is such an overflowing wellspring of talent that it can often seem arbitrary who gets to succeed and who never gets the break. So many of the groups unearthed by Numero are only a notch away from being Booker T and the MGs, or the Temptations, or Martha and the Vandellas.
At the same time I can't help wondering if it makes sense for someone like me to spend time on historically marginal music when I've yet to "do" Ray Charles or Sam Cooke, i.e. incontestably epochal artists in the history of American music. As the series expands (Smart's Palace is the eleventh) Shipley acknowledges feeling "a bit of fatigue with Eccentric Soul … they do become variations on a theme. It's the same story: black musicians facing the same problems." The inexhaustible wellspring of black musical creativity can be … well, exhausting.
Talvez seja por isto que há muita gente racista. Por falta de tempo e paciência.
The scariest thing about the Motown legacy, as my father likes to argue, is that you could have gone into any Black American community at the time and found raw talents equal to any of the label's polished fruit: the Temptations, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson, or Holland-Dozier-Holland—all my love for the mighty D and its denizens notwithstanding. Berry Gordy just industrialized the process, the same as Harvard or the CIA has always done for the brightest prospective servants of the Evil Empire.
Ontem, no Guardian, numa peça sobre o Numero Group – fiquei com imensa vontade de, quando tiver dinheiro, comprar a tal última compilação de luxo que sai agora dessa editora de reedições obscuras –, o Simon Reynolds fala do mesmo:
The music industry is a harsh, cruel business at the best of times, but it seems particularly so in black music if only because – from Detroit, MI to Kingston, Jamaica to Bow, E3 – there is such an overflowing wellspring of talent that it can often seem arbitrary who gets to succeed and who never gets the break. So many of the groups unearthed by Numero are only a notch away from being Booker T and the MGs, or the Temptations, or Martha and the Vandellas.
At the same time I can't help wondering if it makes sense for someone like me to spend time on historically marginal music when I've yet to "do" Ray Charles or Sam Cooke, i.e. incontestably epochal artists in the history of American music. As the series expands (Smart's Palace is the eleventh) Shipley acknowledges feeling "a bit of fatigue with Eccentric Soul … they do become variations on a theme. It's the same story: black musicians facing the same problems." The inexhaustible wellspring of black musical creativity can be … well, exhausting.
Talvez seja por isto que há muita gente racista. Por falta de tempo e paciência.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário