Martin Douglas's "The Only Black Guy at the Indie Rock Show" is a
fascinating longread about race, culture and class, partly a memoir of
Douglas's life as a young black kid in a North Carolina housing project
who loved indie rock; partly a critique of the way we think about what
blackness, whiteness and culture are.
The black kids of my generation and the ones before it were raised with
the notion that it’s essential to hold onto one’s “blackness,” and that
venturing outside of those boundaries meant you were trying to
assimilate to white society, to “be more like one of them.” But
essentially every African-American child growing up has an intimate
knowledge of some version of the black experience, and the way we dress
or the music we listen to still won’t hide the color of our skin. I
never saw my interest in alternative culture as a way to obfuscate my
racial identity. Aside from the annoyance of being typecast as a fan of a
band purely based on superficial concerns, that conversation overlooked
the one substantial reason why there are a lot of black people who
relate to TV on the Radio’s music: They are a band primarily consisting
of African-American men who often explore what it means to be
African-American. For a generation of alternative music fans made to
believe we were betraying “what it means” to be black, a band had
finally come along that made that very idea a theme in its music.
But as TV on the Radio started to grow in notoriety, it still created a
schism in my initial attraction to rock music; here was a band that was,
for all intents and purposes, “socially acceptable” for black people to
like. This falls into my earlier point about young children emulating
people who look like them. I imagine if the band were around when I was
younger — with their overtures to shoegaze, incisive and smart lyrics,
steadfast commitment to experimentalism, and Kyp Malone’s beard — they
probably would have been my favorite band throughout my entire
childhood. At the very least, I wouldn’t have felt like such an outsider
for loving alternative music.
No comments:
Post a Comment