Laina Dawes

2 1/2 stars because it was a bit repetitive and I found the writing on the klunky side and it felt distanced somehow, not intimate, but that's probably just me. Still I enjoyed it.

Frankly eye-opening and sad, too. It's an interesting take on the very sharp musical divide along racial lines that we have. Frankly, I'd LOVE to meet up with her at a metal show. We'd headbang like nobody's business! As a black woman she's so much the outsider in the worlds of Punk and Metal that she is often made to feel physically threatened by going to the shows that she wants to see. Sometimes it’s some asshole throwing the N word at her. As if that isn’t bad enough, she's shunned by blacks and called a race traitor because she doesn't listen to Beyonce or Jay Z. Her parents forbade rock and roll in the house growing up and insisted she listen to "black" music. She feels boxed in and conflicted and has to constantly assert that, no, in fact she's not turning her back on her "blackness". Sad and crazy, but interesting.

It also cleared up some of the reasons that black musicians walked away from rock and roll since their role in helping to create it. For me this phenomenon was always puzzling and one of the reasons bands like Living Color, Fishbone and what Lenny Kravitz did, are so much the odd man out. Even with guitar gods like Jimi Hendrix and Prince, they are both non-conforming in their musical decisions. Jimi more than Prince, but it's there.

In some ways I feel her pain, although being white, heavy metal is more accessible to me, but as a woman I've always gotten strange looks when the subject of music has come up. Those who don't listen to metal think it's all "screaming", but that's just ignorance. Still, it's difficult to have to constantly "defend" the genre in the face of it and that people basically close down when you try to explain or get them to listen. My first rock and roll crush was Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden (truth be told, I still have a crush on him) and that should tell you my style - clean vocals, lots of melody, great lyrics and very, very loud volumes. Sure, lots of harsh vocal styles are popular, but I only go so far with that (some Soilwork and Samael are about it).

Some passages I highlighted during my reading -

Introduction

refer to freedom as a mechanism to find what we need in music, emotionally and physically, and to be able to actively participate in the music scene we prefer.

In his forward for the anthology Rip It Up: The Black Experience in Rock ’n’ Roll, Greg Tate muses that despite the documented history of black involvement in rock music “I remain amazed that as simple an act as a young black man or woman deciding not to sing straight-up reggae, blues, or hip hop can still get people’s panties in a knot.”

I. Canadian Steel

My small group of black girlfriends made me understand that their parents, who immigrated to Canada as adults, did not encourage individualism or the expression of what they wanted to do or to be outside of what was considered the norm.

Expectations for my white siblings were high. I wish I could say the same for my sister and me.

In later years I thought that when the criticism I got from my black friends about my music preferences made me feel like I wasn’t black enough, and when white people made me feel like I was too black. I felt as though, in order to make both groups more comfortable, I should abandon my true self and behave as nearly everyone expected a black person would.

II. Metal Can Save Your Life

While listening to music and perusing music magazines became a great form of escape, I always felt a bit of residual guilt. After all, black people—real black people—don’t listen to metal.

III. I'm Here Because We Started It

There were blues women who were not attractive at all, sang as hard as men, and drank as hard as the men, and it had nothing to do with who they were as women.

Note - Reminds me of Janice.

As more and more white people became involved, the music changed, and black people followed other types of music.”

“As more white people became attracted to rock ’n’ roll, black people started to construct it as ‘This is something for them, this isn’t for us,’” she explains.

Rock ’n’ roll, blues, and jazz albums were banned in many black homes. Many families felt that the music was unsuitable—that it was sacrilegious and conveyed messages that were too personal and too sexual.

More importantly, the sexual desire, emotional woes, and relationship issues that the female blues singers detailed in their lyrics signified a freedom from male oppression, which threatened the sanctity of the black nuclear household.

They want their females to be easily digestible.

IV. So You Think You're White?

On some level, this dates back to the belief that the actions of one black person can negatively affect how we are perceived in the greater society.

Note - Women too. We often represent all instead of just ourselves.

That parochial blackness is as dangerous as hell. It’s dangerous, it steals your joy.”

VII. The Lingering Stench of Racism in Metal

Communities of metal fans are needed in order for the culture to survive and thrive, especially in an era with such an overbearing Top 40 pop music culture.

Stopping black-on-black crime does not mean starting black-on-white crime; that just doesn’t make sense.

VIII. Remove the Barricade--and Stagedive

Funk was the hardest music to get played on black radio. “Some people say that funk is rock music for black people,”

Perhaps the overproduction of R& B music on heavy rotation meant that people who paid to see a funk or rock performer live were disappointed because the music didn’t sound as pristine as what they heard on the radio.

But I think that you can also see that those magazines have a very strong interest in a very fragile, but very important, idea of what blackness is. They have a strong interest in it because their very existence depends on it because of separatism.”

The Fans (from the survey asking why black women listen to hard rock, metal and/or punk and their experiences)

They were actually singing about something other than money, cars, and women, which was new to me since I was raised on hip hop. It was refreshing to find that there are actual musicians that actually have things to say.”

The song topics are varied and creative, and it’s a pleasure to listen to real drummers and guitarists rather than machines!”

You’d think after Tina Turner there’d be a whole slew of black women in rock, but the ’80s kind of pigeonholed us into a ‘sound like Whitney or else’ situation.”

If you look at hip hop nowadays, it is all about creating a black Barbie illusion in little girls’s heads. It seems the more hip hop progressed, the more black women lost themselves and the independence they fought so hard for.

—“ I certainly feel that listening to alternative and rock music helps me to acknowledge feelings of anger or frustration that I generally do not express.

I’d love to date another African-American, but many of them can’t stand my music and believe I don’t accept my ethnicity or culture because I don’t prefer the Top 40 R& B hits.”… (més)