I’ve never listened to a song and imagined myself a few shades lighter. I’ve never heard an album and thought “You know what would go great with this? Casserole” (Ok, that was a low blow). I abhor the inevitable conversation and/or unnecessarily violent glances I intercept when I decide to put on a genre of music, be it on the auxiliary cord in the car or in my earbuds, that isn’t rap. “Why are listening to white people music?” “What are you, a white boy now?”
The hilarious thing though is oftentimes, it doesn’t even need to be rock music I’m listening to. I was listening to a Marvin Gaye song, “Praise”, once, and someone asked me what I found so interesting about “listening to a white person sing.”
“Wow I dunno” I said.
To get a glance on the other side of the spectrum, there’ll be times when I’ll have a rap song playing and someone will say “don’t you listen to anything other than rap?” Or, I’ll be having the very-mundane-yet-necessary “what kind of music do you like” conversation with someone and, very often, they’ll say something like: “Oh yeah, I like x, y, and z, but how about you? Are you a rap kind of guy?” The automatic assumption someone conjures up that I must listen to rap music is ridiculous- not offensive, but very annoying.
I never understood the whole phenomenon of “white people music.” Disregarding the business side of things, where, in that case, many corporate owners are white people which would by extension make every genre of music “white people music,” no certain race has a monopoly on a music genre. There are white rappers (which everyone seems to accept), there are black rock artists (which a lot of people like to criticize), and a whole other spectrum of races outside of the black/white binary which participate in music genres that are not native to their people. White people do not “own” rock music, nor do they “own” any genre of music that has singing in it (a reference to the aforementioned Marvin Gaye incident). Furthermore, Hip-Hop does not “belong” to black people. As a matter of fact recently, there’s been an influx of white rappers, sparking this whole commentary about the “changing color” of Hip-Hop which a lot of people either hate or wholeheartedly support.
The issue of listening to a certain genre of music goes into the issue of “race performance.” The idea that “I’m not being a proper black” because of something I’m doing or something I’m listening to is an erroneous notion, and it’s very easy to spot the incorrectness in it when you actually think about it. Additionally, whenever someone says, “you don’t act black though,” ask them to do their best impression of a black person. The idea of what “blackness” is, as well as the idea of what “whiteness” is, all play off assumptions based off speculation rather than knowledge (let’s go ahead and reference my casserole comment from before, that was wrong, but I’m making a point). And, the truth is, no one can be “knowledgeable” about what blackness and whiteness are because both aren’t real; the idea that certain traits belong to an entire race of people is so, so, wrong.
The beautiful thing about music, as well as people, is that both are formless, and there’s no way to pin down an entire genre of music or an entire group of people. To say “this is how music sounds, this is what you’re supposed to listen to” is a very weird, and wrong, thing to say/suggest. To say, “you are this, and this is what you are” is just as false a claim.
