Should Bruno Mars play black music?

[usmbguest5318]

Should Bruno Mars play black music?

Mars should play whatever kind of music he feels moved to play.

 

[DigitalDrifter]

'Cultural appropriation', the newest creation by those on the left who are perpetually looking to be offended and outraged.

 

[JGalt]

Legitimate question: what the hell is "black music"?

 

[Cecilie1200]

Critics say entertainer Bruno Mars is the wrong type of person of color to sing ‘black’ music

I can't believe I'm asking this, but then, I realize that those on the far left are the most racist people on the face of the planet, and then it all makes sense again.

Bruno Mars should play whatever music happens to enter his head. Anyone who doesn't like it, for whatever reason, should refuse to buy the CD, or download it, or whatever. And EVERYONE should get over the need to control what other people do.

 

[Cecilie1200]

'Cultural appropriation', the newest creation by those on the left who are perpetually looking to be offended and outraged.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Some people need to just be glad anyone wants to be like them at all, and move the fuck on.

 

[harmonica]

the blacks are mad that Bruno is playing/singing like a black man!!

WTF?? didn't Sammy Davis Jr sing like a white man??
I've Gotta Be Me great song by Sammy
now Sammy did take a lot of racism..that was terrible ....disgusting

 

[Moonglow]

Art is not owned by a culture or a race..

 

[Rustic]

White people have no rhythm, and they can’t jump

 

[usmbguest5318]

what about the band Wild Cherry?? their song ''Play the Funky Music Whiteboy''?

I don't know? What about them?

It seems to me that to musical artists, music isn't thought of in terms of black, white, or any other color, but rather in terms of genres. Performers/artists of all races and ethnicities perform music that appeals to them in the hope that other folks, ideally lots of folks, like what the artist(s) sings/performs.

As long as we're mentioning white guys who play R&B/jazz music that appeals(-ed) to black folks...

Average White Band

​

Robin Thicke -- Just about everything this guy does appeals, it seems to me, more to black listeners than to white ones.

​

Teena Marie -- Have many white folks even heard of her? Lots of black folks, over the course of, what, 30 years or so, "got their groove on" with Teena playing in the background. Truly, a guy would have to have absolutely no game to not "get some" with Teena Marie playing.

​

There are so many other white folks who do/did great R&B -- Darryl Hall, Boz Scaggs, Simply Red, Justin Timberlake, George Michael, Bobby Caldwell, Art of Noise, Kraftwerk...the list goes on and on -- that it's really not a thing worth mentioning.

It goes the other way too...Chuck Berry, Little Richard, ke and Tina Turner, Lenny Kravitz, Jimi Hendrix, Nona Hendryx...

And then there's the black singers who I think exclusively perform(-ed) what must be the "whitest of white music" if there can be such a thing, for what else can one call opera -- it's not as though black folks as a community of people had anything of note to do with its foundations or perpetuation, which is something one simply cannot credibly say about rock -- Marian Anderson, Leontyne Price, Jessye Norman, Denyce Graves, and Kathleen Battle, to name a few who rose to the very pinnacle of their craft.

 

[harmonica]

what about the band Wild Cherry?? their song ''Play the Funky Music Whiteboy''?

I don't know? What about them?

It seems to me that to musical artists, music isn't thought of in terms of black, white, or any other color, but rather in terms of genres. Performers/artists of all races and ethnicities perform music that appeals to them in the hope that other folks, ideally lots of folks, like what the artist(s) sings/performs.

As long as we're mentioning white guys who play R&B/jazz music that appeals(-ed) to black folks...

Average White Band

​

Robin Thicke -- Just about everything this guy does appeals, it seems to me, more to black listeners than to white ones.

​

Teena Marie -- Have many white folks even heard of her? Lots of black folks, over the course of, what, 30 years or so, "got their groove on" with Teena playing in the background. Truly, a guy would have to have absolutely no game to not "get some" with Teena Marie playing.

​

There are so many other white folks who do/did great R&B -- Darryl Hall, Boz Scaggs, Simply Red, Justin Timberlake, George Michael, Bobby Caldwell, Art of Noise, Kraftwerk...the list goes on and on -- that it's really not a thing worth mentioning.

It goes the other way too...Chuck Berry, Little Richard, ke and Tina Turner, Lenny Kravitz, Jimi Hendrix, Nona Hendryx...

And then there's the black singers who I think exclusively perform(-ed) what must be the "whitest of white music" if there can be such a thing, for what else can one call opera -- it's not as though black folks as a community of people had anything of note to do with its foundations or perpetuation, which is something one simply cannot credibly say about rock -- Marian Anderson, Leontyne Price, Jessye Norman, Denyce Graves, and Kathleen Battle, to name a few who rose to the very pinnacle of their craft.

they sang like blacks and the lyrics were something a black would sing

 

[usmbguest5318]

Having now contributed to this this thread and its conversation...Who the hell is Bruno Mars?

 

[JOSweetHeart]

White people have no rhythm, and they can’t jump

Yes they do. I've seen this act in concert and the lead guy is all over the place.



God bless you and them always!!!

Holly

 

[usmbguest5318]

they sang like blacks and the lyrics were something a black would sing

Off-topic:

Let me just say this...I want to say it because it's something I've said to various other folks, generally children, who've passed through my life, but this is the first occasion that saying seems somewhat fitting here USMB...though given the abundance of childish remarks I see on here, I guess it was only a matter of time.

What ever it is that stereotypes, classifies, labels -- whatever term one wants to use -- and associates a person's vocal sound with, well anything, just doesn't sit right with me. Period. It so happens that in the context of this thread, you've expressed one dimension of it, that of sounding like what you (perhaps others) expect black folks singing, perhaps speaking too(?), to sound like.

I don't care for the notion in part because I come from a part of society wherein the generation immediately preceding mine, though to a somewhat lesser extent mine too, was expected to adopt a very specific set of elocutionary patterns, namely that of the Mid-Atlantic/Transatlantic accent, which was called that because it sounded like something that came from someplace geographically between New England, Charleston and England, which, obviously, was a non-existent place in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, hence the name.

For those unfamiliar with the Mid-Atlantic accent, listen...

​

My parents' generation, regardless of from where in the U.S. they hailed absolutely had to speak that way. It was one of the requirements of their social class. Now in the Northeast where Momma hails from, sounding like that wasn't particularly odd. In the South where Dad was from, it was bizarre as could be. More importantly, it made some kids who just couldn't (or wouldn't) learn it be outcasts in their own circles. Of course, so-called poor elocution alone also was used to exclude bunches of perfectly fine folks. In short, it was just another form of snobbery.

By the time I an my siblings came along, things had changed. The schools my parents and I attended had stopped teaching that accent. Mind you, it's not as though I like or dislike any accent. What I take exception with is the notion that fine speakers of English need to sound like anything or have any particular accent, at least when speaking in public.

To my mind, one sounds literate to varying degrees based on one's grammar, sentence organization and sentence structure, not based on the sound of one's voice. To wit, other than when Trump reads his speeches, the man sounds like a blithering idiot to me, and I'm not, in this instance referring to the ideas he expresses. I'm referring to the fact that the man often doesn't speak in complete sentences and even when does, there's often no topical relationship between one the next.

Obama and his wife, for instance sounds to me not like black people, but like people who speak very fine English, though I couldn't place their accents. Ditto Maya Angelou and Martin King who had Southern accents -- both could very easily be from D.C., CA or several other places around the U.S. Oprah has a very neutral and unplaceable accent, and based only on the sound of her voice, I wouldn't know to what race she belongs. On the other hand, one can traverse just about any part of the country and encounter horrendous and excellent speakers of English of any race possessing various accents, and in most cases, the people of a given region share an accent regardless of their race. That's not unique to American locales.

In the D.C. Metro area, for example, there are about six accents that come readily to mind. I know of three for the New Orleans area. NYC has at least one for each borough. And I haven't any idea of how many accents London has (I also have no idea how many dialects England has.). I seriously doubt that I'd know a Bronx black speaker from a white one; ditto Brooklyn, Queens, Yonkers, and so on, though I absolutely can tell whether any such speaker sounds like a fine speaker of English.

So while I absolutely do know what is meant by "sounding black" and "sounding white," I don't at all care for the the practice of using the sound of one's voice as yet another tool, as it were, for dividing the members of our society by race. And truly, I haven't found in any other nation having blacks and whites wherein the sound of one's voice is used as a race indicator. So, at the end of the day, my disdain for this notion of "sounding like [insert skin color]" arises for the fact that we divisively associate one's vocal sound, accent, etc. with their skin color rather than with the geographical region from which their sound originates or predominates. People don't sound a particular way because of the color of their skin; they sound the way they do because of where and from whom they learned to speak English.

​

A professor of linguistics thoughts on this and on Trump's linguistics:

• Thick of Tongue
  
• 
  

 

[deanrd]

Now this is an attempt of cultural appropriation,
But this isn't:



See the difference?

 

[harmonica]

...like I've said in other threads, I grew up in a mostly black hood--so my brothers and I talked ''black''.....I guess it was like a mix of white and black
...what's wrong with that??
...the blacks in England/India have Brit accents

 

[usmbguest5318]

...like I've said in other threads, I grew up in a mostly black hood--so my brothers and I talked ''black''.....I guess it was like a mix of white and black
...what's wrong with that??
...the blacks in England/India have Brit accents

I grew up in a mostly black hood--so my brothers and I talked ''black''.....I guess it was like a mix of white and black
...what's wrong with that??

Nothing....
Off-Topic:

...the blacks in England/India have Brit accents

• What blacks in India? That question is partly jocular, but mostly not. The people of India are, by my casual observation, a literal "melting pot" of the planet's races -- some look like Europeans with tans, some look like Hanic folks with tans, some look decidedly Aboriginal (apologies for using such an imprecise term; I don't know much about Aboriginal anthropology), and others look like what Americans might call "black folks with 'good hair.' "
  • In India, blacks are referred to in terms of their race/ethnicity, not their skin color, thus they are thought and spoken of as Africans or of African descent.
  • African descended Indians are classified with a variety of terms referring to their anthropological founding -- Irulas, Kodars, Paniyans, and Kurumbas -- though those folks, to American eyes, may often be thought of as simply dark skinned Indians, perhaps because they generally have smoothly textured hair typical to non-Negroid peoples. [1] These genres of African-descended people have been in India for millennia; they are descendants of the Africans who arrived there or survived there around or shortly after the last near-extinction of humans, ~60K years ago. These people are thought of as Indians, not as "blacks"/Africans, and they number in the millions. They are the people whom we Westerners would broadly categorize as Southern Indians.
    
    After some quantity of millennia of mixing with non-Negroid peoples, genetics did its thing to the outward characteristics one readily observes -- dominant traits express, recessive ones recess -- and, voila: people with brown skin, moderate lips, smooth hair, brown eyes and round/broad noses.
    
    Kurumba Woman
    
    
    
    
    
    
    Paniyan Woman [This woman looks like could be the sibling of every person I've met from Kerala.]
    
    
    
    
    
    
    Irula People
    
    
    
    
    
    What they look like isn't really why I mentioned them. I note them to say they don't at all have British English accents. They speak English with an Indian accent.
• India also has a very small population of Africans who have vastly more recent (dating from the late Middle Ages) African origins. They look as an American would think an African looks, and they are the Siddi people of India. There aren't a lot of them -- population estimates are ~60K, which in a country of over a billion folks, isn't very many at all. The Indians I've asked (employees in my firm) said they know of them, but not one had ever met a Siddi.
  
  Regardless of their expressed racial features, culturally, they think of themselves as Indians, not as Africans even though as a subculture in India, they have preserved some few elements of their distant African culture. These people are thought of as Indians; however, the fact of their African descent isn't overlooked. In that regard, they are sort of in the same boat, as it were, as African Americans.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  I was curious to get a sense of how these folks' circumstances in India might be similar to and/or different from that of black Americans, so I made a point of going to a Siddi village to see them. Turned out that situationally and relative to their country's social mores and structure, they're similar to African Americans; however, unlike black Americans, their ancestors weren't stripped of their former cultural identity. That's a huge thing because it means that whatever they retain from their African ancestry is retained because chose to retain it. Plus they are even today rather pastoral as were their ancestors. There's nothing about today's black Americans; they are citizens of the industrial Westernized world. [3]
  
  All the same, there're no two ways about it, they identify as Indians and with Indian culture just as Western country African-descended people do with the culture of whatever nation in which they live or were raised. Siddi also seem to retain elements of and identify with their African roots -- I was told that some of their party dances bear some similarity to African tribal dances and there's a bit of religious practice that draws from bits of African traditions -- but as an outsider, one's not likely to observe much of it. [4]
  
  They most definitely didn't have British accents; when they spoke English, it was with a typical Indian accent. (Typical to me, anyway because I've not learned the differences among Indian accents.) That said, they struck me as quite multilingual, variously speaking local dialects (I don't recall the names of any Indian dialects; they're all Hindi to me, and since everyone I had to interact with spoke English, I never learned Hindi) and what sounded like an ancestrally African language of some stripe.
  
• Finally, there are the very recent African-descended immigrants. To be sure, among them are folks who are from England, and they are the African Indians who speak with an English accent. That said, there are African descended Indians in the big cities who are recent immigrants from African countries. They speak African accented English. These folks are just immigrants.

Notes:

1. Given Americans' relative lack of world travel and cultural ignorance (insouciance?) about the connections between anthropology and genetics (if one doesn't bother to find out about them, one likely won't know about such things because those topics aren't taught outside of very specific university courses), and the U.S. cultural predilection for oversimplification, I suppose that's not surprising.
   
   In a manner of speaking, I get why folks might not seek information of that sort. If I hadn't occasion to travel a lot, I probably wouldn't have wondered about why the people whom I saw in various places look like they do. But traveling to the Middle East, Europe, South and Latin America, Africa, Far East Asia, and Southern Asia, including India, I couldn't help but notice things like this person looks basically like a European, but s/he has brown skin, or that person has fair skin like Europeans, but has the broader facial features of an African or Eastern Asian, or this other person has brown skin but also epicanthic folds or perhaps wider or narrower eyes.
   
   Seeing paradigmatic racial traits mixed over and over, one, or at least I, can't help but wonder what trends produced these people's appearance. Why don't these people look like I thought they are supposed to look? So, over some period of time, I'd grab a book or read or paper about anthropology, human diasporal patterns, and genetics, and the richness of people's ancestry and human history itself comes to light.
   
2. No surprise that. African Americans think of themselves as Americans, not as Africans, and they haven't some 900 years of inculcation into American/Western culture. Black Americans are no more culturally African than is Donald Trump.
   
3. The bucolic charm of the place I visited is irresistable. If one can imagine living in a very rural area in the U.S., it's quite like that. Life's relatively simple. Kids play together outside. People are pleasant with one another. It's safe, if one takes proper precautions against large wild animals, which basically means one doesn't roam the woods after dusk. On the other hand, there's no 7-11 or Saks Fifth Avenue for thousands of miles, so I'm not looking to build a home there.
   
4. From what I understand from colleagues, the Siddi suffer the disdain of the predominant Indian ethnic groups. I wondered whether their efforts to retain vestiges of their African cultural ancestry is a means of girding themselves, finding some sort of inner strength, so to speak, against the rejection they feel from the majority ethnicities. I don't know....I just know that it seems very similar to notions of "black pride" that African Americans embrace.
   
   To get some sense of these people, you may care to watch the following video. He visited a different village in a different part of India than I did, but the major similarities are there.
   
   
   
   This is a shorter video. It deals more with one way in which the Indian state relates to the Siddi people and, to a lesser extent, how the Siddi relate to India. I think it safe to say that there's a good deal of similarity about how the Siddi feel about the Indian social structure and how black Americans feel about American cultural structure.
   
   

 

[Hellbilly]

...like I've said in other threads, I grew up in a mostly black hood--so my brothers and I talked ''black''.....I guess it was like a mix of white and black
...what's wrong with that??
...the blacks in England/India have Brit accents

Bruno Mars aka Peter Gene Hernandez was born on October 8, 1985, in Honolulu, Hawaii, toPeter Hernandez and Bernadette San Pedro Bayot, and was raised in the Waikiki neighborhood of Honolulu. His father is of half Puerto Rican and half Ashkenazi Jewish descent (from Ukraine and Hungary), and is originally from Brooklyn, New York.

Sent from my SM-J727VPP using Tapatalk

 

[harmonica]

...like I've said in other threads, I grew up in a mostly black hood--so my brothers and I talked ''black''.....I guess it was like a mix of white and black
...what's wrong with that??
...the blacks in England/India have Brit accents

Bruno Mars aka Peter Gene Hernandez was born on October 8, 1985, in Honolulu, Hawaii, toPeter Hernandez and Bernadette San Pedro Bayot, and was raised in the Waikiki neighborhood of Honolulu. His father is of half Puerto Rican and half Ashkenazi Jewish descent (from Ukraine and Hungary), and is originally from Brooklyn, New York.

Sent from my SM-J727VPP using Tapatalk

he's NOT black???!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
that proves he's RACIST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Bruce_T_Laney]

...like I've said in other threads, I grew up in a mostly black hood--so my brothers and I talked ''black''.....I guess it was like a mix of white and black
...what's wrong with that??
...the blacks in England/India have Brit accents

Bruno Mars aka Peter Gene Hernandez was born on October 8, 1985, in Honolulu, Hawaii, toPeter Hernandez and Bernadette San Pedro Bayot, and was raised in the Waikiki neighborhood of Honolulu. His father is of half Puerto Rican and half Ashkenazi Jewish descent (from Ukraine and Hungary), and is originally from Brooklyn, New York.

Sent from my SM-J727VPP using Tapatalk

And the mother had Filipino ancestry.

So he is just whatever he want to be and who gives a damn what he sings as long as he enjoys it and his fans love it...

 

[Cecilie1200]

...like I've said in other threads, I grew up in a mostly black hood--so my brothers and I talked ''black''.....I guess it was like a mix of white and black
...what's wrong with that??
...the blacks in England/India have Brit accents

Bruno Mars aka Peter Gene Hernandez was born on October 8, 1985, in Honolulu, Hawaii, toPeter Hernandez and Bernadette San Pedro Bayot, and was raised in the Waikiki neighborhood of Honolulu. His father is of half Puerto Rican and half Ashkenazi Jewish descent (from Ukraine and Hungary), and is originally from Brooklyn, New York.

Sent from my SM-J727VPP using Tapatalk

And the mother had Filipino ancestry.

So he is just whatever he want to be and who gives a damn what he sings as long as he enjoys it and his fans love it...

And you know what? I say everyone else should be whatever they want to be, artistically speaking, regardless of ethnicity. You do you, and don't try to tell others how to be themselves.