Just came across Kandia Crazy Horse’s weigh-in on the now infamous New York Times "blipster" article. Check this:
The appropriation of the song "Dixie," likely based on the childhood
reminiscences of Mother Ellen Snowden, and now the saddling of the
Afropunk milieu with the spurious slang term "blipster," meant to
cheapen the very real impact and velocity of overlapping progressive
black movements currently afoot, prove that there are no safe havens
for colored cultural producers, not even in alternative spaces. In
other words: a black artist has no utopias the dominant culture’s bound
to respect.
The Black rock movement is not just about creative freedom. It’s about respect, which translates into the ability of such artists to sustain their creative output and, thus, their careers. Kandia further writes:
Yet such interest, genuine or not, doesn’t alter the salient fact that
white audiences take umbrage at these kids’ presence in their midst
and, moreover, have not sustained any kind of aesthetic and commercial
acceptance of "black rock" acts since the long ago heyday of Jimi
Hendrix and Sly & the Family Stone — and (on a different scale)
Bad Brains and Living Colour in the 1980s.
No matter what anyone says, there’s still lots of work to be done.
Read the full article here.
