Light Years Beyond Madonna

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 22 January 2015.

David Bowie performs "Heroes" at Marc Bolan Show in 1977.

I think we interpreted "tropes" a little differently.

I was going with the idea of "here are different types of lineups." I intentionally left the implications of the lineups out, for a variety of reasons. They all conjure different types of baggage for everybody, and it's always hard to know what anyone's intentions are for their choices, anyway.

I think there are sub-tropes within every trope I delineated. For instance, in the all-white groups, you could have the Pat Boone thing, which is whitening a black sound for commercial acceptability; the Elvis thing, which is directly ripping off a black sound and using his whiteness as a way to profit from it; the tribute thing, which happens when a white group is profoundly influenced by black artists and finds its own voice through black music (Hall and Oates maybe); or the novelty act, in which there is a gimmick behind the idea that the white band sounds so black (Wild Cherry, The Average White Band).

Of course, through all this discussion, I'm aware of many of the countless problems in using terms like "white music" and "black music." Arthur's music is genuinely his own and I don't think there is anything exploitative in the influences that show through in his music. But then there's Will, who reflects the American Way of doing business and turning art into product.

It's easy to go overboard in crying racism when looking at pop music.

It's also easy to let artists we like off the hook. I love Bowie, too, but he might be the king of a British colonialist approach to music. Nearly all of his career is about taking American raw materials, finishing them with British sensibilities, and selling them back to Americans at an inflated price. Even his Berlin period began because he followed Iggy over there. I'm not calling him a colonialist to dismiss him. I think he's a genius and love his music, and I think he has the best sense of how to turn appropriations into something new and interesting out of any artist I can think of...he's light years beyond Madonna.