Friday, February 17, 2006

Can a White Guy Sing Soul?

Not to be racialist about it but you be the judge?

1 comment:

fourstones said...

alig is a character based on a white suburban man who lives with his mom and pretends to be black. I guess I was making a stupid tie between that and the 'blue eye soul' guys referenced in the funky16 blog entry. (more on alig below)

I don't know about you but the first time I heard Winwood belt "I'm a man, yes I am..." I was NOT picturing a 16 year old white suburban British kid so that answers my actual question.

If we're going to talk about this for real, I guess there no getting around the question of "cultural appropriation" which I'm pretty conflicted about, having grown up TOTALLY surround by soul, R&B and funk -- seems like sometimes appropriation is ok, expected, respected, lauded and other times it touches the third rail of Amercian race relations and people get really (often justifiably) upset. (e.g. I can never remember what side of things Crouch is on.)

re alig: I'm not sure the Danson analogy is the right one. If anything he's an extreme case of what Brown/AliG is saterizing but I've never been able to quite figure out what he was trying to do there. Sasha Brown (AliG) is making very strong points about cultural sensitity by taking the LONG way around but when he gets there it's powerful, if squirm inducing stuff. But hey I'm not his publicist. ftr, his other character is a buffoony sheep humping eastern european that only by a fluke of cosmic fate (and my parent's nearly fatal emmigraion to America) isn't me.