Davey the Fat Boy wrote:Sure. There was plenty of filler. But James Brown, Barry White, Al Green, EWF, The Stylistics, etc was not it.
Generally agreed, although I wouldn't blame anyone for cherry picking James Brown or Barry White's catalogs. I used to collect JB's Federal, King, People and Polygram 45s and...I was not horribly put out when I liquidated about a decade ago for venture capital.
The impetus behind a thread like this, I'm guessing, is a very real reaction to a very real blanket Anglo Saxon musical deification of...you know, "Negroes". Blues, soul, funk, gospel, reggae, hip hop - there seems to be a line going all the way back to the Beatles/Stones/Yardbirds British beat boom all the way through yr Dave Marsh types or yr
Legend/The Best of P Funk/Bloodsugarsexmagic owning fratboys where this shit is all somehow unimpeachably sacrosanct. At the end of the day, I'm not certain there's anything whiter than wanting to be black.
It's a deep well of some stunning music, but the implication that African Americans have a notably stronger musical batting average than whitey seems no less spuriously canonistic than yr baby boomer classic rock propaganda.
As it happens, I could die happily enough without hearing another note by George Clinton or Aretha Franklin.