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Who wrote paint it black7/28/2023 In an insightful passage on the Stones’ notorious 1971 hit “Brown Sugar,” Hamilton writes: Though benefiting from their place atop a racialized social order, they at least acknowledged the order itself. The key figures here are the Rolling Stones, who always emphasized their debt to Black American artists even as they enjoyed creative and commercial advantages exclusive to white Englishmen. Motown’s Supremes, were denying their own heritage. Hamilton deconstructs this ideology, arguing that Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” is as much a classic protest anthem as Dylan’s “Blowin’ In the Wind,” and that Franklin’s career path was as important as Janis Joplin’s, even if sanctioned rock retrospectives (most of them by whites) give far more attention to the Dylans and the Joplins than the Cookes and the Franklins.Īs well, Just Around Midnight explores how much white and Black musicians were actively and fruitfully adopting each other’s styles – Hamilton scrutinizes Paul McCartney’s bass lines alongside Motown ace James Jamerson’s – despite purists’ insistence that whites could never have soul and that polished Black acts, e.g. Rockism holds that Bob Dylan and the Beatles, for example, were uniquely talented individuals, but Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin merely had the inborn musical natures of any and all African Americans. Just Around Midnight does present a convincing case against “rockism,” the tendency of journalists and radio programmers to elevate the works of white performers from the mid-1960s on as artistically significant, while at the same time relegating contemporary songs by Black people to a general category of primitive source material. It’s a provocative premise which is largely, but not entirely, borne out by his evidence. Instead Hamilton is more interested in the history of popular music criticism – an original avenue of scholarship, even if the writer is inclined to indict critics for the same prejudices others have attributed to the industry as a whole. The most refreshing aspect of Jack Hamilton’s 2016 book, Just Around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination, is that it doesn’t rehearse the familiar history of popular music as a long sequence of white artists ripping off Black ones for fun and profit.
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