500 Songs

I am listening to Andrew Hickey's "The History of Rock in 500 Songs."  It is the same series that Ann Althouse mentions occasionally, though she has caught up and is listening to episodes as they come out, while I am in the early episodes.

It contains much good information, but perhaps it would be better named "The History of American Racism in 500 Songs." Hickey is a Brit, which would ordinarily be a plus for an Anglophile like me, but in this case it is tiring, that he has the standard-issue, not thought out prejudices about Americans of his tribe in England.  In episode 18 he makes a good point about the Crewcuts making their fortune by taking R&B songs by Black artists and re-recording them without much change. He allows that new versions can sometimes be more valuable than the recordings they are imitating if they have value-added. In the case of the Crewcuts, it would be hard to make the case they added much.  He should have taken this excellent observation to heart and applied it to his own politics. He simply regurgitates what his tribe wants to hear, with no spin or insight of his own.  They are just canned sermons.

It's a pity. I keep trying to hang with him, because he is otherwise pretty good, and it's not as if racism can be legitimately avoided in the discussion of Rock's early roots. But a few episodes have not even been much about the music, just his feelings of outrage.  He doesn't even bother to hide it at times. He mentions that Sam Phillips suffered from depression and explains it by saying it was because he had somewhat different wiring than other people. It allowed him to empathise with the shy Elvis and the depression of some of the Black artists he worked with.  But their depression was caused by oppression. When a Black artist or producer cheated other Blacks, it was because he was just a sonnuvabitch. When a white person did it, it was because of racism.  It's a universal solvent for explanations.