Showing posts with label music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label music. Show all posts

March 1, 2008

Anti-Mormonism

The intensity of anti-Mormon feeling displayed during the defeat of Mitt Romney must have come as a shock to Mormons. They put up the most competent-looking Presidential candidate, and he gets kicked around. In a very recent poll, 32% said they wouldn't vote for a Mormon for President, compared to only 4% who wouldn't vote for a black.

That must send a wake-up call to Mormons. For generations, they've assumed that because they have a weird religion, they will have to be the most normal of Americans. But now, being a normal American is considered weird.

It will be interesting to see how Mormons respond.

The next test of the strength of anti-Mormonism in the U.S. will come in the "American Idol" voting, because a 17-year-old Hispanic Mormon kid from Utah named David Archuleta appears to be more talented than anybody else. Here's a video of his rendition of John Lennon's "Imagine," in which he somehow turns the most hackneyed song in the world, the quasi-national anthem of Brussels Eurocrats, into a thing of beauty. The kid won "Star Search" at age 12 and appears to be a professional singer, so it's kind of like a 17-year-old Stevie Wonder competing against a bunch of amateurs ("Hey, Little Stevie, weren't you in all those Beach Party movies with Annette Funicello four years ago?" "Shhhhh.")

But the anti-Mormon Evangelical demographic makes up a big chunk of the phone-in voters on "American Idol," so it will be interesting to see if anybody can upset Archuleta.

By the way, it's fun to compare Archuleta's slight reworking of Lennon's limited melody to contestant Jason Yeager's attempt to make up his own melody for Henry Mancini's exquisite "Moon River." Check out the video beginning 45 seconds in, when Yeager gets a proud smile on his face as he unleashes on humanity the new tune that he's dreamed up for the line "Two drifters off to see the world."

Take that, Henry Mancini, I totally pwned you! Next, I'll do a couple of songs I like to call "The Purple Panther" and "Baby Hippopotamus Walk."

Yeager looks like Val Kilmer doing an American Idol parody on Saturday Night Live.

Also, I didn't find much on Archuleta's ethnic background, but if I had to guess, I would bet he's descended on his father's side from settlers who entered what's now the American Southwest under the King of Spain's rule many centuries ago. There's a county in Colorado named "Archuleta" down on the border with New Mexico, and most of the Archuletas in genealogical databases are from that general area.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

December 1, 2007

The Epitome of the Cultural Hegemony of the Baby Boomers

I'm looking out my window and two airplanes are flying by, towing advertising banners. The first one says, "Alvin!!!!!!!!!!" and the second one says, "Get Munk'd, Dec. 14."

I presume they are referring to some sort of upcoming movie about Alvin and the Chipmunks, a 1958 novelty song project by Ross Bagdasarian, in which he sped up his voice to sound like rodents singing a Christmas song.

It's rather pleasing to me that the pop cultural ephemera of my childhood continues to be recycled and inflicted upon new generations. Of course, we Baby Boomers didn't create most of the stuff we loved as pre-teens. Indeed, one reason for the enduring hegemony of our childish tastes is the failure of my teeming Baby Boom generation to come up with replacements for things like the great Christmas songs of 1934-1958.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

November 17, 2007

"In the government yard in Trenchtown"

It's odd how certain lines from songs stick in the heads of lots of people. One of the stranger famous lines is from Bob Marley's 1975 hit "No Woman, No Cry," especially in its amblingly monumental live version:
I remember when we used to sit
In the government yard in Trenchtown

Trenchtown is a slum neighborhood in Kingston, Jamaica whose most distinctive feature was an open sewer trench. The government yard was a public housing project where Marley lived.

This doesn't sound like promising raw materials for a tourist attraction, but the second line is so ineffably memorable that, sure enough, Jamaicans are trying to make the government yard in Trenchtown into a museum. Apparently, tourists have been getting off planes for years and telling cab drivers they want to sit in the government yard in Trenchtown. The BBC reports:
"The public housing project where reggae legend Bob Marley lived is being re-envisioned as a historic site and tourist area. But high crime in the depressed neighborhood poses a challenge to dreams of a tourist-friendly shrine to Marley."

I can see how this could be a problem because the crime rate in Kingston scared the hell out of The Clash when they visited 30 years ago. As Joe Strummer recalled of their trip to Jamaica in "Safe European Home:"
I went to the place
Where every white face
Is an invitation to robbery
An’ sitting here in my safe European home
I don’t wanna go back there again

Didn't Bob have, like, a favorite beach or waterfall he liked to visit, maybe bring his guitar along and work on his songs? Tourists like beaches and waterfalls a lot more than they like housing projects. I'm just trying to be helpful here ...

The funny thing about the line's fame is that there's not a lot of catchy melody going on when Bob sings, "In the government yard in Trenchtown." I suspect the use of common English words to make up slightly puzzling phrases helped make it popular. But, clearly, the wistful, elegiac organ part behind the verses plays a huge role.

Now, where have I had heard the organ line in "No Woman, No Cry" more or less before? I certainly have negligible musical skills, but it's surely reminiscent of (without being exactly the same as) Procol Harum's famous bluesy organ part from their 1967 hit "A Whiter Shade of Pale." Procol Harum's organ line was inspired by J.S. Bach's "Air on a G String" and another Bach piece. (Here's a technical discussion of the Bach-Procol relationship, and here's the scene in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing about how Bach, "that cheeky beggar," stole "A Whiter Shade of Pale.")

Marley's organ part is quite similar to Procol's, and adds a catchy descending resolution at the end, set to the words "No woman, no cry," that wraps it up nicely. (By the way, here's a quantitative description of why the live version of "No Woman, No Cry" is so much more popular than the trite studio version on Natty Dread -- it's slowed down from 99 beats per minute on the studio album to 78 beats per minute on the live album. This MeanSpeed site has calculated the beats-per-minute of 15,000 pop songs, and has developed some elaborate theories about how different speeds fit different emotions.)

So, I was pleased to find out that Procol Harum has noticed this too and uses this when they tour on the Baby Boom nostalgia circuit:

"When they did Whiter Shade ... Gary feinted with a couple of false starts, going once into No Woman, No Cry and once into When a Man Loves a Woman before doing the full three-verse version ('Said I'm home on shore leave...')."

Percy Sledge's "When a Man Loves a Woman" came out the year before and has a similar chord structure to AWSoP.

Although there was a long court fight among members of Procol Harum over whether the Bach-inspired organ part was original enough to merit a share of the songwriting credit (and thus the royalties), it would be tacky to sue the Marley estate for a share of "No Woman, No Cry" because Marley registered the song he wrote as being written by a friend named V. Ford who runs a soup kitchen -- so "No Woman, No Cry" is the charitable donation that keeps on giving.

I've always liked to see bands mashup songs by different artists that share elements in common, such as a backbeat or chord structure.

Even more fun is when musician and singer aren't in cahoots but can still follow each other. The best DJ in LA is Steve Jones, the Sex Pistols guitarist, a shambling, amiable old bloke who knows everybody in the music business. Despite all the made-up nonsense about how the (pre-Sid) Sex Pistols couldn't play their instruments (kind of like how "Seinfeld," the most intricately plotted sitcom in American TV history, is always described as a "a show about nothing"), Jones was a well-paid session guitarist for many years after the Sex Pistols broke up in 1978. So, Jonesy, who has been on the wagon for twelve years, does his two hour show each day on 103.1 FM with his acoustic guitar in his lap. It's fascinating listening to somebody who talks like an old duffer, yet whose music intelligence remains so sharp.

Last spring, his guest was Mika, a Beirut-born English pop singer with operatic training. So, Jonesy started by playing on his guitar Mika's latest hit for his guest to sing, then segueing into songs by Mika's influences, such as Freddie Mercury (an English Parsi gay) and George Michael (an English Greek/Jewish gay), then into songs that influenced Mika's influences, such as going from George Michael and Wham's "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" to Martha and the Vandella's Motown "Heat Wave." Mika valiantly followed Jonesy' lead, scat-singing when he couldn't remember the lyrics, turning ten minutes of live music into a seminar on a half century of one thread of pop history.

The Jonesy's Jukebox show is such a success that it seems very strange that I can't recall ever hearing before a rock DJ who plays guitar live on the air.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

October 31, 2007

What's gone wrong with music?

A recurrent topic of mine is "Kids These Days: What's the Deal with Their Music?" Unlike the previous generation, my complaint is that popular music has barely changed in 25 years. Rap music is still the same old same old; the LA "New Rock" radio station KROQ sounds almost exactly the same as when I left LA in 1982, except styles have gotten narrower (fewer synthesizers and fewer girl singers); and country sounds like the lamer sort of 1970s rock.

The great age of rock music was driven in part by the electric guitar, which first emerged with Charlie Christian's participation in Benny Goodman's band in the late 1930s. Just as the development of the pianoforte (soft-loud) was essential to the Romantic music of the 19th Century (imagine if Romantic composers had had to compose on harpsichords!), the electric guitar was central to turning rock 'n' roll (which could be performed just fine on the piano, as Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard had shown) into rock. Around 1964-1965, the world discovered how protean the electric guitar could sound, and that set off one of the great eras in popular music history.

But there was an important ethnic angle, the slow synthesis during the 19th and 20th Centuries, mostly in the Mississippi watershed, of an Afro-Anglo-Celtic style. And that started to come apart with the punk-New Wave era at the end of the 1970s, which was a rebellion, in large part, against the dominance of the blues, as institutionalized by the Brits from the Beatles onward in the sainted Sixties. Devo, with their robotic rendition of the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction," was a representative New Wave act -- not particularly talented, but that made them more representative than some idiosyncratic genius. Their message was: Let's stop pretending we're Mississippi Delta bluesmen; we're nerdy suburban white kids with three digit IQs.

The problem has become that the punk-New Wave rebellion against the blues got institutionalized, and the same musical styles that were refreshing in 1977-1982 are still hanging around. The more linear, abstracted styles that emerged after 1977 were interesting, but you can't keep mining that vein -- abstracting an abstraction hits diminishing marginal emotional returns pretty quickly.

An article in The New Yorker --"A Paler Shade of White: How indie rock lost its soul" by Sasha Frere-Jones -- starts off as a review of an Arcade Fire concert and then touches on some of these issues.

By the time I saw the Clash, in 1981, it was finished with punk music. It had just released “Sandinista!,” a three-LP set consisting of dub, funk, rap, and Motown interpretations, along with other songs that were indebted—at least in their form—to Jamaican and African-American sources. As I watched Arcade Fire, I realized that the drummer and the bassist rarely played syncopated patterns or lingered in the low registers. If there is a trace of soul, blues, reggae, or funk in Arcade Fire, it must be philosophical; it certainly isn’t audible. And what I really wanted to hear, after a stretch of raucous sing-alongs, was a bit of swing, some empty space, and palpable bass frequencies—in other words, attributes of African-American popular music.

There’s no point in faulting Arcade Fire for what it doesn’t do; what’s missing from the band’s musical DNA is missing from dozens of other popular and accomplished rock bands as well—most of them less entertaining than Arcade Fire. I’ve spent the past decade wondering why rock and roll, the most miscegenated popular music ever to have existed, underwent a racial re-sorting in the nineteen-nineties. Why did so many white rock bands retreat from the ecstatic singing and intense, voicelike guitar tones of the blues, the heavy African downbeat, and the elaborate showmanship that characterized black music of the mid-twentieth century.

Unfortunately, the author appears to be too young to know his history correctly:
"MTV had been on the air for nearly two years before it got up the courage to play the video for Jackson’s “Billie Jean,” in 1983. (Jackson was the first black artist to appear on the channel, though it had played videos by the equally gifted white soul act Hall & Oates.) Jackson’s 1982 album “Thriller” is the second-biggest-selling record of all time (after “Eagles: Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975”), but he alone could not alter pop music’s racial power balance. Black and white musicians continued to trade, borrow, and steal from one another, but white artists typically made more money and received more acclaim."

No, he's confused here. Blacks were huge stars long before then -- Ever hear of the Supremes? Stevie Wonder? Aretha Franklin? Jimi Hendrix? Marvin Gaye? Ray Charles? Johnny Mathis? Nat King Cole? Ella Fitzgerald? The biggest stars of the post-1964 classic rock era were British (Beatles, Stones, Who, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd), but among American acts, blacks did fine.

The first two years of MTV, 1981-1982, were an anomalous period in which white rock fans were overtly anti-black. (I recall Prince, opening for the Rolling Stones at the LA Coliseum in 1981, being showered with boos no matter how much heavy Hendrix-style electric guitar he laid on.) This was specifically because white rockers blamed blacks (wrongly) for disco. (They should have blamed gays -- as Tom Wolfe pointed out at the time after visiting Studio 54, the music industry was covering up just how gay disco was.) It was a passing phase growing out of the anti-disco backlash, and wasn't true before or after.
"If young white musicians had been imitating black ones, it was partly because they had been able to do so in the dark, so to speak. In 1969, most of Led Zeppelin’s audience would have had no idea that Robert Plant and Jimmy Page had taken some of the lyrics of “Whole Lotta Love” from the blues artist Willie Dixon, whom the band had already covered twice (with credit) on its début album."

Oh, come on ... Everybody knew British rockers were copying black bluesmen. The Brits talked about it constantly -- in their limey speaking accents that contrasted so hilariously with their Memphis singing accents.

Nor were whites only "stealing" from blacks. Consider Aretha's 1967 classic "(You Make Me Feel Like a) A Natural Woman," which was written by the Brill Building husband-wife team of Gerry Goffin and Carole King. Indeed, a strong respect for Jewish showbiz professionalism contributed mightily to black musical success. Most famously, Motown founder Berry Gordy explicitly organized his recording company to mimic the methods of Hollywood movie studios of the 1930s.

The author goes on to make a better point:
"In the mid- and late eighties, as MTV began granting equal airtime to videos by black musicians, academia was developing a doctrine of racial sensitivity that also had a sobering effect on white musicians: political correctness. Dabbling in black song forms, new or old, could now be seen as an act of appropriation, minstrelsy, or co-optation. A political reading of art took root, ending an age of innocent—or, at least, guilt-free—pilfering. This wasn’t a case of chickens coming home to roost. Rather, it was as though your parents had come home and turned on the lights."

For example, after the first rap Top 40 hit in late 1979, white bands released various raps in 1980-81, such as Talking Heads' "Crosseyed and Painless" (with super-nerd David Byrne rapping "Facts are simple and facts are straight / Facts are lazy and facts are late"), The Clash's "Magnificent Seven," and Blondie's #1 hit "Rapture." It was a fun novelty fad, and the cool New Wave bands were hopping on the bandwagon. And why shouldn't they?

Now, though a white performer has to be as good at rapping as Eminem or he'll be tarred as the new Vanilla Ice.

So, white musicians retreated from anything to do with black music, not wanting to be accused of being the new Pat Boone and stealing Little Richard's act.

Meanwhile, it turned out that blacks weren't such almighty natural creative geniuses either, at least when freed of the anxiety of living up to white demands. Black songwriting collapsed. Writing melodic hooks came to be seen as incompatible with keepin' it real. By the 1990s, black songs that weren't raps didn't have much more melody than the raps did. Hip-hop just droned on forever, although it may now, hopefully, be finally dying.

The terrible irony is that blacks turned themselves into new minstrels, acting out ridiculous gangsta rap fantasies for white fans, sometimes with lethal results.

At the Super Bowl halftime show this year, oldtimer Prince gave a tremendous performance in the pouring rain. For his two cover versions, he pointedly chose songs written by whites and covered by blacks -- Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower" (most famously peformed by Jimi Hendrix) and Creedence Clearwater's "Proud Mary" as done by Ike and Tina Turner. His message was clear: Let's get over this obsession with who stole what from whom. Together, we Americans conquered the musical world. We can do it again if we just grow up.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

October 6, 2007

Bob Marley was white!

Here's something I never thought of before. Although Jamaica was an English colony, the "one-drop rule" works the opposite way there than it does here -- some white blood makes you white. (I suppose this was because Jamaica was a Spanish colony until 1655, and kept the Latin perspective on racial classification.) So, the most famous Jamaican ever, Bob Marley, who had a white father and black mother, was more or less considered white in Jamaica.

Marley's ex-bandmate, Peter Tosh, used to complain about this. Wikipedia says: "Tosh became bitter about the success of his ex-bandmate, at one point claiming that the only reason Marley was so successful was that his father was white ..."

Sorry, Peter, but I think the real reason was because Bob wrote better tunes than you did.

I remember walking out of a Tosh show at the Roxy in the late 1970s, and the club put on the English group 10cc's pop reggae hit "Dreadlock Holiday," and thinking to myself, "I know Tosh is supposed to be Mr. Authentic Roots Rock Reggae and all that, but this piece of fluff is catchier than anything in his whole show."

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

July 8, 2007

Is this why musical styles are stuck?

A reader who teaches history in a public high school with mostly American-born, English-speaking Latino students writes:


My students in the back of the class are constantly sticking their iPods in their ears and blaring their music so loud that everybody else can hear it. What I'm amazed by, however, is that when I have to point and yell at them to turn off the music, how often the loudest instrument we can all hear is .. an accordion. Who would have thought that the wave of the future was accordion music?


For much of the 20th Century, pop musical styles in the English-speaking world changed at a breathtaking pace as each generation rebelled against not just their parents but also their older siblings. For example, the punk movement of 1977 was explicitly against the 1960s generation -- "Your generation don't mean a thing to me" sneered Billy Idol in Generation X's attack on The Who's "My Generation," "Your Generation."

And then not too many years after 1980, musical innovation slowed down. Most notably, African-Americans, who had been so stylistically fecund, got stuck with rap.

I wonder whether increasing ethnic diversity has played a role in the Great Slow-Down. To dislike accordion music because your dad and grandma like accordion music is now not just rebelling against other generations, it's rebelling against your own race.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

The good side of multiculturalism: silent shopping?

The only thing that makes the experience of shopping at the vast, crowded Costco warehouse stores tolerable is the merciful quiet. Unlike most stores, Costco doesn't play music over the PA. You would think this would become a trend as shoppers get more multiethnic and have fewer musical tastes in common, but, for some reason, I fear it won't be.


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

June 6, 2007

For Clash obsessives

Excerpts from Chris Knowles' book Clash City Showdown provides the analytic orientation missing from the new and extremely long and detailed Joe Strummer biography. Knowles makes sense of The Breakup (the punk equivalent of Lennon and McCartney breaking up): In the early 1980s, Mick Jones wanted to go forward into hip-hop, while Joe Strummer wanted to go back into roots rock and the like. The irony is that rap would have suited Joe well, with his lyrical and rhythmic strengths. He just preferred real music over what my nonagenarian father calls "yap music."


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

May 23, 2007

American Idol and the Rise of the Mulatto Elite

For about ten weeks, my wife has been predicting that the winner of the TV singing contest will be 17-year-old Jordin Sparks, the cheerful daughter of a black retired NFL player and a redhead, because she can sing both black and white. In contrast, 29-year-old Melinda Doolittle, who conducted a master class each week in how to sing like the great black women of the past -- Aretha, Tina, etc. -- finished only third.

We'll find out Wednesday night when the show drags out the announcement of the winner for two hours. (In contrast, the shorter Tuesday night shows when the actual competition singing is done are a lot snappier. The very 1950s thing about this show that's key to its success is that the contestants never ever get to lip-sync, so it combines entertainment with the tension of sports.)

If, as expected, Jordin does win, it will be another data point for my theory of the Rise of the Mulatto Elite -- white people like minority entertainers and politicians, but they don't like them too minority, and minority cultures in the U.S. tend to be somewhat dysfunctional environments for raising children, so the best combination for becoming famous these days is to have a minority dad and a white mom.

Rage Against the Machine, the most important left wing rock band since the Clash, is a classic example with both the guitarist and singer being of mixed race. Prodigious guitarist Tom Morello is the great-nephew of Jomo Kenyatta (!), founder of modern Kenya. His father was a Mau-Mau rebel and then Kenya's first ambassador to the UN. His mom was an Irish-Italian girl from Illinois who traveled the world and married his father in Kenya. She left her husband before the baby was born. Morello was raised in Libertyville, IL, a nice all-white suburb 40 miles north of Chicago, near the Pine Meadow Golf Course, which I used to drive out from the city to play.

Similarly, the band's annoying lead singer, Zack de la Rocha, has a Latino father, who went nuts when he was 13, and so he was raised by his white mother in posh Irvine, CA. Like a certain Presidential candidate's adolescence, this pleasant white upbringing led de la Rocha to identify more strongly with his minority side.

If Blake wins American Idol, however, well never mind ...

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

April 19, 2007

"American Idol"

continues to dominate television ratings with a product that just isn't terribly deplorable. The success of the contest at finding unexploited commercial singing talent, especially female talent, shows up the inefficiency and corruption of the traditional music industry, which fails to maximize profits because too many male executives prefer to exploit their power to promote pretty but untalented girls who will sleep with them rather than to find the best singers. Further, the contest format gives nice, unassertive people like this year's standout, Melinda Doolittle (a 29-year-old professional back-up singer with a near Gladys Knight-quality voice but a shy, unassuming personality), a chance to shine in a business where pushiness is normally a prerequisite.

One striking difference between American Idol and the spate of lesser reality TV shows is that, surprisingly, it doesn't reward diva attitudes and bitchiness on the part of the contestants (the judges provide more than enough of that). The show has consistently resisted the temptation to put cameras in wherever it is that the contestants are lodged. It would be easy to encourage the contestants to engage in backstage backbiting and undermining each other on camera, like on Big Brother and all its imitators, but the show doesn't do that. One reason is that American Idol isn't American Idle -- the contestants who make it past the early auditions to Hollywood are working hard in rehearsal all week to get ready to put on two shows a week, and thus don't have as much time to connive against each other.

Another reason is because singing is a more objective undertaking than just being a media personality. Radio psychiatrist Dr. Drew Pinsky gave the standard Narcissistic Personality Inventory test to scores of minor celebrities that came on the "Loveline" radio show he hosted with Adam Carolla and found that the most narcissistic were the least talented -- the female reality TV stars of the moment were the most narcissistic, while the most talented, the musicians, were the least. If you are an excellent musician, you are always aware that there are truly great musicians out there. Melinda Doolittle knows that as good as she is, she's not as good as, say, Whitney Houston was in her (brief) prime.

Indeed, one of the rare pleasures of American Idol is the initial open audition shows when the talentless egomaniacs are sent home with curt, but valuable, advice to find a different career. In an America that constantly propagandizes about how everyone can achieve their goals if only they never forget their dreams, yada yada, Simon Cowell offers some useful English realism.

One thing that surprised Cowell a half decade ago was how little the American public cared about singers' looks. Being beautiful, like last year's runner-up Katherine McPhee, or cute, like the previous year's winner Carrie Underwood, helps, of course, but being fat (e.g., winner Rueben Stoddard), funny-looking (winner Fantasia and popular runner-up Clay Aiken), or gray-haired (winner Taylor Hicks) doesn't hurt as much as it would in Britain.

My wife has been guessing for some time that the winner this year will be 17-year-old Jordin Sparks, the cheerful mulatto daughter of a retired NFL cornerback and a blonde. Sparks, who has done some plus-sized modeling, is cute but not sexy, which is becoming in somebody so young. Sparks is a fine singer but not as strong as Doolittle or, when she's on her game, big LaKisha Jones. But the complex interaction of race and musical style just might favor young Sparks.

This year, the male singers have been below average, and without a strong white female country singer like Underwood or first winner Kelly Clarkson, the black women have dominated. Although they always put a cute white rocker chick in the top dozen, American Idol isn't conducive to singing electric guitar rock, for which you need your own small band, so that leaves country as the only genre where experienced white women have an advantage over black women on the show. The other good genres for the show are either black, such as Motown, or old-fashioned, such as show tunes, where the black advantage in raw vocal talent gives black women the advantage.

But there have been so many good black women this year, and they never have that all big a voting bloc among the public (the modal voter -- an adolescent white girl would prefer, all else being equal, to vote for somebody she identifies with), so they've cut into each other's vote, with LaKisha almost being sent home this week. (Howard Stern's novelty candidate Sanjaya was sent packing instead). The same thing happened in the third year, when Fantasia, who is black, won. Another tremendous black singer, Jennifer Hudson, the new Oscar-winner for "Dreamgirls," finished seventh, despite a lot of praise from the judges. Without Fantasia in the running, Hudson might well have won, but there wasn't enough support from the public for black women for both of them to make it to the last night.

Because she can sing black or white, Jordin Sparks thus looks well-poised to win the vote this year.

If she does well, that would be more evidence for a phenomenon I've been vaguely noticing for some time -- the rise of a Mulatto Elite in public life, to some extent displacing African-Americans raised in a conventionally black background. Perhaps it's just that there are more people with one black parent and one white parent today. But I suspect it's also that traditional African-Americans, in general, are getting ever more into their own narrow black groove and thus slowly losing touch with the rest of the country. For example, Levitt and Dubner wrote:

"The California data establish just how dissimilarly black and white parents have named their children over the past 25 years or so—a remnant, it seems, of the Black Power movement. The typical baby girl born in a black neighborhood in 1970 was given a name that was twice as common among blacks than whites. By 1980, she received a name that was 20 times more common among blacks. (Boys' names moved in the same direction but less aggressively—likely because parents of all races are less adventurous with boys' names than girls'.) Today, more than 40 percent of the black girls born in California in a given year receive a name that not one of the roughly 100,000 baby white girls received that year."

Giving your baby one of these stereotypically black names exposes your child to discrimination on the job market (as resume tests have shown). But blacks seem to be willing to have their children pay that price in the name of racial solidarity. Giving your baby a name like LaKisha is a way of branding her permanently with black culture so that she is less able to step away from it if she chooses.

As conventional blacks increasingly concentrate in only a handful of fields (e.g., just basketball and football in sports) and make a fetish of keepin' it real, of not "acting white," they are losing touch with the interests of the white majority, even as whites become ever more positive toward black talents. In their place, those individuals who are part black genetically, but had at least a partly white upbringing are able to flourish among whites by providing black skills without as much self-defeating black attitude. (Any connection between this trend and the popularity among whites of a certain Senator from Illinois is of course utterly coincidental.)


My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer