Blog 5 (9/26-9/28)
For class this week we talked about minstrel shows in the United States. I was blown away by the lecture on minstrel shows. I found it to be so unbelievable and gross. I had no idea about them at all and on top of that how prevalent they were, and how much they affected things today. I strongly believe that it’s a disgraceful part of America’s history that is not taught enough. I may be an exception, but I had never been taught or heard about minstrel shows at all, and I’ve come to learn they were super prevalent in our history. I have heard of “black face” before, but even that had never come up in any school lecture, I had only heard it on the news from what I assumed where seriously extremists racists.
Building off of my rant, another thing I found to be incredibly interesting was that the songs “Yellow Rose of Texas” and “Dixie” were are written for minstrel shows with white men wearing black face. Wow. That was really crazy to learn, and I feel like it needs to be more common information because I think that if people, particularly southern white people, who have pride in these things realized the origins, they would be blown away and disgusted. There are white people who genuinely don’t think the confederacy is racist, and even with the seriously obvious reasons as to why it is, they maintain the thought that the symbols of the confederacy don’t symbolize racism. The fact that the confederacy song is a straight up minstrel show product proves the blatant racism. I don’t know how you could separate it after knowing that.
Aside from the minstrel shows, we also talked about beats this week. European music being on the 1 & 3, while pop music and dance music tend to reside on the 2 & 4. We then talked about the alteration of time and space caused by changed in technology in the United States. Such as time zone and regulated time, electrical light, and motion pictures. Lastly, we touched on the “Acoustic Era” of recorded music, before musicians sung through microphones when recording.