“White People Music”
It’s no secret that I’m a lover of music.
However, up until the age of about 12, I listened to Rap & R&B radio exclusively. (Of course in the early 90’s and late 80’s…there wasn’t a clear delineation between say Taylor Dane and Anita Baker in regard to what would be played on radio station so we’re going to disregard that for now…)
Back to what I was saying though, once R&B and Rap did break away from Pop on the radio in the 90’s, I considered Pop and light rock “White people music.” Phil Collins, The Bee Gees, or the more recent N Sync or Britney Spears were all people that I thought I was too good to listen to (lol…)
That all changed when a certain movie by the name of Titanic came out. That was my FAVORITE MOVIE OF ALL TIME at that age. I went to see it 5 times in the theatre…I got all the books and related magazines. Leonardo DiCaprio was my FUTURE HUSBAND and Kate Winslet was a “gutterbutt trollop” © B Scott.
I started listening to the Pop station to catch “My Heart Will Go On” which would be played every 15 minutes on the radio somewhere…and I would stop to listen to it every time. In the meantime, I would sometimes catch the other Pop songs and started to realize they weren’t so bad after all. I started to like those N Sync, Britney Spears, and Spice Girls songs. They were catchy…they got stuck in your head…
And I was ashamed.
We always used to make fun of my sister for openly liking Ace of Base and hanging out with our lighter brothers and sisters all the time (My eldest sister was in the popular Black people group and I was mostly a loner eat lunch in the library type.) I was conflicted because I thought liking Pop would make me less Black somehow so I kept it to myself that I liked this type of music. Instead of buying cassettes, I’d just tape songs off the radio and listen to them on my walkman. As I got older, when Napster first came out, I’d download songs and keep them in a password protected folder.
These days, I don’t too much care what my sisters think, but it’s been kind of programmed that I don’t broadcast that I like this type of music. I still haven’t bought any Pop CD’s besides say that Tarzan Soundtrack because I love Phil Collins, but I do have a small collection of MP3’s (and when I say small, I mean 20% of about a thousand MP3’s)…
(And before the po po comes to get me, they’re all legal. My family has at least 10,000 CD’s, records, 8-tracks, and tapes between us…we could stock a whole record store!)
I’m going to try to start building up my library though. I can’t help what I like! There are some excellent Pop and Rock artists out there! It’s all music to me…
