Ray Charles - "Rap is not music"

@tylermunns, not this black person. My first instrument was Cello, then bass, then sax, then piano, and now archtop guitar. I get it, not everyone can fit into a box. But in general, this thread is evidence of the fact that white people can’t be expected to get rap. Otherwise, this entire thread wouldn’t exist.

Rap music crossed over to white audiences in the mid to late 80s.  I'm thinking about the Beastie Boys, Aerosmith/Run DMC and Yo! MTV Raps.  At that point young white males were the biggest consumers of rap.  In many ways rap music has morphed and evolved well beyond its origins in the streets and clubs of the Bronx and Brooklyn to the point where its originating blackness is irrelevant.  The Indian sub continent has a decades old history of rap music that is unique to Indian/Pakistan.  The music was originally inspired by what came out of America, but its cultural significance is vastly different.

Here’s something tangentially related:

There is a YouTube video (made and posted by Adan Neely, a very knowledgeable, intelligent, and articulate young man) entitled "Music Theory And White Supremacy", in which an interesting topic is explored: the conflating of the concepts of "music theory" (as it is taught) and "the harmonic style of 18th century European musicians", and how "race" is related to that conflating.

The video was posted two years ago, and has been viewed 2.3 million times! It’s 44 minutes long, and believe me is VERY worthy of your time. I’m going to watch it again right now.

@bdp24 These notions that “white supremacy” and music theory are somehow intrinsically linked are so utterly preposterous as to demand any fair-minded person with a modicum of intelligence heartily laugh them out of the room.
We hear a lot of nonsense these days.
We hear people say that expecting someone to be on time for a scheduled engagement is “white supremacy.”

There are 12 damn notes.
“Here’s a basic ordering of those 12 notes that we have.”
That’s all “music theory” is.
Are math, science and writing, “white supremacist?”

This stuff is beyond silly.

However, I can kind of see where he's coming from. Yes, there are only 12 notes in the scale, but how we envision those 12 notes and what we find to be pleasing to the ear and acceptable as a paradigm it's completely based on our Western upbringing. The same can be said for the pentatonic scale if you look into Asian music.