[Rob Knuth]

Popular music is what it is: light, uncomplicated, unsophisticated, and eminently forgettable. All the boy bands and teen queens on the scene right now are destined for obscurity. Remember grunge? The so-called popular music has so little intellectual appeal that it has a minimal lifespan. Remember MC Hammer? Music is a definitely a subjective preference, but, Foucault and Derrida aside, I think that the cognoscenti can agree that classical music is the standard for musical expression. Black people certainly took music in a different direction, but to my mind it has been a steady decline from jazz (where blacks took the instruments invented by whites and played simple unstructured tunes) to rap, where all musical pretense has been eliminated, and plagiarism and vulgarity reign. Blacks have no doubt been influential, but to a large extent it has been pernicious. And it is an irony that the rock groups that have been most successful have been white. The Beatles, the Doors, and the Rolling Stones may still be listened to 100 years from now, but Chuck Berry? Every black artist--and I use the term loosely--of the past decade isn't worth Scott Joplin's oeuvre. That is someone for blacks to be proud of, but, compared to Sisqo, he might well have never existed, for all the awareness among black youth of ragtime, and true musicianship.

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Name : Rob Knuth, Gender : M, Sexual Orientation : Straight, Race : White/Caucasian, Religion : Atheist, Age : 35, City : Sherman, State : CA Country : United States, Occupation : Systems Analyst, Education level : Over 4 Years of College, Social class : Upper class, 

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