Ripping Off Black Music (Singles Classic)

Ripping Off Black Music (Singles Classic)

It is jarring and most distressing to walk into a room one has considered private and find it ringed with cameras, spotlights, and insistent strangers claiming long acquaintance and making plans to move in and redecorate without being invited. Black music and with it the private black self were suddenly grossly publicâ€”tossed onstage, dressed in clown white, and bandied about with a gleeful arrogance that just yesterday had chosen to ignore and condescend.

Blacks, it seemed, had lost the battle for mythological ownership of rock, as future events would prove.

Written more than 40 years ago with astonishing prescience, celebrated critic and memoirist Margo Jeffersonâ€™s Ripping Off Black Musicâ€”her first published essayâ€”is at once unflinchingly honest and dead-on in its critique of appropriation in popular music, from Chuck Berry to Elvis, Jimi Hendrix to the Beatles.

Features an introduction by the author.

Ripping Off Black Music was originally published in Harperâ€™s, January 1973.

Cover design by Adil Dara.
Country USA
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2016-07-18
Format Kindle eBook

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