The United States of the blues: On the crossing of African and European cultures in the 20th century

William L. Benzon ¹

Available online 3 July 2002

doi:10.1016/1061-7361(93)90016-K

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Abstract

European-American racism has used African America as a screen on which to project repressed emotion, particularly sex and aggression. One aspect of this projection is that whites are attracted to black music as a means of expressing aspects of themselves they cannot adequately express through music from European roots. Thus, twentieth-century expressive culture in the United States has been dominated by an evolving socio-cultural system in which blacks create musical forms and whites imitate them. This happened first with jazz, and then with rock and roll. The sexual revolution and the recent florescence of blacks in television and movies suggests that white America has had some success in using black American expressive forms to cure its affective ills. The emergence of rap, from African America, and minimalism, from European America, indicates that this system is at a point where it is ready to leave Western expressive culture behind as history moves to the next millennium.

1: William L. Benzon is co-author with Richard Mark Freidhoff of Visualization: The Second Computer Revolution (New York: Abrams, 1989). He is a frequent contributor to the Journal, co-authoring “The Evolution of Cognition” with David G. Hays in Volume 13, Number 4. The present article is the third of a recent triptych by William Benzon on literature and music that began with “The Evolution of Narrative and the Self” in Volume 16, Number 2 and “Stages in the Evolution of Music” in Volume 16, Number 3 of the Journal. (See also “The Evolution of Expenssive Culture”, JSES, 15/2, for an important piece by David G. Hays in this area.)

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