I wasn’t planning to say anything about the Kanye West-Beck dust-up at the Grammys and afterward, but there has been a general argument floating around social media that I think badly distorts the artistic process and makes assumptions about art that do not hold water.
Here is one of the memes:
Seems logical — or at least that is what a lot of my (mostly white) friends think.
Here is another variant of the same argument:
Let’s start with the optics: Both memes set a black artist against a white one, set a primarily black sound against a white one. Is this a racial issue? No, but the response carries a whiff of underlying racism. One can look at the entire spectacle that was this year’s Grammys and wonder how an industry whose sales are dominated by black artists could hand out so few awards to black artists. I’m not defending Kanye West’s behavior or saying Beyone’s record was better than Beck’s — neither made my own personal Top 40 nor were they the best work by two top-notch artists.
What I am saying — to quote a response I made to a friend’s Facebook page — is “this dichotomy creating opposition between the Beck-like do-it-all-yourself artist and the artist as collaborator is bullshit. The only thing that matters is the art produced, not how many people it takes to produce it.”
Let me add a second response I made on Facebook — to a different post:
Just to be clear, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughn, Janis Joplin, most of the main Motown acts — should I continue — didn’t write their own music or play instruments. I think, if you look at the memes that have come out of the Beck-Kanye tiff, you’ll see that most of the most vocal proponents of this argument are showing pictures of big, burly heavy-metal guitarists or otherwise white acts. The new spokesman for this bullshit argument is Paul Stanley, who has said that the rock hall should not include what he defines as non-rock (read mostly black) acts. And this dopiness is coming a week after Bob Dylan, who along with The Beatles, was the primary person responsible for moving us from the separation of the singer and songwriter to the singer singing his own songs, released an album of songs written by others.
The point, if I haven’t been clear, is that there are many different ways to create great art and great music. You can write your own songs and play your own instruments, play in a band, sing others’ tunes, work collaboratively on the writing and production, etc. There is plenty of room for both Beck and Beyonce, for the immensely talented West and interpreters like Bennett. How you get there is less important, in the end, than the art that is produced.
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Hank Kalet 