Let’s celebrate the creators of great music
The late great Sharon Jones was one of the few veterans who received overdue recognition.
This erasure is not just confined to music. I’m sure it’s the same in disciplines as varied as science, medicine, art, sport, politics, and many more. Sometimes it takes a while to catch up.
Van Gogh famously sold few paintings in his lifetime. Sometimes the gatekeepers who write and document history are far removed from the subject they speak about. Sometimes history is rewritten because of propaganda. However, in 2024 we need to be doing much better. We now have access to the internet and the world is much smaller than in centuries gone by. Let’s celebrate the pioneers and originators and give them their overdue acclaim.
House music of 2024 is different to the music which was birthed from the ashes of disco in the 1980s. Disco was the most popular music on the planet by the end of the ’70s, when an often fairly sanitised version of it took the clubs and charts by storm. Disco too had complex inner city roots and it developed out of genres such as Philly Soul and Motown but by the mid ’70s it was taking the mainstream by storm.
It was no coincidence that it was born in a time of social and economic uncertainty, and disco offered an escape from unemployment, crime, poverty or even the mundane nine-to-five. Its roots are Black, Hispanic, gay, and Italian and it’s no coincidence that there was a racial and homophobic element to the backlash disco received as it suddenly went out of favour at the turn of the decade. The backlash had venom.
It went back underground and mutated into house music, re-emerging in the mid ’80s and developing into the kind of dance music we hear 24/7 on radio these days. Lots of DJs who are 30- or 40-plus are currently bemoaning the way house has gone now, but in my opinion such gatekeeping is unfair.
New generations will always put their own spin on things. Thus disco became house, electro became techno, and hip-hop became everything from trap to drill. But it is imperative that those of us who know the roots help amplify the roots. Pay homage to the OG DJs and producers and labels and others who paved the way.
None of us started this dance music culture which many of us love. With hip-hop the DJ has practically been erased from mainstream culture, but the Jamaican and Hispanic roots of it have erased too. The disco roots of hip-hop are often ignored. The funk musicians who created the breaks we love are respected and known by us avid DJs and record collectors, but many died broke and unheralded and many more are forgotten.
Blues and soul and jazz and gospel legends died unknown and broke and often their names weren’t even credited on songs. Some of these songs have been sampled hundreds of times ever since and generate royalties for record companies decades on.
There have been some good news stories too. Charles Bradley, Sharon Jones, and Lee Fields are a few veterans who received overdue recognition, and even though two of them have now passed, they all got their flowers after years in the business.
There’s independent record labels doing some good work unearthing obscure music, and sometimes the original artists benefit nicely and get a second chance of a career or some royalties too. There’s podcasts, documentaries, books, articles, and there’s lots of passionate music fans who are doing their best to shine a light on the pioneers too.
Hip-hop’s 50th anniversary celebrations weren’t perfect, but they did bring a few more OGs to the fore, but many more will remain obscure and ignored and sidelined and erased. I guess it’s up to the rest of us to keep on learning and documenting and talking about this great history, which we will try to keep alive.
