{"id":3659,"date":"2016-06-29T13:53:13","date_gmt":"2016-06-29T13:53:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/?p=3659"},"modified":"2016-06-29T13:53:13","modified_gmt":"2016-06-29T13:53:13","slug":"the-slippery-slope-of-musical-appropriation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/2016\/06\/29\/the-slippery-slope-of-musical-appropriation\/","title":{"rendered":"The Slippery Slope of Musical Appropriation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Given the misogynistic imagery that saturated \u201cGangster of Love,\u201d it\u2019s easy to understand why Miller would be uncomfortable when he heard his 1973 recording of \u201cThe Joker\u201d (its four-bar slide-guitar solo looped fifty-four times in the mix) providing the rhythm and chorus for such an uncouth song. To listen to \u201cGangster of Love\u201d for the first time was pretty much inseparable from the shock one felt at its vulgarity, and even the favorable media reviews for The Geto Boys in 1990 took specific exception to the song\u2019s lyrics. (\u201cThis track spends a solid five minutes viciously denigrating women,\u201d wrote a Rolling Stone critic. \u201cThere\u2019s no excuse \u2014 literary, comedic or otherwise \u2014 for this kind of malice.\u201d) Furthermore, Miller\u2019s decision to sue the Geto Boys could not be chalked up to some racist loathing for hip-hop, since he hadn\u2019t protested when black rap artists like Too $hort, N.W.A, and the Jungle Brothers had sampled his songs around the same\u00a0time.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, Miller\u2019s move to disallow the use of his song in \u201cGangster of Love\u201d did carry racial undertones. When the white, Milwaukee-born rocker croons \u201ccall me the gangster of love\u201d on \u201cThe Joker,\u201d he is actually echoing a line from his 1968 cover of a different \u201cGangster of Love\u201d arrangement \u2014 a blues tune originally recorded in 1957 by a black, Texas-born musician named Johnny \u201cGuitar\u201d Watson. Under American copyright law, a Houston bluesman like Watson couldn\u2019t prevent Miller from recording a cover of his song, yet Miller was perfectly within his rights to restrict a quartet of Houston gangsta rappers from sampling his lyrical allusion to the Watson original.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Source: The Slippery Slope of Musical Appropriation<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Given the misogynistic imagery that saturated \u201cGangster of Love,\u201d it\u2019s easy to understand why Miller would be uncomfortable when he heard his 1973 recording of \u201cThe Joker\u201d (its four-bar slide-guitar solo looped fifty-four times in the mix) providing the rhythm and chorus for such an uncouth song. To listen to \u201cGangster of Love\u201d for the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3pfIY-X1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3659"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3659\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3661,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3659\/revisions\/3661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}