All I'm seeing here is racism, guys.
A euro-centric view is the right one?
Funny, I didn't see any
racism at all.
I saw a
cultural judgment about a genre of music, injudiciously expressed in a way that
risks injudicious accusations of racism, by making a negative aesthetic judgment in a sentence adjacent to a sentence containing the word "black" (which was in the prior paragraph).
Now, not being God or a mind-reader, I don't know Zedhed's heart and intentions, so, I'm not in a position to informedly defend Zedhed from accusations about his heart and intentions.
But as I understand it, the original claim he made was:
(a.) there are some white kids in his area (which is not the USA) who're trying to imitate a black gangsta image;
(b.) the music those white kids listen to (presumably whatever a white kid thinks black gangstas listen to) is, in Zedhed's opinion, "shit."
Item (a.) is unsurprising to me, and I see no reason to dispute it, unless we think Zedhed is mistaken, and the kids in question were trying to imitate a different "gangsta" image, one not associated with 80's and 90's street culture from majority-African-American portions of U.S. cities. But unless those kids were all wearing zoot suits, I suspect Zedhed correctly identified the costume these poseurs were wearing.
Item (b.), then, would seem to be the crux of the issue. Is it okay to identify a genre of music associated with an American subculture which happens to feature a lot of kids whose ancestors were from Africa, and say that when some different kids (whether Euro or Hispanic or Asian or Australian Aborigine, I don't care which) listen to music
from that genre for the
purpose of imitating it, the
songs those kids select as being representative of gangsta culture are often Pretty Bad Music?
I think it
is okay, provided that the
reason for judging those songs Pretty Bad is, "They have no rhythmic variation or thematic interest in any of the accompaniment, no evidence of artistic craft in the instrumentation, no knowledge of harmony or melody, are tiresomely overcompressed and rife with a style of engineering which was already hackneyed back when Tone Loc was popular, and rely solely on the artist's voice and delivery to be distinguishable from every other same-BPM instance of the genre." I think that's
fine.
Conversely I think it would
not be okay, if the reason for judging those songs Pretty Bad is, "Somewhere, a dark-skinned person might have liked them."
But do we have any reason to suspect that Zedhed's judgment was based on
that? Maybe it was, but
I have no reason to think so.
Come to think of it, I also have no reason to suspect that Zedhed isn't, himself, the color of an ebony fretboard...although I suppose demography alone makes that less likely than him being some
other shade of the human kaleidoscope.
But I
do have good reason to think that, in 2021, when one person goes out of his way to assign racist motives to another, that fact usually tells you nothing about the accuse-ee, but the accuser is typically a college-educated white.
Aaaaaaand, I guess
everyone now has good reason to think, from
how I write, that I'm a pedantic bore. Sorry. It's congenital. But I'm a well-intentioned bore, if that helps.