Dennis Romero in City Beat:
Sasha Frere-Jones’s recent New Yorker essay, “A Paler Shade of White,” argues that “rock and roll, the most miscegenated popular music ever to have existed, underwent a racial re-sorting in the nineteen-nineties” and became, essentially, free from black influence. Rock, as I argue in “Pop’s Living Dead” [CityBeat, October 9, 2003], stopped evolving around 1979, a victim of self-segregation (rock fans burned disco records in Comiskey Park that year) at a time when African-Americans moved on to create rap, disco, and soon, house and techno – new genres far from rock. But with that came a hyperawareness of blackness and masculinity in hip-hop – an almost anti-rock sentiment. As the genre stepped further away from its multicultural roots, it turned its back on its brother, the often-effeminate dance music genre. In the late ’90s, a defiant saying in hip-hop clubs – where men would line the dance floor, arms crossed, and bob their heads as women gyrated – was “n—— don’t dance.”
Today, hip-hop is recapturing the groove.
(Via Andrew Sullivan)