The ongoing protests against police brutality in the United States are beginning to bring wider change and reflection. Over the last two weeks, that’s meant that the music business, long a site of racial inequity, has been the subject of a reckoning. One of the first old structures to fall has been the category “urban” music, a quirk of nomenclature that goes back more than four decades, and has become such an elastic term that it’s almost lost all meaning.
The notion of an “urban contemporary” approach to music dates back to the 1970s, when Frankie Crocker, the pioneering D.J. on New York’s WBLS-FM, was pushing his station beyond the soul and jazz favored by his generational predecessors. He played club music, soul, and sometimes music by white artists, too. By the 1990s and 2000s, however, “urban” had become an umbrella — and a euphemistic one, too — for black music, used to name departments at record labels, charts and awards.
On this week’s Popcast, a discussion of the long and twisted path taken by the term “urban.” Also, a brief conversation about the pioneering music journalist and early hip-hop producer Robert (Rocky) Ford Jr, who died in May.
Guest:
Nelson George, a longtime music journalist and screenwriter, and the author of “The Death of Rhythm & Blues” and several other books
Source: Music - nytimes.com
