This is thee most unsubstantiated post concerning music I have EVER read. Your comments are ENTIRELY race and opinion motivated and anyone that does not stand with me on this is just playing the politically correct BS argument put forth by the "we're entitled to this and that" mentality that has been present since NAACP did it's best to destroy real equality based on REAL merit and not the color of someone's skin, began.
Please cite your sources if you are going to make claims like those above. Let's see 'em.
Are you telling me that Chuck Berry, Ike Turner (who was a woman beating drug addict, that certainly didn't help his credibility) & Little Richard weren't as HUGE as Bill Haley, Dick Dale & Jerry Lee Lewis? Because if you are, you are COMPLETELY wrong.
Race my ass. Jimi Hendrix was/is the GREATEST guitarist to ever effect the natural evolution of the of the electric guitar within contemporary rock music's history. He has ALWAYS been acclaimed as such. Where's the racial exclusion? Don't give me this Hollywood race exclusion BS and try to state that artists would have been more or less successful blah, blah, blah. It's nonsense and pure conjecture. Unless you can prove what you state, when in fact it's YOU that don't know your history, you are just one more cause within the REAL equality of race's degradation. Just because someone is not bright enough, or more directly, has not been around long enough to see that, doesn't mean it's not the truth.
I good and guarantee you one thing. President Barrack Obama never sat around playing the boo hoo race card and neither did all the black Wall Street moguls that make more money in a day that you or I will make in a lifetime. STOP feeling sorry for the color of your skin.
I'll say it again and really don't care how yours or my comments are interpreted. Your statement that Elvis (whom I am not even a fan of) wouldn't have been as popular as he was if his skin was a different color, is SHEER RACISM. If it's not, PROVE IT.
What utter childish nonsense. I thought you people were into music and not politics. Just more of the blame game.
BTW, what does this Chuck Berry/Elvis's skin color have to do with "most overrated" anyhow? This is supposed to be a clearly opinion based thread about those that are underrated. NOT some conspiracy based political cocktail clique party.
WOW, starman...uh, maybe one or two less thermosfuls of coffee in the future, huh?
I don't see a whole lot that needed substantiating in gregjohnson's post - maybe the Elvis quote. It's been pretty well documented that (many, not all) radio programmers didn't think America was ready for a black man to be the standard bearer for rock'n'roll in the mid - 50's, as was the case with most American institutions. The U.S. military was one of the first , and most successful institutions to integrate...major league baseball, which was about 80 years old at that point, was only a decade beyond Jackie Robinson and still had relatively few black stars...and obviously it would still be many years before many other facets of American life were even
legally integrated. let alone in a practical sense.
Your Jimi Hendrix example is flawed because first of all the 60's were not the 50's...a whole decade of civil rights upheaval had been going on between Little Richard and Jimi Hendrix ( during which time Hendrix played in Little Richard's band ) and in the music world, several years of massive successes from Motown and to a lesser degree Stax had warmed people up to embracing black stars. Add to that the fact that Hendrix really did have talent and oodles of star power. And also there just hasn't been a huge number of black musicians that have tried to make it as "rock" musicians - willingly allowing and qualifying themselves to be categorized as such - so the sample is really too small to make Hendrix' rise to fame remarkable enough to make a case either way.
And did you REALLY, TRULY say that the NAACP tried to destroy "real equality based on REAL merit and not the color of someone's skin"???...oh my god
Do you know ANYTHING about American history? It's only been in roughly the second half of America's existence that America would acknowledge that certain races were any more than cattle...and only in the last 45 years that blacks could eat, drink, vote, learn, and worship as equals (in a legal if not practical sense)...in YOUR lifetime and mine all these things were denied, and some of them still are in some places.
"REAL equality" is still a work in progress in the "Land Of The Free And The Home of The Brave".
