{"id":74456,"date":"2022-06-21T03:00:10","date_gmt":"2022-06-21T07:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=74456"},"modified":"2022-06-20T18:04:55","modified_gmt":"2022-06-20T22:04:55","slug":"maybe-black-people-generally-prefer-black-music-because-its-far-superior-to-the-standard-landfill-indie-that-glasto-is-mired-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2022\/06\/21\/maybe-black-people-generally-prefer-black-music-because-its-far-superior-to-the-standard-landfill-indie-that-glasto-is-mired-in\/","title":{"rendered":"“Maybe black people generally prefer black music because it’s far superior to the standard ‘landfill indie’ that ‘Glasto’ is mired in?”"},"content":{"rendered":"

At Spiked<\/em>, Julie Burchill<\/a> wonders what happened to Lenny Henry:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

“Sign of the times @ Glastonbury Festival” by timparkinson<\/a> is licensed under CC BY 2.0 <\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Spare a thought for Sir Lenworth George Henry, Commander of the Order of the British Empire and knight of the realm. He works without interruption or unemployment at a job he loves (and in his spare time makes television commercials for Premier Inn hotels \u2013 megabucks payday ahoy!) and has done so from the age of 16. He is now 63 and, unusually, is becoming more attractive as he ages. He has sailed a trimaran from Plymouth to Antigua, performed on a record alongside Kate Bush and Prince, and escaped from marriage to Dawn French. Whereas some comedians become sad shadows of themselves \u2013 capering clowns who are laughed at, not with \u2013 in middle age he became a serious actor. His radio documentary, Lenny and Will<\/em>, sent him “in search of the magic of Shakespeare”, whose plays he has since performed in to great acclaim. Not only is he very rich, he has also helped raise millions of pounds for charity as co-founder of Comic Relief.<\/p>\n

But despite all of this wonderful success, Henry has in recent years taken to griping about things which really aren’t worth bothering about. Sir Len, where did it all go wrong? Well, I’d wager that it went wrong when Henry realised that if he identified as happy people might start thinking that he chose showbiz as a way to show off and get handsomely rewarded for it. And where would that leave him in the Victimhood Olympics? Nowhere near the podium.<\/p>\n

His latest gripe is about Glastonbury. “It’s interesting to watch Glastonbury and look at the audience and not see any black people there. I’m always surprised by the lack of black and brown faces at festivals. I think, ‘Wow, that’s still very much a dominant culture thing'”, he told the Radio Times<\/em> this week.<\/p>\n

Here’s a thought. Maybe black people generally prefer black music because it’s far superior to the standard “landfill indie” that “Glasto” is mired in? And maybe they’re keener on personal hygiene than a bunch of scruffy, middle-class students roughing it on their gap year before going home to a cushy billet arranged by a friend of their father? You won’t find many white working-class people at festivals, either, for the same reasons.<\/p>\n

I speak from personal experience. As a teenage reporter at the New Musical Express<\/em> I got sent to a festival \u2013 Reading \u2013 as punishment<\/em> for one of my many juvenile misdemeanours. The moment my stilettos sunk into the mud, I turned back to the station, thus facing a further trouncing from the editor. Every night, after an evening watching some rubbish punk band, I would go home and dance around the room to the sweet soul licks of the Isley Brothers until the awful white racket was forgotten.<\/p>\n

I prefer more foreign things than I do indigenous things \u2013 from curry to gospel music \u2013 but I’m not some self-loathing idiot who believes that this country was worthless when it was white; if diversity is so great, does that mean that India and China and Africa were uninteresting before the West barged in? And don’t bother trying to make the countryside “more accessible” \u2013 I’ve never wanted to go on a ramble in my life. Why should I and my fellow mud-dodging citizens of various ethnic heritage be bussed into the racist countryside from the cities we built and love?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At Spiked, Julie Burchill wonders what happened to Lenny Henry: Spare a thought for Sir Lenworth George Henry, Commander of the Order of the British Empire and knight of the realm. He works without interruption or unemployment at a job he loves (and in his spare time makes television commercials for Premier Inn hotels \u2013 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","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":""},"categories":[4,28],"tags":[1420,200,99,907],"class_list":["post-74456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-media","tag-classism","tag-music","tag-racism","tag-snobbery"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-jmU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74456"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":74460,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74456\/revisions\/74460"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}