Black music evades white colonization through traits inherited from field songs and spirituals

Evidence

Hip-hop and R&B have proved harder to colonize. This music remains at the creative and commercial center of American popular music—a fact that might further underscore how superfluous Black people can seem in everybody’s attempt at Blackness. Yet hip-hop’s rapid adaptability also proves how little territory Black people are willing to cede, how they continue to expand the landscape, how there has always been something in Black music that’s viscerally attractive yet distinctly elusive, a depth of feeling that the field songs and spirituals instilled, perhaps eternally. The undying attraction to that feeling also gets at something thrillingly crucial about the music and its people, what so much of the sound is staked upon: humanity. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1141

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Plantation music turned stifled speech forms into a world language — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 415