Music

Derived from English drinking songs, Celtic folk music, German
popular music including waltzes and the proto-gospel singing of
Scottish immigrants, "country folk" music had been an aspect of
American culture since the early days of the Republic, but as it
existed in country and not city was rarely recognized by cultural
authorities of the day. Further, once new populations became empowered
and replaced the old, most of this history was forgotten.

In part, the reason for this was political: the members of
society who advanced American popular music as an artform were not of
the original Northern European population, nor were they disposed
toward thinking benevolently toward the same; further, they needed to
invent something which, like advertising throughough the 1950s,
presented itself as an oppositional alternative to the "traditional,
boring" way of doing things (early advertising extolled the virtues of
its products, while later advertising promoted products as part of a
lifestyle which had to demonstrate both novelty and uniqueness to have
value as a replacement for the traditional, boring, and otherwise
effective way of doing things; this transcendence of function for image
has fundamentally shaped American character). As a result, the mythos
of blues as a solely African-American artform, and the denial of the
Celtic, English and American folk influences on both blues and rock
music, was perpetrated as a marketing campaign with highly destructive
results for all involved.

The blues was not formalized until it was recorded, and at that
point in time, a fixed structure was imposed on it based on the
interpretations of others. Broadly stated, it used a minor pentatonic
scale with a flatted fifth, constant syncopation, and distinctive
"emotional" vocal styles. Of all of its components, none were unique,
nor was its I-IV-V chord progression unique to the blues. To view it
from an ethnomusical perspective, the blues is an aesthetic (not
musical) variation on the English, Scottish, Irish and German folk
music which made up the American colloquial sonic art perspective since
its inception. From a marketing perspective, however, the blues had to
be marketed as a revelation from the downtrodden and suffering
African-American slaves, so that it might maintain an "outsider"
perspective which, to people bored with a society based on money and
lacking heroic values, might appear more "authentic" than their own.

When country music was re-introduced to the then-standardized
blues form, the result was called rock music. Its primary difference
from country was in its use of vocals which emphasized timbre over
tonal accuracy, and the adoption of a more insistent, constant
syncopated beat. While German waltz and popular music bands had
invented the modern drum kit and developed most techniques for
percussion, their music and that of their country counterparts in
America tended to use drums sparsely, much more in the style of modern
jazz bands than in the ranting, repetitive, dominant methods of rock
music. However, it is hard to find someone in a crowd of mixed caste,
race, class and intellect for whom a constant beat is intellectually
and sensually inaccessible, so it was adopted as a convention. Much as
the standardization of the blues took diverse song forms and brought
them into a single style, rock swept a wide range of influences into a
monochromatic form.

Some historical backfill is worth noting here. The Celtic
folksongs of Ireland and Scotland had two main influences: the
pentatonic drone music of the Semitic "natives" of the UK, namely
Scythians and the diverse groups forming "Picts," and the Indo-European
traditional music which is continued in India today. The melodies,
including pentatonic variations of many different forms (many of which
include the flatted fifth or modal analogue), are almost contiguous
such that a player of Indian classical music and a Celtic folklorist
can complete each others' melodies in the traditional manner.
Similarly, pentatonic music also derived from the Indo-European
tradition was present in Germany, most notably in the biergartens and
public ceremonies requiring simple music that everyone could enjoy.
These musics employed improvisation, as did classical playing from the
previous four hundred years; when these historical facts are
recognized, American popular music can be identified as the marketing
hoax that it is.