#108. Jam Bands

Black people love music. During the erection of Black Run America (BRA), sports and music were important integrating devices for helping white people gradually accept Black people into the social fabric of Pre-Obama America.

Sports played a significantly greater role in the various attempts at assimilating Black people into everyday life in America, but music was another avenue for white people to identify with a group of people completely alien to them.

Music helped break down societal boundaries that had been built to separate the races, but sadly some forms of music seem auditory pleasing to racially cohesive groups. Classical and country music have become solidly white forms of entertainment, while rap music – though it is declining from its gangsta roots – is solidly a Black form of music with a rabid white following (primarily because white girls enjoy dancing to it, guaranteeing that white males will too).

Interestingly, most modern music seems to bifurcate over time between how white and Black people appreciate it and adapt to the changes within the various genres that have some overlap between the two racial groups. No greater form of music could display this point save the Jam Band:

Jam bands are musical groups whose albums and live performances relate to a fan culture that originated with the 1960s group Grateful Dead and continued in the 1990s with Phish. The performances of these bands often feature extended musical improvisation ("jams") over rhythmic grooves and chord patterns and long sets of music that cross genre boundaries.

While the seminal group Grateful Dead were originally categorized as psychedelic rock, by the 1990s the term "jam band" was used for groups playing a variety of genres, including those outside of rock such as funk, progressive bluegrass, and jazz fusion. The term is also used for some groups playing blues, country music, folk music, world music, and electronica.

Attending a concert performance by a jam band is to step into a world seemingly out of the 1950s where integration was never mandated by the federal government and white people frequented establishments exclusively with other white people. However, jam band performances usually provide a plethora of disheveled and olfactory unpleasing white people moving inexplicably to music that ostensibly is being played extemporaneously.

The jam band normally consists of improperly nourished white males of questionable showering habits, performing music that Black people find shockingly unappealing and incompatible with their normal melody, harmony and tune predilections.

Talented at improvising and at actually performing with an instrument (and largely devoid of the synthesizer and other equipment necessary to create the sounds heard in rap or pop music many Black signer employ) jam bands perform in front of crowds teeming with white people who have rejected implicitly the manufactured musicals sounds so many embrace.

Token Black people are rare at jam band concerts as this form of acting white is anathema even to Black people desiring acceptance into 21^st century white culture. Black people find any situation where they represent but a fraction of the thousands of people in attendance totally untenable, and one that must be avoided at all costs.

Of course, college football games (and most sporting events) across America represent one such event that Black people proudly disregard this rule as tens of thousands of white people sit in rapt attention to the exploits of the players on the field.

But jam bands force Black people to be reluctant at embracing such an obvious white-dominated genre, where white hippies proudly grow dreadlocks, scorn proper hygiene and become completely indifferent to polite society and in holding down positive employment.

Though fans of jam bands proclaim to being open-minded individuals embracing the ambiguity of life and search vainly for some higher form of reason, Black people and Black performers are a rarity at concerts:

Although the post-hippie jam culture is generally considered one of the most welcoming communities in the music world, music from the African-American tradition has not been particularly well represented in the scene.

Perhaps the ultimate jam band event transpires in Tennessee each year at Bonnaroo, the Mecca for the white fans of this genre of music. Stuff White People Like individuals flock to Bonnaroo to revel in the jam band atmosphere, all the while failing to acknowledge the shockingly high lack of diversity in the attendees.

In an attempt at minority outreach, the 2008 Bonnaroo was to be home to a Glasnost when it came to an admitting the lily-white shortcomings of jam bands perennial event, as Kanye West was to perform. Sadly, he was booed by the stoned white people with the ferocity of a hypothetical Journey concert at the Apollo:

Kanye West’s late night performance at Bonnaroo was delayed nearly two hours, angering the festival crowd who responded by chanting “Kanye sucks” and pelting the empty stage with glow sticks.

West had been scheduled to take the main stage at the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival at 2:45 a.m. Sunday morning. While the sleepy thousands in the audience waited, a message on the jumbotrons told them West’s show would be delayed until 3:15 a.m., and when that didn’t happen, that he would start at 3:30. West didn’t hit the stage until 4:25 a.m.

Stuff Black People Don’t Like includes jam bands, for performances by groups with names like Phish, String Cheese, Wide Spread Panic, etc., have little artistic appeal to Black people. The throngs of white people who show up to be entertained by this form of music leave Black people uneasy, and the fluid nature these bands actually play their instruments causes consternation among them as well.

Why do so few Black people – notable exception being Prince – that are deemed musically inclined lack the ability to be proficient with an instrument? These goofy jam bands comprised entirely of white people and followed with religious zealotry and fervor by white people appear to actually have musical talent.

Pulsating, symphonic beats manufactured by synthesizers and computers that accompany rap lyrics seem paltry and unimpressive compared to the originality on display by jam bands.