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Welp, Turns out Four White Guys in a Band Is a Very Bad Thing – Opinion

By Pluralist / December 23, 2021

You never knew!

The Beatles. The Fab Four. They are the most influential band ever. If you don’t agree, I will fight to the death. More on that in a bit, but first the idiotic — though completely predictable — issue at hand: the notion of four white guys.

Let me take a moment to enjoy myself before we move on.

Anyway, as a musician who played in a couple of bands back in the day, have music in my soul, and know a fair amount about the stuff and its history, it turns out there’s one person in particular who knows a hell of a lot more about all things music than I do: NPR music critic Ann Powers.

According to Ms. Powers, that four white guys in a band is all kinds of bad, including “homosocial and mostly segregated.”

These are just a few of the many things you might have thought. ProgressionSnobs with no knowledge of life and the real world just sit back and watch. TryTo come up with ridiculously ridiculous stuff that is more absurd than what they have ever read or written? Me, too.

A long, silly piece entitled The Fellowship of the RockersPowers opens by drawing an analogy between Paul McCartney, the Beatle, and Dave Grohl who became famous as the drummer of the grunge rock band Nirvana. Powers was apparently set off in October when the former was part of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s second induction of the latter.

Paul McCartney remarked on the similarities between Grohl’s and his own life while inducting another white man to a band.

Powers was the author of McCartney’s:

The Fab Four merged a Hobbit-like charm and Aragornish glamor to create this character. As The Beatles became the most successful rock band, they created mythic memories through their Cavern Club days.

“Over the decades,” Powers continued:

The band men traded their leather for Spandex, and smashed the scene like punks. However, it was the tale of men growing up through music, becoming a family, and then finding fame on the battlefields dominated by noise and rhythm.

Here’s where the silliness begins in earnest:

In 2021 this notion that rock’s essence spews forth from acts of male bonding feels somewhat trite. Yet there’s no way to accurately comprehend the genre’s history without acknowledging its remarkable staying power.

“Everything I learned about rock and roll I learned from this man right here,” Grohl exclaimed when McCartney joined the Foo Fighters onstage for “Get Back,” the song that provided a title for Fellowship of the Ring director Peter Jackson’s new Beatles doc-cum-band-guy-disquisition Take Back. 

McCartney looked at Grohl while they sang with an affection that was both filial and fatherly. Two men on stage, hammering it out.

I am struck by the thought that Ms. Powers hates men in general, but that’s neither here nor there.

Is it possible to be a guy in a band?

Powers had a great question and he answered it in a ridiculous way. “A musician who’s a band guy is happiest when locked in with his fellow players in the studio or on stage, his ego paradoxically subsumed and enhanced by the creative exchange.”

Turns out, though, according to Powers, the term “band guy” is “problematic.” And racist, of course. At the very least, it is race-centric.

The term “band guy” is problematic, though, isn’t it? In 2021 it’s as common for women, trans and nonbinary people to jump into rock’s timestream as it is for men.

Yet, something remains to infuse rock mythos, and that is the sweaty-socks smell of masculine, even boyish, convention. Whiteness, too.

[…]

Other heroes with homosocial and mostly segregated pasts include astronauts, state champions at high schools, foxhole dwellers, and a rugby scrum.

“Homosocial.” Defined as “relating to social interaction between members of the same sex, typically men.” Oh, the humanity!

Black Bands are a real threat

What attack on “four white guys in a band” would be complete without spewing silly crap about Black bands  Powers did not disappoint.

White observers may not have been aware of the threat Black bands could pose to their ability to unite. It’s not a coincidence that the music industry itself became more segregated during a period when civil rights defined the spirit of protest in America.

The Beatles and the other English soul transformers/appropriators that quickly followed in their wake, from The Rolling Stones to Joe Cocker, personally protested the divisions that greeted them on tour and sometimes in the recording studio.

While Powers’ point about the industry at the time was mostly correct, the Beatles did so much work with Black keyboardist extraordinaire Billy Preston that he was dubbed “the fifth Beatle.”

Like I mentioned at the beginning, The Beatles continue to be the most influential group of all times. IMHO.

Not because the music they made was the best — certainly later bands played far more sophisticated, soulful, meaningful, et al., music — but because they were the first.

In just eight years, The Beatles have made music progress with each album that they make. It will never again happen. They also begat other bands.

Let’s get to the bottom of it:

Powers keeps going on. Partly to immerse herself in her own music fantasy world, and partly to persuade the reader that four white guys should no longer be in a group.

Gang is not progressive enough Too systemically racial.

This is all just crap.

An ex-member of a group that included four white men.

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Pluralist

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