Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Clarence Clemons RIP

If you read obituaries of Clarence Clemons you'll notice that they don't say an awful lot about his music.

 I have to preface this by saying I don't mean this as a put down: it's not bad music. But, how to put this gently, the man never had an original musical idea in his entire life. If Clemons had been playing in 1955 he would have sounded up-to-date but not terribly innovative.

Again, please don't take this a sneer. Clemons' fellow band member David Sancious is unquestionably an innovative musician but I'd listen to Clemons before Sancious any day.

The interesting thing here is something that has been (nervously) pointed out before: as far as most white music fans in the era from about 1965 to 1995 were concerned, the golden age of black music was in the past.


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