I Am a Big Eric Clapton Fan. Cultural Appropriation is BS

[garrardguy60]

To culturally appropriate something, you have to be able to do it/pull it off capably (i.e., if you can't pull it off, it's not successful appropriation). EC is a shitty bluesman. His blues albums (e.g., In With The Blues) are to actual blues what Linda Ronstadt's Nelson Riddle albums are to the American Songbook; namely, poor imitations which are painfully amateurish.

 

As you can tell, I am not an EC fan. I will give him credit as a pop/rock artist, though even here I think he is best classified as a sideman whose luck allowed him to rise to star status. He can't sing. His guitar playing, while competent, is so wildly overrated it's not even funny. Jimmy Page is such a superior guitarist, but Page doesn't get credit cause he was stuck with that wailing banshee singer and all their songs were about fu.... well, you know what Zep's songs were about. (I say that not as criticism; they are my second favorite band after the Beatles and before the Stones.)

 

EC's best work was with Cream, because he was paired with two musicians who were superior to him, allowing him to do what he does decently, and not having to stretch beyond his level of competence. (Oh and btw, George Harrison cowrote one of their best songs, Badge, so again this shows how EC has consistently benefited from a little help from his friends.)

 

[garrardguy60]

I apologize if this is off topic, but I just want to say that in 56 years of participating in the world of electronics and audio (i.e., since I was a little kid with a transistor radio in the mid 1960s, through to being an EE and working in the field), I don't think I've ever seen societal contentiousness spill over into a hobbyists forum like this. (Well, ok, maybe when the Beatles publicly criticized the Vietnam war in a press conference, that was a similar Venn diagram overlap of music/politics.)

 

Anyway, my point is NOT to say that this shouldn't happen. It IS to point out that this is a very bad harbinger for where we are as a society. It means this s**t is in our faces in our daily lives 24/7 no matter who we are; where we go; what we read, view or listen to; or what we do. (And likely the last 18 months of covid and the things that have happened during this period have made things much worse.)

 

We are fracturing as a society and it seem there is no way to fix it. (Telling people to get back on point or threatening to nuke the thread may well keep this forum as an "audio-only" [safe?] space, but we can't unsee what we've just seen here. The genie is out of the bottle.) I fear that we are in a bad place, with, as Bob Dylan sang in "Like a Rolling Stone," no direction home.  . .