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Lead Belly's The Bourgeois Blues

1546 Words7 Pages

Music has always been a means of artistic expression and delivering a message. In the early years of music with traveling bards, music was a means of telling mythos and entertaining a sense of adventure. It slowly moved to a means of expressing one's sense of self and identity. One of the most dramatic changes in music was the development of hip-hop which changed music as a whole allowing for a means of expression of populistic ideals and social constructs that were important at the time and now. In my last paper, I argued that the hip-hop genre, unlike the other music of its day, was a catalyst in crafting the opinions of the people and presenting them to the world, bringing “power to the people.” Although this is very true it somewhat undercuts …show more content…

In this work Lead Belly complains of the bourgeois mentality in Washington D.C., he is unable to participate in everyday activities and is mistreated for nothing but the color of his skin. He describes how the situation has got to the point that knowing how “to call a colored man a nigger just to see him bow” (Lead Belly, 1937), is something not out of the ordinary. This situation is much different than the usual upper echelon society subjugating the poor, instead of the middle class or as Marx names them Bourgeoise is afflicting them. They just want to demonstrate their superiority, which is very similar to the elitist world who does this same thing to the middle class. It is a cycle of subjugation, and Lead Belly was speaking for the blacks of his day who experienced this. However, this is still critical work as this is something that many face even today, giving the meaning of this song much more longevity and import. Lead Belly used these critical lyrics to speak to much of what the African-American community of the time was feeling and what the American populace feels today that they are being pushed aside and treated as second best by the elites of

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