April 28, 2006
DEMOGRAPHIC DESIGN
In May of 2004, Thomas Bartlett sent me an email containing some out-takes from an interview he had done with Stephin Merritt for Salon:
“There was a section of the interview that the editors, for some reason, decided not to include. I asked him if it was fair to say that he consistently preferred music by white artists to music by black artists—if he basically didn’t like African-American, and African-American derived, music. As evidence (as if any evidence was necessary), I cited a feature he’d done for Time Out New York a few years back, where he picked a favorite song or recording from each year of the 20th century. The list of one hundred songs was pretty laughably short on black artists. His response was to look carefully through the list, and tell me that, as best as he could figure, there were exactly eleven songs on the list that were ‘produced, written, or performed by’ black artists, and that eleven percent of US population is African-American, but that it was less for much of the 20th century, so in fact he slightly over-represented black artists on his list.”
Posted by Sasha at April 28, 2006 01:04 PM | TrackBack