Buffalo 40 Country Music Analysis

Great Essays
I saw Buffalo 40 perform at the DC9, a night club in northwest DC. Buffalo 40 is a rock band that was created in 2013 that combines many musical elements such as “rock funk blues metal and modern rock”(ReverbNation). These fusional musical elements of their performance highlighted their country music and rock musical identities as well as their attire, lyrics, gender identity socioeconomics and race. During the performance of clothing but one exception was one band member was wearing a top hat with green cloth attached to it. Each band member had a black shirt and a pair of jeans on rock musicians usually wear items that are similar to other band members. Their musical identity was seen in their attire because it exclusively had elements of …show more content…
The songs told a story and these narrative elements can be seen in country music as Melton Alonza McLaurin explains “Among the recurrent elements of country music is a strong sense of narrative. For this reason country music has often been called a storyteller’s medium, and most fans familiar with the music would agree that country songs tell stories. Whether related in first person or third person,the characteristic song narrates a specific story in detail from start to finish.”(McLaurin 1992). McLaurin than mentions that country music instrumental style is kept simple to facilitate the stories in country music “ The chord structure is simple and predictable the melodic range is slight, the rhythm is regular and the orchestration is sparse.“(McLaurin 1992).However this is not the case with buffalo 40 they played much faster and more aggressively than most country musicians and they had an electric guitar player along with a bassist which is not seen …show more content…
The band members presented themselves in a masculine manner and didn’t bend gender roles. They were all white which might have influenced what and how they played their music. Country music was a prominent scene in their music which is dominated by a white male presence in the music industry. Rock music also has a strong white male presence within the genre and these elements might have influenced what they chose to play and how their band is set up. However their fusion of style included such as the saxophone blues elements and blues generally associated with African Americans. In the past what white musicians have emulated blues musician without giving those black musicians credit “ In their romantic embrace of a poverty of choice, "white" audiences and performers engaged in discourses of authenticity and in the commodification, racialization and gendering of sounds and images as well as in the confluence of blues music’s class origins. I argue that as "white" people started to listen to "black" blues, essentialist notions about "race" remained unchallenged and were even solidified in the process. By the end of the 1960s, moments of cross-racial communication and a more flexible approach to racialized sounds had been thwarted by nostalgia for and a reification of essentialist categories. This marked the emergence of a conservative blues culture

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