poptimists | Just to make the same link come up 3 times a row on my friendslist

agh it's not meant to sound like an insane rant at all.

Don't get me wrong it's a great interview and the broad point about who gets promoted when and why is crucial - that particular juxtaposition made me chuckle though.

the bit about her defn of soul was going to be the closing para at first! until i found a better one.

Just as well since like most definitions of soul it's classic lady-if-you-have-to-ask... bullshit!

the elephant in that particular corner of the room - which I didn't have the time or space to go into in this interview - is of course that soul is traditionally black music and an integral part of the black experience; which isn't to say that white people can't do it (we talked about Amy W a lot, whom Estelle loves and totally accepted as a soul singer) but when only white people are promoted, and they're singing a v much 'whitified' version of it, then there is an issue there.

also re: the 'black experience', Estelle also said interesting things about how easily she bonded with black Americans compared to white Britons even though theirs was in many ways a more alien culture.

There is a whole herd of elephants in the room I think Lex!

- Amy W's success very obviously!
- Pop Idol/X Factor and the tighter definition of "good voices"
- For Duffy at least the 60s retro thing goes WAY beyond soul (what white working-class kids - which clearly Duffy isn't - DO with soul is a massive part of UK pop tradition too)
- The way the media treats soul when it's out of fashion - which it is for LONG periods of time - I simply don't know whether soul music *is* any kind of living tradition in large parts of the black British music industry or community.

I particularly thought of your third point too! And come on, the Duffy album is called ROCKFERRY, I get a strong kitchen-sink-y thing from Duffy (which I quite like actually).

I have let Adele completely bypass my radar, quite purposefully but Duffy just keeps on howlin', she juuuust keeps howlliiin' awaaaaaaay (thanks Leona for that).

Yeah Duffy seems to me like some kind of How Does It Feel To Be Loved fantasy figure scrubbed up for the mainstream!

By Bob Stanley, at that!!

It's what he's been dreaming of ever since "One Goodbye In Ten" flopped!

well, by bernard butler actually...

- also: strictly speaking Estelle is/has been more hip-hop anyway and the question of why UK hip-hop is ignored vis-a-vis why UK soul is ignored has long been a bigger beef (until white-girl soul suddenly became fashionable) (I hope this was made clear: the hyping of white girls singing soul is only a part of the wider issue, ie the entire spectrum of black British music, not just soul, being ghettoised or ignored)

I think it's clear to us because we've been discussing it for the last few weeks, but your average Graun reader may think different. What saddens me is that music dudes who should know better are already sharpening the knives for Estelle. £5 to the first person to spot a press article branding her as 'bitchy' or 'mouthy' :(

I know right, agh I hate people. It's not as if I couldn't see it coming, but I think I've represented Estelle's views fairly (and I think they're views which needed to be expressed), and it's just frustrating to see anyone who speaks their mind about what they perceive as injustice to immediately be labelled UPPITY BITCH by idiots who can't fucking read.

nb: this comment (http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/03/estelle.html#comment-1017786) from the related Grau blog is pretty much spot on.

the others remind me why I don't tend to read Grau blog comments.

That is possibly the unmeasured spirits, though :)

I think it was fairly present in the interview as is, any more might have tilted the perception into "I have problems with these people doing this" rather than "More people should do that".

Though I see immediately below me that it hasn't stopped people taking that impression anyway. Well done the internets.

"the elephant in that particular corner of the room - which I didn't have the time or space to go into in this interview - is of course that soul is traditionally black music and an integral part of the black experience; which isn't to say that white people can't do it (we talked about Amy W a lot, whom Estelle loves and totally accepted as a soul singer) but when only white people are promoted, and they're singing a v much 'whitified' version of it, then there is an issue there"

I think that sounds fair, and that it's reasonable to say that there's an issue there. However, it's a shame that there wasn't more space for the Winehouse discussion, because this sentence:

"As a black person, I’m like: you’re telling me this is my music?"

is the prime candidate for interpreting as "white people cannot do soul". I think the distinction between white and whitified is perhaps one that could have more time spent on it (in the world at large). Is it really that more often than not, the "whitified" versions are promoted over as-authentic-but-as-such-not-as-mainstream "white" performers? (Amy being an obvious exception here) I'm not sure, but I think that thinking in those terms makes for more interesting discussion than simply white/non-white.

I toyed with putting the Amy thing in but thought, you know, fuck it: Estelle doesn't need her words qualified by stuff like that, and it wasn't so much a discussion as just Estelle going, oh I think Amy's amazing.

The trouble is once you start ACTUALLY USING words like 'black' and 'white' you end up having to qualify and double-qualify everything you say; it'd be a good candidate for a stand-alone column but in a piece with the focus on a specific person, there just wasn't room.

Oh, yeah, I understand wrt space/focus - it's an interview, not a column. I was more thinking about jumping off points that weren't what the majority of blog/forum traffic is going to pick up on. It's still a good article either way.

Also I don't get the feeling that if I had included the one line "I think Amy W's amazing though", it would have stopped any of the complainants from misreading or just not reading or whatever they're doing.

It's a shame you didn't include that, especially the Winehouse bit, because it does hold Estelle open to attacks of the "why can't white people sing soul?" variety and it would be a fair point.

She refused to be cowed by anything in the States, either, giving as good as she got: "They kept saying 'bloo-y' [with a glottal stop] this' and 'bloo-y that'," says Estelle, pursing her lips in distaste. "I was like, have you ever heard a British person before? Where do you think I'm from? No one's ever said 'bloo-y' like that."

I have no idea what the fuck she's going on about here.

Does she mean 'bloody'?

bloo-y = bloody

^^^ re why I didn't put Winehouse thing in, people praising AW is just not interesting b/c everyone does it

Alas it seems various dudes on the interweb have already picked up on Estelle 'dissing' Adele and have ignored any context or point she was trying to make :(

Link link! Fite fite!

Also OI RUSSIAN LJ OVERLORDS when are you going to spend yr ill-gotten ad money on getting rid of pseudo-Japanese spammers???

Oh god that's actually what I was afraid of - I thought last night, I am going to go EFFING MENTAL if I see people saying

a) ESTELLE DISSES ADELE CATFIGHT - when she makes it clear she hasn't got a personal problem with Adele, and what she's dissing is Adele's hype
b) ESTELLE IS COMPLAINING AND WHINING - cuz yeah let's sweep race issues under the carpet again and be grateful for what we're given right?

where are dudes saying these things?

http://astolath.wordpress.com/2008/03/28/shes-not-racist-but/

His subheader is a Manics quote too Lex! GO GET HIM!

http://www.popjustice.com/index.php?option=com_smf&Itemid=237&topic=9023.msg205057;topicseen

all I am going to say in response to that one is that last time I ventured into the pit of hell which is the popjustice forum, I encountered this thread (http://www.popjustice.com/index.php?option=com_smf&Itemid=237&topic=8709.0) which features the same poster going "OH SHE'S SO UPPITY" on the Estelle thread getting called out for racism by like everyone else.

actually kind of annoyed: I like attention but I don't like seeing Estelle misinterpreted or misread!

I think that the problem is that the shorter article in the main Graun, the one linked there, stops just too short*, the next line is the "They keep trying to tell me in the media what soul music is and I'm like, we KNOW what soul music is, stop fucking around with us!", which is more the point, yeah?, that it's not that anything Duffy is doing, but that the media is going "At last! White people have come to save soul!"

*though obviously I can understand the temptation to let "Fuck that!" be the last word.

I think Lex and Estelle are wrong about how Adele and Duffy have been portrayed, though! Certainly Duffy (cf Sarah and my conversation above) - I think generally there's a distinction that needs to be made between "soul" and "soulful" - D & A have been promoted as the latter but I think NOT the former so much precisely because they aren't black.

The real meat and story in the interview is how black British artists get treated by the industry/media/critics/us - the expectation of street-ness or sonic radicalism and the concurrent inability to handle the ambition of someone like Estelle when it's not in cartoon bling form.

Or even when it is!

(I thought her rant near the end, about 'Black Boys', and how race gets swept under the carpet in the UK generally, was far more worthy of attention...)

(The other thing to remember here is that soul music is pretty tightly interwoven with white working class culture in the UK as well, possibly more so)

And the classic Stax soul house band was 50% white, 50% black. (Booker T and the MGs)

I did not know that about 'Black Boys' so that was interesting yes.

(though I don't think she's being misinterpreted as such, I think people have seized on the one unhelpful aspect of what she's saying - setting herself up as Gatekeeper of Soul - and ignored all the rest)

OH GOD I JUST NOTICED THEY CHANGED 'BREDREN' TO 'BRETHREN'!!!!!

its made it to yahoo entertainment news (via ITN)

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/itn/20080328/ten-estelle-takes-a-swipe-at-british-sou-ea4616c.html

Awesome. They got the angle right, too.

But ITN or Yahoo is being unethical in that they didn't link or credit the Guardian.

You know what would be really awesome, if this snowballed to such an extent that Adele and Estelle ended up releasing a single on the same day, and it was hailed as the Blur vs Oasis for the 00s, and this would be ALL YOUR DOING.

Or if they did a duet called 'Oh Bloody Hell'?

I know I've said it before, but I'll say it again: a large part of the relative power of black Americans in the US music industry is simply the weight of numbers. There are 37 million black Americans - over 12% of the population. Black Caribbean equals 1% of the UK population (and falling), Black African .8% (rising), and black/white mixed race about .6% (rising) – we're talking the broadest possible black population as about 1.4m people, and quite a lot of those will be trad black Africans with no built-in affinity with transatlantic black pop culture. Black American purchasing power sustains a (rubbish) TV network, plus the movie careers of the likes of Tyler Perry.

Just to make the same link come up 3 times a row on my friendslist

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Black Britain v Black America: the numbers