How, when and why did rock music turn white?

by Admiral_Oelschwanz

The beginnings of rock music clearly lie within black communities. It was mostly African Americans that pioneered rock n roll.

However, at some point this seemed to change. I'd guess that around the late 70s or early 80s, most rock artists and audiences had become overwhelmingly white.

Today, rock is generally seen as a "white" thing, for both artists and fans. If we include genres that came out of rock, such as metal, we rarely ever see any black bands or audiences.

How did that happen? And when exactly?

Thank you very much in advance!

throwawayonmybody

You might be interested in this previous question answered by u/hillsonghoods. Some key points I take from u/hillsonghoods answer which I'd agree with pretty strongly is that:

  1. African Americans didn't really stop making rock music; the sort of "rock music" being made by African Americans simply diverged from what was happening in the more mainstream or "white" American cultural sphere (I.e, soul, funk, hip hop, vs hard rock/heavy metal), and that the divergence between "rock" music preferred by black Americans vs white Americans isn't as clear cut or sudden, with there being a not insignificant amount of cross-influence between what we see as "black" and "white" music well into the 1980s. Funk, for an example, didn't drop out of the sky, and is apart of the same legacy of experimental rock music hailing from the 1960s that birthed the same hard rock and heavy metal that dominated the 1970s and 80s. Hip hop, in the same vein, is just as much of a legacy of the popular music that directly preceded it, with hip hop since it's inception and up until now sampling funk, soul, disco, and jazz records plentifully.
  2. Depending on how you look at it, rock/rock n roll was a predominantly "white" thing since it's inception. The term "rock n roll" itself emerged as a very mainstream, late 1940s/1950s pop culture way of referring to what appeared to be a new fangled music, but what was actually developing for quite a few decades prior. To many people, this sort of music didn't really become "rock n roll" until people like Bill Haley or Elvis Presley "introduced" it into the American mainstream. In a similar vein, people don't really even see rock n roll as being "rock" until The Beatles or shortly thereafter. and whatever reservations we might have nowadays about this interpretation, to many in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and onward, rock did really seem like a new fangled style being pioneered predominantly by young, fresh-faced white guys. A lot this has to do with African Americans never really being seen as marketable musicians to the masses until relatively recently, with this stemming from implicit racism within record labels and on music charts, biases towards what a black musician could portray in their music while being black (This becomes more pronounced as rock moved away from the decidedly more wholesomely veiled dance music of the 1950s to the more angsty, emotional, sexual, and sometimes even violent rock of the late 60s and onward), as well as fears that the mass advertising of black musicians in the white American pop culture sphere might strike up controversy among those with less than high views of blacks.