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How Seattle’s storied rock scene is shattering the genre’s white male image By Michael Rietmulder, The Seattle Times
Published: May 31, 2021, 6:05am
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SEATTLE Rock ‘n’ Roll has a complicated history. Like nearly every form of American music, it was created by Black artists. Yet, Black artists have often been made to feel unwelcome in the genre or had their contributions erased.
White men in particular have been overrepresented (to put it mildly) in almost every corner of what was the world’s most popular genre for generations. For years, it was and in many circles, still is all too common to attend a rock show and see three bands, each made up of white dudes with guitars.
SEATTLE â Rock ânâ Roll has a complicated history. Like nearly every form of American music, it was created by Black artists. Yet, Black artists have often been made to feel unwelcome in the genre or had their contributions erased.
White men in particular have been overrepresented (to put it mildly) in almost every corner of what was the worldâs most popular genre for generations. For years, it was â and in many circles, still is â all too common to attend a rock show and see three bands, each made up of white dudes with guitars.
Seattle, historically, is no exception.
photo by Melissa Wax
“This is Seattle, we’re the most progressive city on the planet,” states the mayor of Seattle in the second episode of the dystopian web series
While it’s a fictional story, the parallels between the Seattle of
Bazzooka and the Seattle we know today are striking in their similarities. A mayor who sees “no color or gender or sexual identity, only love” while also ignoring the needs of and injustices towards people of color. An evil tech corporation that’s trampling local businesses, especially those run by people of color. BIPOC youth standing up for themselves and enacting change through protesting. It’s a plotline that could’ve only been born out of the hellscape known as 2020 and yet stands on its own as a thoroughly entertaining, unpreachy mystery sci-fi series.
In the streaming series
Bazzooka, which premiered last night on YouTube, a Seattle police state imposes a curfew at 6pm, courtesy a mayor whoâs married to a local tech CEO (âthe zillionaire who invented hands-free, auto, online shoppingâ). So a contingent of Black-led punks is taking to the streets and resisting. But everything here is a cognate: The mayor, played by Andrea Hays (Heidi from
Twin Peaks), is not Jenny Durkan. The corporation is Tundra, not Amazon or Microsoft. And the yearâif we still want to annually demarcate this temporal slurryâis 2022.
There are a couple reasons for this alternate world, says Danny Denial, who wrote and directed the show (you may know Denial as the musician behind last yearâs album