We Were the Blueprint: What Happened to Black Music’s Soul?
By Monyea Crawford
You ever notice how, especially when it comes to Black music… it feels like it’s over? Not the sound, not the spirit — but the substance. Ain’t no bands no more. Ain’t no real musicians. Just computers, dancers, and a whole lotta smoke. Somewhere along the line, we traded live grooves for light shows, and instruments for Instagram.
See, here’s the thing — Black folks don’t go to hear the show anymore. We go to see it. The artist gotta change clothes fifty times, blow up the stage, maybe even fly across the crowd. And the audience? Man, they done spent half their paycheck on outfits just to look like they performing too. The music’s become the background to the spectacle.
Meanwhile, white folks? They still go to hear the show. They might have some lights and visuals — sure. But there’s still a band up there. Real musicians. Real singers. Even if they’re running stems, it’s still live. And whatever that white artist had on when they got off the tour bus? That’s probably what they’re wearing on stage. It ain’t about the costume change; it’s about the chord change.
Their crowd too — whatever they had on at work, that’s what they came in. They’re not dressing to be seen; they’re showing up to listen. Somewhere along the line, we flipped the priorities. We’ve been bamboozled into believing that the performance matters more than the craft, that the vibe is more valuable than the virtuosity.
And we’ve convinced ourselves that cutting corners somehow keeps the money in our pockets. “Why hire a band when you can hit play?” That’s the logic. But every time we cut that corner, we cut one of our own people out of a paycheck. The bass player. The drummer. The keyboardist. The sound engineer. The people who built the foundation of our sound — gone.
Back in the day, those cats in the bands used to spin off and become stars themselves. Think of how many legends started as sidemen. That pipeline is gone now. That whole ecosystem that fed our culture, that trained generations of musicians — it’s been dismantled. And guess who picked it up?
White folks. They doing exactly what we used to do. They still got places to play. They still write original material in clubs. They still have music programs in schools teaching theory and history. They still got college radio stations breaking new artists and spinning unreleased records. The infrastructure that once belonged to us — the creative soil — they kept watering it.
Meanwhile, Black college radio? Too many of our stations are stuck in the past, spinning the same “dead jazz” and refusing to pass the torch. It’s not that jazz is dead — far from it. It’s that too many of the gatekeepers won’t let new voices in. The young cats come with new energy, new ideas, and new sounds, but the old heads hold the door shut, afraid that innovation means disrespect.
You got young monsters out here — Keyon Harrold, Joel Ross, Marquis Hill, Julius Rodriguez — all of them redefining the tradition with brilliance. They’re not copying Miles or Coltrane; they’re channeling them, breathing life into the next chapter. But most people wouldn’t know it, because the spotlight isn’t where it should be. We’re too busy guarding ghosts instead of growing gardens.
And that’s the tragedy — we should be thriving. R&B should be booming. Black musicians should be filling arenas again with real bands, real harmonies, real instruments. Because guess what? That’s exactly what the white artists are doing — using live bands, nurturing talent, keeping the craft alive.
We were the blueprint. We designed the sound, the style, the soul. But somewhere between the Grammys and the algorithms, we stopped following the plan. We stopped investing in the next generation of musicians, and started investing in the next viral moment.
Maybe it’s time to bring it back. Not just for nostalgia’s sake, but because the music — the real music — still matters. The rhythm section, the horn players, the singers who don’t need Auto-Tune. That’s our legacy. That’s our genius. And if we don’t protect it, someone else will — and they already are.
