this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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There's little chance that immigration wouldn't have been involved somehow in your scenario(s). But true, maybe we could have gotten blues and jazz from a thriving, industrialized Congo, Nigeria etc.
They might have invented interesting musical genres that merge mainstream european music with their own more rhythm-focused music styles, but I really doubt any of them would have invented something that closely resembles early black music. Maybe one of them could have invented techno, but blues, jazz, soul, and blues-derived rock music as we know it? Very improbable. Music genres don't spawn out of thin air.
Immigrants approaching the US from a position of common interest, a la French foreign investors or Chinese manufacturing interests or Saudi oil companies. You won't just have people crossing the Atlantic to (be made to) make music, you'd have them coming over to distribute it under home-grown record labels and on contractual terms that favored their domestic interests.
Maybe they'd have made something just as compelling, but different. Maybe they'd have made something better. It's very hard to say. But the claim that you have to whip people and chain them up to synthesize European folk melodies with African base rhythms seems at once absurd and sadistic.
If music history has proven anything, it is that great art flourishes when people have more leisure and more material resources. The Blues and Jazz traditions that eventually gave birth to modern Rock were the consequence of a rapidly expanding middle class. And that came out of unionization, urbanization, the modern entertainment industry, and the eight-hour work day.
Absent prior centuries of pre-industrial slavery and emiseration, we may have achieved this musical tradition sooner and developed it more fully, before the 21st century flattened and assembly-lined its production.
Cool, I never made that claim. They probably needed to immigrate to a western country to invent it and popularize it, that they went there as slaves is a different matter.
How do you think Africans came to be in the New World?
Brits didn't need to immigrate to the US in order to learn about American rock music.
I did write that they came as slaves, but that's not the necessary part. I'm starting to think that you just really want me to be racist, facts be damned.
Yeah, because american rock music already existed, and USA and UK have a long shared history. Inventing rock music without close personal proximity is much less likely, and inventing a style is one thing but popularizing it is quite another. It wouldn't have gotten as popular in the USA and Europe if all the early blues and jazz musicians were in Africa.
I don't think you're racist. I think you're clinging to this idea of the Transatlantic slave trade as some kind of necessary evil.
Cultural traditions have cross-pollunated without mass migrations on plenty of prior occasions. The Silk Road didn't need to move legions of displaced people in order to bring food, clothing, and music into the Mediterranean. Neither did Dutch traders need to flood into Japan in order to convey their art and technology.
The idea that you need a mass resettlement in order to mix musical traditions doesn't bare out in practice.