Week 9 - Are Blackness and Whiteness useful concepts in the study of Popular Music?

Blackness and Whiteness are terms that are often used to define the origin of some music for example a lot of the time these are two categories that are used to define a genre of music as a whole.  We can always identify the sounds, instruments and rhythms that are commonly heard in a certain type of music and this is the same for Black and White.  It could be said that within music there is an obvious difference between the two categories for example the types of voice within both are usually very different.  Earlier in history it may have been easier to separate the different types of music due to clashes to do with race and when there was a more pronounced difference between the two but recently it has become more difficult to separate the music into these two different categories as black and white artists are crossing the borderlines of these genres and beginning to create music that would be seen as the opposition, the styles of black and white music are now becoming more mixed so now it could be said that the concepts of blackness and whiteness within music are not much use at all.