{"id":206741,"date":"2025-10-12T05:05:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-12T05:05:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/206741\/"},"modified":"2025-10-12T05:05:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-12T05:05:08","slug":"why-miles-davis-struggled-to-like-blood-sweat-tears","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/206741\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Miles Davis struggled to like Blood, Sweat & Tears"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Jazz<\/p>\n

(Credits: Far Out \/ \tTom Palumbo)<\/p>\n

Sun 12 October 2025 0:30, UK <\/p>\n

Interpolation, cultural appropriation, and crossing into territories you shouldn\u2019t are three of the biggest issues across today\u2019s music industry. Miles Davis<\/a> once had a major issue with the latter.<\/p>\n

When we look back at some of the most major moments in music history, it\u2019s hard not to grimace at how distasteful it was. Cher still gets a hefty amount of heat for her controversial \u2018Half-Breed\u2019 for all the same reasons some people feel uncomfortable watching Madonna\u2019s \u2018Vogue\u2019 music video. Across rock, blues, and other major genres in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, there was also the emergence of the \u2018cover\u2019 song, which countless artists have looked back on less fondly than how we regard them today.<\/p>\n

Put simply, historians, musicians and everything in between have seen the emergence of the cover as something that quite literally covered markets the original couldn\u2019t. Don McLean once said, \u201cIf a Black act had a hot record, the white kids would find out and want to hear it on \u2018their\u2019 radio station,\u201d a sentiment echoed by DJ Luxxury, who said, \u201cThe origin of the term \u2018cover version\u2019 is you\u2019re covering a part of the market not covered by the original. If this audience is hearing it, this audience isn\u2019t. This goes back to the racist origins of cover versions, but to oversimplify it, the rock \u2018n\u2019 roll record gets it to the white people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Finding issues with how artists found ways to sidestep the industry\u2019s inherent racism problem isn\u2019t a new thing. Neither is looking at all the ways that white acts and bands \u2018borrowed\u2019 elements from predominantly Black genres like rhythm and blues to further their development and popularity. The Rolling Stones is a prime example, Keith Richards taking his love for people like Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters and BB King<\/a> and injecting it into the Stones\u2019 distinctive flavour of rock \u2018n\u2019 roll.<\/p>\n

Eric Clapton did the exact same thing. The list is endless \u2013 people took the things they loved and made them their own. Which in itself isn\u2019t bad, but becomes a bit trickier to decipher when you think about how the more privileged people profited from minor communities just because it was the way the system worked. It\u2019s like all the reasons Miles Davis once went after Blood, Sweat & Tears. Not only did they try to be something they weren\u2019t, they also did it in a way that he found \u201cembarrassing\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When you dissect his words, which came during a 1969 interview with Rolling Stone, he was seemingly embittered by a few things, like how they also assumed the role of revolutionaries when what they\u2019d done was already dated. \u201cIt\u2019s social music. There\u2019s two kinds \u2013 white and black, and those bourgeois spades are trying to sing white and the whites are trying to sound colored. It\u2019s embarrassing,\u201d Davis said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

He went on: \u201cBlood, Sweat & Tears is embarrassing to me. They try to be so hip, they\u2019re not. They try to sing Black and talk white. I know what they do: they try to get Basie\u2019s sound with knowledge, put some harmonies in it \u2013 instead of a straight sixth chord, they\u2019d use a \u2013shit, I can\u2019t call chords anymore \u2014 a raised fourth or some shit like that, with the tonic on top. It was done years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

He also praised James Brown and \u201cthose little bands on the South Side\u201d, saying he appreciated them because \u201cthey swing their asses off\u201d and there\u2019s \u201cno bullshit\u201d. All the other \u201cwhite groups\u201d, he added, didn\u2019t quite cut it because they had to rely on \u201chair and funny clothes\u201d to \u201cget it across\u201d. <\/p>\n

To create good music, therefore, Davis claimed there needs to be a range of talents. Jimi Hendrix, in his view, gave as good as he got because he could \u201ctake two white guys and make them play their asses off\u201d. It has to feel authentic, and where people often went wrong was the lack of know-how because it wasn\u2019t their thing to begin with. Which, as we all know, paves the way for some of the most inauthentic-sounding groups of all time.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Far Out \/ Tom Palumbo) Sun 12 October 2025 0:30, UK Interpolation, cultural appropriation, and crossing into…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":206742,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[49,48,361,75,88690,54615],"class_list":{"0":"post-206741","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-celebrities","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-miles-davis","13":"tag-rock-n-roll"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206741\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/206742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}