It's all about the music-well, not really.... Andrew Sullivan pointed me to this article about pressure from Craig David's advisors for him to drop his white guitarist to appeal to the urban demographic. The article talks about how segregated American music is, and that's totally true. The irony being that the music scene tends to be dominated by "progressives." When I was a freshmen in college, one of my neighbors in the dorms was a big fan of the tail-end of the Seattle Sound (late 95ish, think Smashing Pumpkins). He didn't really like rap and R&B too much. He wasn't a snob about it, but his preferences were clear. Then one day, I saw that he had a Beasty Boys CD in his collection. I know that the Beasty Boys "transgress" (as the PoMos would say) the boundaries between rap & rock, but I asked my friend why he listened to them when he had absolutely no interest in anything else that smelled of rap. I was curious as to whether it was because they were white. My friend became very angry, but he didn't quite deny it. Not that the shoe can't be on the other foot, the lead singer of Hootie & the Blowfish (not my type of music, but they sell, or used to) is black and gets shit from his peeps for playing rock in a white band. With bands like Korn and Limp Bizkit breaking down the barriers between rap and rock-race is a better indicator of a band's genre than any substantive musical style. The key here is that "Eric and Erica" (as in the white kids that love Eminem) take race into account in making quick purchases. On the other and, they go through a battery of sensitivity and indoctrination in PC that inoculates them to the charge of racism and tends to make them point the finger at others, those much less enlightened and more likely to make a racial "party-foul." That's the biggest problem with today's attitude toward race-it's all about surface dynamics. But remember the formula for a boy band: Two bothers, a heart-throb, a bad-boy and a Hispanic guy. Black's need not apply, unless it's a black boy band (one of the guys in O-Town is half-black, but he could pass as Latino if he wore a hat).