(TheBRHM.com) Every genre keeps a canon. This one guards its like a family heirloom, maybe tighter. Ask somebody where the music came from and you’ll get six names, tops, said in the lowered voice folks save for church. Fine. But notice who never makes that list and something starts to itch. Hard to un-notice it after that.
Found that out young, at a record shop counter, maybe seventeen, wearing a Bad Brains shirt. Older dude behind me had a Led Zeppelin patch sewn to his jacket. He clocked the shirt, looked a beat too long, and asked did I even know who that was. Real slow, like he already had the answer. I told him HR could sing circles around anybody taped to that wall of his. Meant it too. He laughed, rang me up, and the whole thing stuck to me for years, because it said something rotten about who we let own the loud stuff. The riffs, the sweat, the whole inheritance.
Here’s what nobody wants to sit with. This genre has a memory, and that memory is selective as hell.
We treat a handful of groups like scripture. You know exactly who I mean. Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, that tier. The same five or six names pull the anniversary box sets and the remastered vinyl, plus a two hour documentary every couple years, narrated by somebody with a voice like warm gravel. Their smallest demos get treated like the Dead Sea Scrolls. Meanwhile artists who shaped every one of those sacred acts fade out quiet, like a fire nobody bothered to feed. And a whole lot of those forgotten folks look like me.
Go back to the root. Sister Rosetta Tharpe was already out there bending electric strings and dragging gospel somewhere wild and a little dangerous, and this was before your so called founding fathers had even picked up their first guitars. She had the fuzz and the swagger cold. Chuck Berry pretty much wrote the language everybody after him borrowed. Not just the duck walk, though that too. More the idea that a guitar could carry a whole song, tell a story, lead the thing instead of trailing it. Little Richard hollered the blueprint into the air with more nerve than a hundred imitators combined. Big Mama Thornton cut “Hound Dog” first, and you know good and well whose version became the global money machine. None of these are footnotes. They’re the slab everything else got poured on top of. Yank them out and the whole structure caves.
Yet ask a casual fan to name the people who invented the sound and watch how fast the conversation slides toward Liverpool and London. Nothing against those boys from across the water. Students, and good ones. They admitted it themselves, over and over, across a lifetime of interviews. Loving the source was never the issue. What curdled is how the culture crowned the students and let the teachers slip into the fog.
Consider the group Death. Not the Florida metal outfit, though respect to them too. Three brothers out of Detroit, the Hackney boys, punk before punk had a manifesto. Those kids were cutting snarling, urgent, forward music in the first half of the seventies when a label man told them to change their name so it would sell. They refused. So the reels went into a box, up in an attic, and sat there most of thirty years. Whole time, the accepted history had punk kicking off a couple years later with a different, whiter set of kids in ripped shirts. When somebody finally dug those Detroit tapes back out, folks who’d built careers on knowing this era cold had no idea what to do with themselves. How’d we miss this? Come on. You didn’t miss it. Somebody filed it under the wrong faces, that’s all.
Then you’ve got Living Colour, who could play circles around most of the untouchables and did it in front of arenas. Vernon Reid is a monster on that instrument, a real architect, and the group had the songs and the politics and the fury to match anybody. Fishbone brought a chaos and joy that half of what came after quietly borrowed and never credited. And Tina. Half the front people who ever strutted a stage were running her playbook whether they cop to it or not, yet for years her legend got told through the man who beat her, like the storm she was on her own somehow needed a co-writer.
You start to see the pattern, and once you see it you can’t stop seeing it. The keepers of the flame decide who counts. Magazines, hall of fame committees, radio programmers, the algorithm now too. They build the shrine and they choose the statues. And funny how the statues keep looking a certain way.
Some folks push back here and say it’s really about sales, or airplay, or who happened to catch lightning at the right moment. Comfortable answer. Lets everybody off the hook. Trouble is, it falls apart the second you look close. Plenty of these erased artists sold, toured, tore roofs off. They shaped the very people getting worshipped. Influence is the whole currency of this thing. We measure greatness by how many downstream acts somebody spawned. So when a person pours the foundation and then vanishes while their descendants get bronzed, that isn’t the market being neutral. Somebody chose that, and kept choosing it, until the choice set like concrete into what we call history.
And it isn’t only a Black thing, to be fair, though it hits hardest there. Women get vanished the same way. Big Star made some of the most quietly influential guitar music of their decade and got heard by almost nobody while it counted, and half the jangly acts folks adore owe them a debt they’ll never pay. The MC5 lit a fuse under everything loud and furious that came after and still barely register in the polite version of the story. Whole scenes get flattened into one convenient hero while the network of people who actually made it move go uncredited. The proto everything acts, the ones who were too early or too strange or too broke to get documented right, they slip through. Memory rewards the tidy narrative. One genius, one lightning strike in one lucky city, roll credits. Real culture never once worked like that. Always been a crowd instead, a bunch of people in the same sweaty room stealing and gifting and building off each other.
None of this is a demand to tear down what you love. I love plenty of the canon too. I’ll blast the untouchables loud as anybody when the mood hits. What I’m asking is smaller and harder. Make room. When you praise a group for inventing something, go find who they were listening to and say those names out loud too. When a documentary crowns another set of heroes, ask yourself who got left on the cutting room floor and why. Follow the trail back past the obvious.
Because there’s a quiet cost to a thin memory. Here’s the part that actually gets me. Some kid right now, looks like me, picks up a guitar for the very first time and gets handed a story where none of this was ever really his. A guest, more or less, in a house his own grandparents built. That lie has teeth, and they sink in early. Decides who even feels welcome to plug in, then further down the road it quietly sorts who a label signs and whose name still carries weight in forty years. Erasure like that doesn’t only insult the dead. The living pay for it too, pockets picked while they’re still on their feet.
There’s a reason that record shop moment stays with me. The man wasn’t cruel. He probably thought he was guarding something sacred. But his version of sacred had a wall around it, and the wall had a shape, and I didn’t fit it. Here’s the thing though. Truth doesn’t need that wall. Runs bigger and messier and more beautiful than any shrine. A gospel woman with an electric guitar. Three brothers in Detroit refusing to sell their name. Big Mama’s voice buried under a stolen hit. All of it, tangled together, none of it separable no matter how hard the story tries to pull it apart.
So play your favorites. Wear the patches. Just don’t let the memory stay this thin. Say the names that got left out. Dig for the tapes in the attic. Give the teachers their flowers, not just the students. The music was never supposed to be a museum with a bouncer at the door. It was a riot. Everybody was in it. And it could be that again, if we’d just remember the thing right.
Staff Writer; Bobby Jackson
This brother is dedicated to covering heavy metal and rock music with depth, respect, and cultural awareness. His writing highlights Black heavy metal and rock artists while also celebrating the genre’s broader legacy, influence, and artistic power.
Contact him at: BobbyJ@TheBRHM.com.