Spiritual Jazz of the 50’s and 60’s... the Coltrane, Mingus, Miles Davis, etc jazz represents some of the greatest music humans have ever made, and there hasn’t been a scene that packed more innovation into a short period of time in music history.
This may be unpopular with the boomer audience, but no singular movement has been more impactful to the course of popular music than the development of hip hop was 35 years ago. For the first couple decades of its existence it was unquestionably a positive force in the black community (at least on the east coast, you can debate the west). Tribe Called Quest, Gangstarr, Nas etc made some of the best/most thought provoking art of the era.
Both of these movements were primarily black movements, and both created a huge number of timeless classic works that will be appreciated by people for centuries to come. Combine this with movements like Motown and techno in Detroit, house music created almost exclusively by the black lgbt community in chicago, and others, and you see that while there may never be another “Harlem Renaissance” there have been communities of black people moving our culture forward all over the place in the last half century.
Spiritual Jazz of the 50’s and 60’s... the Coltrane, Mingus, Miles Davis, etc jazz represents some of the greatest music humans have ever made, and there hasn’t been a scene that packed more innovation into a short period of time in music history.
This may be unpopular with the boomer audience, but no singular movement has been more impactful to the course of popular music than the development of hip hop was 35 years ago. For the first couple decades of its existence it was unquestionably a positive force in the black community (at least on the east coast, you can debate the west). Tribe Called Quest, Gangstarr, Nas etc made some of the best/most thought provoking art of the era.
Both of these movements were primarily black movements, and both created a huge number of timeless classic works that will be appreciated by people for centuries to come. Combine this with movements like Motown and techno in Detroit, house music created almost exclusively by the black lgbt community in chicago, and others, and you see that while there may never be another “Harlem Renaissance” there have been communities of black people moving our culture forward all over the place in the last half century.