That's not a fair method. Rock began with Elvis. Before then, it was blues. Yeah, Elvis was inspired by black Americans, but his music was all his own.
The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, who both moved music forward, were both white.
The indie music scene nowadays comes from Jeff Magnum of Neutral Milk Hotel. He's white.
Techno was inspired by minimalist classical music. Steve Reich? Philip Glass? White.
I agree with your first point: music changes. I disagree with your last point: genres are interesting from the start. They become interesting for fans of other genres after a few decades, but for people who comprehend the musical theory behind a genre it tends to become interesting from the beginning.
I didn't say white people haven't innovated in music. I said that virtually all new pop genres have come from black americans.
Techno was influenced by 20th century minimalism, but it wasn't inspired by it. Minimalism started becoming a significant influence in the second wave of techno.
From your later comment, punk and some other rock sub-genres are good examples of genres that have not stemmed directly from black american culture.
Note -- I don't think this is something fundamentally having to do with race, but that there's something within black american culture that has driven a disproportionate amount of innovation in popular music.
With the genre-mixing thing, I didn't mean that genres aren't interesting from the start, just that often the phase where they begin to cross-pollinate often produces results that are as if not more interesting than the advent of the genres themselves.
"Pop genre" is mostly things that would get their own section at the record store.
Country / western and pre-pop jazz aren't new, but they're definitely pop. Pop became jazz and country came around about 90 years ago. Broadway's even older. The rest on your list I think non-controversially have African American roots.
Probably a reasonable definition of "new" is everything post-widespread-phonograph since genres started working different culturally once the primary way of listening to music shifted from live to recorded.
> The rest on your list I think non-controversially have African American roots.
There are two lists, separated by "vs".
I'm responding to a claim that almost all American pop genres came from AA roots. I disputed that claim by providing two lists, the first for "not AA" vs the second for "AA". The number of elements in the first is comparable to the number of elements in the second.
...They're both 1955. Neither knew the other when they began. They're completely, utterly different in style. Elvis's Sun sessions invented the basis of what I'd consider rock.
Berry is riff-based. He's all about the guitar. He did incredible stuff, but for me rock was about the advent of the larger-than-life music personality, and about the attitude. Elvis had attitude. Berry didn't, not in the same way. Elvis was the first rock heartthrob.
My point was that it's not a race game. White people do music too. To add to my above list: punk was Sex Pistols and the Ramones.
The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, who both moved music forward, were both white.
The indie music scene nowadays comes from Jeff Magnum of Neutral Milk Hotel. He's white.
Techno was inspired by minimalist classical music. Steve Reich? Philip Glass? White.
I agree with your first point: music changes. I disagree with your last point: genres are interesting from the start. They become interesting for fans of other genres after a few decades, but for people who comprehend the musical theory behind a genre it tends to become interesting from the beginning.