This is gonna be controversial, but I'll go ahead anyway:
In the fifties, sixties and even much of the seventies and eighties, racism against black was more entrenched then in Europe. Not because Europeans are per se less racist, they can be very racist and ethnically imbued. But because there was no seriously sized black minority in Europe to speak of, black people were viewed as exotic, strange animals, martians, but not a threat. You want proof: Just look at the careers of Josephine Baker, Eartha Kitt, all the black bluesmen and jazzers heralded in France in the fifties and sixties when they were relegated to minority niche music back home, and, finally, Jimi Hendrix who couldn't get arrested in the US and needed to front a Brit band and make his success there before making it back home with the hippie clientel (which for a fleeting moment also embraced Sly Stone). Black people in masses forever seem to put white America in a bad, threatened or at least guilty mood.
The Blackeyed Peas don't count, they are a dance and R'n'B singer act with an injun and a latina-looking chica, not a multiracial band with a white drummer (rock feel and not just funk) and a white lead guitarist such as Mother's Finest. Dance music has always been a black niche, more so since the late seventies than ever.
Mother's Finest were all about the race mix. They flaunted it in Europe all the time and complained about suffering for it at home. Joyce was a great-looking woman and singer, but you neither saw her on the covers of Ebony, Black Music, Creem, Hit Parader or Rolling Stone. Ignorance of the black media might have had something to do with the fact that MF were southern "niggaz", not hailing from Motown or the Big Apple.
In any case, even MF themselves always felt torn between two worlds. Following that spectacular late seventies live album and the no less impressive live gig at Rockpalast that broadcast them into western Europe, they ping-ponged from one direction into the other: The live album was followed by an overtly funky one with less rock influence and the eighties saw them ditch their wonderful keyboard and going white metal on that godawful Power-something album.
Uwe
