The ideological link between rhythm and race that has inflected much musical discourse over the last century was forged during the modernist generation … [and] emerged alongside the eruption of the unsettling plebeian phonograph musics in the colonial ports … For many, the distinctive nature of these new rhythms was captured in the notion of 'syncopation,' a more or less technical term for the displacement of accents to the weak or off beat, that emerged, in [the 1920s], as a keyword in the popular discussion of the new rhythms … The commonplace notion that the rhythms of [global vernacular] musics could be understood through the category of 'syncopation' led many to hear them as simple ornaments and to dismiss their originality; 'syncopation is new for popular music,' Adorno writes, 'but by no means for art music.' However, as Carlos Sandroni has argued, the very term 'syncopation' was less an adequate way of understanding the rhythmic character of the musics—he is writing about samba—than a metaphor that mediated between the vernacular musics and the dominant musical discourse. A concept drawn from Western musical theory, where it denoted a sense off rupture or dislocation and depended on the non-syncopated, it was an uneasy match for musics where the 'irregular'—the variety of asymmetrical formulae—was the rule. Despite its inadequacy, the notion of syncopation was, he argues, adopted into the local knowledge of music, giving it a musicological sanction and becoming a seal of authenticity: syncopation should be seen less as a scientific concept than a kind of 'native-imported category like café or mango.'
Michael Denning, Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution