Value basis of Black culture

By Bukka Rennie
July 06, 2002
By Bukka Rennie

In it's editorial of July 3, the Newsday, in seeking to congratulate 12-year-old Abigail Maxwell for her outstanding achievement of 100 per cent in the SEA examination, makes this rather curious assertion:

"We would not be surprised to learn that Abigail did not allow herself to be distracted by the pointlessness and violence of dub and rap. What has emerged, however, is that of a well-rounded person."

The thought-pattern that led to such formulation is scary. Most certainly it brought back recollection of an earlier piece I did in response to an article in the Sunday Times of London.

That article was written by a young, female Black Britisher, Zina Saro-Wiwa, who expressed outrage that the one could be projected as synonymous with the other. She described it all as an "insult to her intelligence."

In my response, I begged Saro-Wiwa, as I would today beg the writer/writers of the Newsday editorial, to look deeper at the process that seeks always to trivialise and reduce all creative endeavour to a common nothingness. The following are excerpts:

"When today the question of culture is discussed, a lot of new social science constructs and definitions are thrown into the melee, yet to me there is no better description of 'culture' than that utilised by virologists who prepare a 'culture', a predetermined set of environmental parameters or habitat, in which viruses are bred and nurtured to reveal their particular behavioural patterns, transformations and metamorphoses.

"Virologists prepare these 'cultures' to be best able to understand viral diseases and so be able to create antidotes and palliatives to control and combat them. But viruses are a 'bitch' as we well know.

"It's a pity human beings are not more like these viral bitches that mutate every which way and keep scientists constantly on their toes. Human beings are not as feisty and succumb much more easily and readily to the conservative comforts of social conditioning. Societies are predetermined habitats geared to breed said human results. "What is dangerous is how comfortable we become with what is predetermined. The narrow, little slots into which we are regulated are quickly made to feel and appear to be heavenly paradise, so much are we creatures of what becomes habitual.

"The world of humanity has changed little in terms of fundamental qualitative measure from since time immemorial. Human beings have been doing the same basic things: Procreating, cultivating, in the sense of some form of husbandry, and engaging in some form of social engineering to exploit and subdue profitably the natural environment . "The point is the social capital that is built up in the process is, and have always been, controlled by minority elites who are in every which way just like the virologists designing and preparing the conditioning. After a while, the whole process operates as though on auto-pilot, self-serving and self-perpetuating.

"If Black culture is today made to appear synonymous with 'street/ghetto' culture, it is because such a situation has been so determined by the specific logic of certain pathways that were opened up and allowed to develop according to inherent dynamism.

"In other words, there is no one person or groups of persons walking around subjectively forcing certain behaviour out of all and sundry; what obtains now more so is the objectivity of automatic conditioning."We need to understand that the products of the multi-billion entertainment industry, the powerful icons of music and fashion, are the most profitable commodities to the prevailing form of 'Americanism'. Together, they comprise today the foremost conduit through which a 'value-basis' is generalised internationally as a platform for sustainable economic networking and control.

"Today we do not use the word 'imperialism' for fear that it may be deemed trite, cliché-ish and passé. That is surely an indication of how far the world has sunk morally amidst all the splendour and spectacle.

"In the '50s and '60s, Afro-Americans were struggling to set themselves apart and to give particular voice to their authentic cultural manifestations. They were/are central to the bowels of the beast.

"The jazz artistes such as Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Rasana Roland Kirk, Sun-Ra, etc were demanding jazz be declared Black classical music and their original work be considered in the same vein as the works of the European masters such as Beethoven and Mozart.

'Many blues artistes, such as Mississippi John Hurt at age 77, were rediscovered in this period. But moreover the young, brash, bold, soul/R&B, music performers, fresh from the spiritual-triumphalism nurtured within the hallowed halls of gospel, were telling white America that 'you all can learn to do the Watusi but we are the Watusi' Such distinctiveness, inherent power and positive, militant energy could not be left alone to develop and harness its own direction.

"The tendency of global capital is to co-opt, suck up, emasculate and reduce to common sop all distinctive departures and divergent creative manifestation. The conduit is money, material returns, instant wealth, gold-plated mansions and automobiles, glorified trinkets, geared to turn heads and force the majority of youthful, immature artistic practitioners to compromise the integrity of their work and dull the power of their purpose and message to invoke and generalise counter consciousness, counter to what is mainstream and pro-established status-quo.

"All who fought the process of commercialisation were marginalised, left out of the loop of 'what's happening' and eventually forgotten"

Part 2: Music and Black culture