Music and Black culture

July 13, 2002
By Bukka Rennie

The significant proponents of jazz, blues and soul, the great ones, who refused to go "commercial" felt the brunt of the process and were left simply marking time, eking out a living depending on the psychological necessity of older folk to seek from time to time what is termed "nostalgia".

With the technology available, the computer, the synthesizer and the drum-machine, everything was reduced first to sterile disco and finally to soppy pop in which lyrical content and rhythm seem constantly to be at loggerheads, having lost a certain "connectedness".

"Words" as the primary "drums", as instrument, seem to have virtually disappeared from the musical art forms.

But if one understands that the power of Black culture rests firmly on the power of the word, then one comprehends the significance of the emasculation and the damage done.

One only has to recall the effective voice-drums of the soul singers to comprehend what was lost in the process.

This "treatment" was meted out not only to the Black musical forms, but to every aspect of life, popularised by 20th century development.

One major form or strategy of the co-option process is to transform every progressive political posture, stance or expression, emanating from the masses below, into common everyday fashion.

Once classified as "fashion", everything is trivialised and rendered powerless as symbolic political weapons.

The socio-political statement of the natural hair-wear of the '60s was reduced to nothing later by the introduction of fashionable "Afro-wigs".

Similarly, the creative work of Van Peebles, senior, in his movie Sweetbackbadasssong, served to unleash upon us a slew of rash, crude, nonsensical but quite popular "Black movies" devoid of any art and craft.

Such movies made piles of money for studios which were concerned primarily with reducing the Black Power statement to graft, greed, drugs, sex and foul language.

People never cease to fight back against those inherent processes of global capital which tend to reduce everything and everyone to a common denominator.

If, despite its totalitarian nature, Central Europeans and Easterners fell back to ancient religious fundamentalism as defence mechanism against modern globalisation, then it can be said that the Black youths fell back unto their very basic native spirit, their authentic, secular culture and natural vitality; they reclaimed the power of the word and the voice-drums of their music with rap and hip-hop taking this particularity to the Nth degree.

Rap and hip-hop can be traced directly back to the ancient African oral traditions that gave rise to a certain significant way of expression throughout the African Diaspora in the Western Hemisphere:

The "high-five jive" of Harlem, New York; the "dozens" verbal warfare on all the ghetto-blocks of America; the "rhyming" contest of primary school pupils in T&T, a version of the "dozens"; as well as the "extempore-calypso wars" and the "rapso" or "rap-calypso" that is presently very popular in Western Europe, and even moreso the "dub" and "dancehall" of the Jamaican experience which, because of reggae's international appeal, had the greatest influence on the rap and hip-hop that emerged out of the Bronx in particular.

The point is that all of this has its genesis in the genre of African verbal, poetic "signifying" of personal prowess and personal distinctiveness, and that, suddenly, throughout the entire African Diaspora in the West, Black youths were everywhere into similar expression.

True to form, global capital in the entertainment industry has snatched hold of rap, hip-hop, dub and dancehall and are presently beating them to death, complete with fashion statement.

The same "treatment" is today being meted out. Black teenage proponents of this art form are being created "millionaires" overnight.

The original acts with the power of progressive message such as some of the early artistes out of the Bronx and even later groups like Arrested Development were quickly marginalised while the negative, empty "gangsta" trash is being projected "to the max".

It is natural that in the course of commercialisation of "gangsta rap" that the whole Black-gangsta sub-culture or "street-culture" would be projected as the culture of Black people per se as long as it helps to sustain the generation and accumulation of billion dollar profits for the captains of the entertainment industry.

What is most frightening is that there is no longer any individual expression in fashion, as we in our teenage days knew and respected, since for everyone today the value is not being "different" but being like everyone else, being a "clone".

To counter all that we have to embrace our own power to define, think divergently and build our own community institutions in accordance with our own likeness and our own view of the world.

Rap and dub, the very foundations of this "street culture", emerged as negation of the sterile disco and pop and are themselves a negation that likewise will soon be negated. It is about the dialectics of all social development.

What do you think the likes of Tracy Chapman, Eryka Badu, Macy Gray, India Aire and Alicia Keys have come to do? And is it surprising that they are all Black and female?

Madame Keys, herself, has made it abundantly clear that she has come to establish "classical soul". Note, and note well, Keys says "classical" and not "funky" soul.

Part 1: Value basis of Black culture