WordUp - kalamu’s words

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

LET'S HAVE SOME FUN

 

Hey, everybody, let’s have some fun.

You only live but once, and when you’re dead, you’re done.

 

Pleasure is essential to life. Indeed, the desire to fulfill the pleasure principle is the fundamental hunger of life. Even at the basic survival level of food, we prefer down home cooking that gives us pleasure to dishes that solely give us nutrients. The first law of human nature is survival. The second law is find a way to enjoy surviving!

 

While we all know the pursuit of pleasure can lead to excesses such as greed, gluttony and hedonism, we all also would prefer a smile to a scowl, a caress to a slap, a kiss to a moral lecture. Most of us would prefer to enjoy ourselves rather than grimly go through life rigidly disciplined. Why is this?

 

Pleasure is essential because life is hard. A grain of sugar (or a proverbial “taste of honey”) is never so sweet as when savored by a tongue accustomed to a poverty enforced regimen of starch and vinegar. Those who have had the harshest experiences possess the deepest appreciation of pleasure. Moreover, for those who live a life of toil rather than leisure, pleasure is not just a salve soothing over hard times, pleasure is also a necessary encouragement to optimistically face the future. Or, as the blues bards sing: I believe / the sun gonna shine / in my backdoor someday. We face the future because we believe there will be some pleasure to be gained by holding on, otherwise, why stay alive?

 

In the United States, the pursuit of pleasure is very often linked to popular music, and, in turn, the popular music of the United States is Black music and/or musical forms (such as Broadway show tunes, Country & Western, or Rock & Roll) that are strongly influenced by Black popular music.

 

This little essay will talk a bit about the function of Black popular music, specifically Rhythm and Blues (R&B)—and by extension Rap music, in modern American society. I understand that not everyone will appreciate popular music in America as being one and the same with Black music. Some argue that music has no color. Others argue that Black music is not the only popular music of America — such people, of course, deny any connection between country and western, for example, and Rhythm & Blues, or between bluegrass and traditional jazz. While I respect everyone’s right to their own beliefs, that right in no way negates an accurate appreciation of reality.

 

In reality there is no popular music in America that did not come from Black music or that is not strongly influenced by Black music. For example, the very notion of a backbeat and of swing is proof of the Black origins of popular music. If the rhythmic emphasis is on two and four, rather than one and three, better believe “Negroes” had something to do with it.

 

I use the term Negro both ironically and seriously. Ironically, because currently we former Negroes no longer use that term to identify ourselves, preferring African American or Black, and yet both African American and Black are ambiguous with respect to identifying us as specifically and/or exclusively coming from the USA; in reality all Blacks who are born and reared anywhere in the western hemisphere are African Americans. Moreover, just as African does not identify where in Africa our ancestors came from, American does not identify where in the western hemisphere we come from unless one assumes the great nation chauvinism which claims that when we say American we are ipso facto talking only about the United States and that anywhere else in the western hemisphere is not America.

 

I use the term “Negro” seriously to specify that we are talking about those of us in the African Diaspora who were culturally shaped by and in turn have shaped and/or significantly influenced the culture of the United States of America. The term “Negroes” differentiates us from Afro-Cubans, Brazilians, Haitians or others “Blacks” born and reared in the Western Hemisphere. Negroes initiated the backbeat and the concept of swing in music. Samba, zouk, calypso, etc. do not have a pronounced backbeat, and those forms which do, such as reggae, do so as a direct result of the influence of “Negro” music. The upshot of all of this is that when we abandoned “Negro” we actually muddied the water of self-identification, even as we thought we were making things clearer. In one sense we were clearer in identifying with Africa—which “Negro” obviously does not since there were and are no “Negroes” in Africa—but in another sense we confused the issue of the specificity of our Americaness by simply saying America. The irony is that we dropped one label and picked up another in an effort to be clearer, but our new term is actually more ambiguous than the older term even though the older term had its own limitations.

 

Although this is an obvious aside, it is an important digression in that it helps us understand how it is that our music can be identified primarily as “Black” music within the USA and primarily as American music outside the USA. Now, let us return to the main thread of our discussion.

 

Essentially, modern American pop music all started with the ragtime craze and minstrel music. We may not know Scott Joplin, the greatest composer of ragtime, but we do know Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”

 

The invention of popular American music is distinct from the various popular ethnic musics—e.g. the polkas of the Polish peoples; the ballads of the English, Irish and Scottish peoples; the martial music of the Germans—the John Phillip Sousa inspired marching bands that still parade through downtown Main Street in the American heartland; the light opera of the Italians; all of these ethnically identified musical forms merged into and were subsumed by the wave of popular music unleashed by newly emancipated enslaved Africans (who by the turn of the century had officially become “citizens,” i.e. products of the American social matrix).

 

When people argue the existence of American popular music they are really acknowledging the disappearance of distinct European ethnic musical forms and the emergence of a unique music. By the twenties (which, incidentally, immediately follows World War I, the historical starting line for the rise of America as an international superpower), American music (i.e. “jazz”) sweeps Europe and the rest of the world for the “second” time. Before jazz, there was the ragtime craze and there was the near insatiable appetite for Negro spirituals. All of this was represented as “American” music, a music which did not exist anywhere else in the world unless exported by the U.S.A.

 

Added to this, is the technological dominance exerted by American “inventions” and “improvements” on twentieth century technology. Specifically, the phonograph (1917 was the first jazz recording, 1920 the first blues recording) and the cinema. Although photography was not invented in America, Hollywood is purely American in its exploiting of the technology. Moreover, the first “talkie” and first film musical was “The Jazz Singer” (1927) starring Al Jolson, a man of Jewish heritage performing in black face.

 

To raise the ante a bit, during the period of American ascendancy as a world power, Euro-ethnic immigrants signified their transformation into “Americans” via their (re)presentation of “American” music, i.e. music which had been initially created by “colored people.” What do I mean? I mean the Berlins, the Gershwins, the Goodmans, the Whitemans, not to mention Bing Crosby who started off singing jazz or Gene Autrey who sang blues! Check the records. To be an American was to be able to make or emulate some form of Black popular music.

 

The three major musical branches of “American music” were jazz, blues and gospel, and the three major musical roots were ragtime, minstrel and Negro spirituals. Everything we know as popular America music either came directly from these six elements or was indelibly influenced by those roots and branches. I do not claim the Broadway musical is “Black” but I do claim that the origins of Broadway  music is directly inspired and influenced by ragtime and the minstrel tradition. The contemporary dominance of “rap” is nothing but a reoccurrence of the dominance of jazz and before that the dominance of ragtime. That is the history of American music in a cursory but not inaccurate nutshell.

 

“Black” is not solely a racial designation. For the purposes under discussion here, Black is a cultural designation that refers to a very broad, but nonetheless, specific cultural aesthetic. This aesthetic is sometimes misleadingly labeled “always for pleasure.” Actually, this music is produced by the same people who literally slaved to build America. Clearly there is more to “Blackness” than the unbridled pursuit of pleasure. At the same time however, in the case of what is popularly known as R&B, undoubtedly and unashamedly, pleasure is the primary purpose. And that’s good.

 

Acknowledging that pleasure is good is a given among those of us who like our good times hot and loud, but the philosophical goodness of pursuing pleasure is alien to the traditional, Anglo-oriented status quo of America. Engaging the body in dance and celebration specifically for the pleasure of the experience is a concept both integral to African-heritage aesthetics and as foreign to Anglicized, puritan philosophy as is the distance between tepid clam chowder spiced with only a pinch of salt and cayenne flavored filé gumbo.

 

Music, song and dance is the holy trinity of the Black music aesthetic, and R&B/Rap, in particular, is the paragon of pleasure seeking within the context of Black music. Plato never trusted music precisely because music foregrounded emotion and backgrounded cognition. Christian ministers were always condemning Black popular music as the “devil’s music” pointing out that such music inflamed pagan passions. When we say that “music” is the first aspect of the eternal triangle, we mean that music communicates at a visceral level, connects through sensations, feelings. Popular music is then a music you don’t have to think about, in fact, any thinking you may do is incidental or secondary. The first commandment is what is real, is what is felt. This only makes sense, when you consider that feeling precedes thinking—before you can think about the world, you must “feel” the world, or, as we commonly say in New Orleans, “I feel to believe.”

 

The second commandment is “sing,” express yourself lyrically. Singing represents your conscious thoughts about the world presented with emotional ardor. When we sing we are not only making music, we are also expressing our thoughts, and regardless of how base or ordinary the thoughts may be, and regardless of how emotionally charged the music may be, all popular music expresses thoughts as well as feeling. R&B is primarily a vocal music, i.e. the lyrics are sung, whereas jazz is primarily an instrumental music. In the early days of jazz, the music was both sung (vocal) and played (instrumental). In fact, jazz introduced “scat singing,” which was a new way to vocalize music. But when jazz ceased being popular music, the emphasis swung heavily toward instrumental music.

 

The vocal element, is then, a key element in popular music. It is significant that R&B/Rap has lyrics, significant that you can “articulate” (emotionally communicate) your thoughts and feelings without the need of an instrument other than your own body. Popular music is then literally “self”-sufficient—the body is the only vehicle absolutely required for presenting both sensation (feeling) and cognition (thought), whereas jazz is almost impossible without instruments, without the use of material objects (instruments of “noise making”) outside of the performer’s body. Moreover, it is extremely significant that jazz instrumental techniques mimic the human voice rather than some abstract pure tonality. The jazz “vocalization” emphasis for the playing of instruments points to jazz’s origin as popular music based in an African aesthetic. This vocal-orientation is a major demarcation between how one plays jazz and plays Euro-centric musics. “Vocalness” is then the second element of the tri-part focus.

 

Thirdly, R&B/Rap has a strong beat, it is dance music. The emphasis on dance is significant. Indeed, the birth of R&B happened precisely at the same time that jazz ceased being dance music. While I do not argue that dancing is necessary to receive pleasure from music, I do recognize that at the popular level in America, pleasure in music is equated with dance. Initially, R&B was nothing more than a branch of post-World War II jazz that emphasized lyrics (often humorous and/or bawdy) accompanied by a dance beat. A founding figure of this development was saxophonist / vocalist / bandleader Louis Jordan. Indeed, initially this precursor of R&B was sometimes known as “jump jazz,” a term which made the dance connection obvious.

 

America’s fascination with Black dance forms began with the “cakewalk” during the ragtime era and escalated from there. When we investigate the background of dancers whom are considered 100% American such as Vernon and Irene Castle, who made a career out of teaching popular (i.e. “ballroom”) dance in the twenties, or movie idol Fred Astaire, we find that they were not only directly influenced by Black dancers of their time, indeed they often studied Black dancers, both directly (as in were mentored by) and indirectly (as in imitated).

 

If not directly descendant from or primarily influenced by Black dance, all forms of popular America dance have an ethnic origin outside of American—need we point out that Cajun culture is French influenced? Although a case can be made for square dancing, even that has been transformed by Black contact as any quick perusal of country cable television will demonstrate. When we see contemporary country and western dance, what we are looking at is “cowboys” doing line dances whose structure and moves are clearly based on Black forms of dance. They don’t call what they do the “electric slide” or the “bus stop” but the resemblance is both obvious and unmistakable. In fact, if we look back to the late fifties/early sixties we find the immediate precedent for contemporary line dances, the “Madison” dance craze touted by Time magazine complete with a chart demonstrating the steps.

 

Musicality, lyricism and a dance beat are the triumvirate of essential ingredients in all popular American music.

 

One of the most significant “American” shifts in the Black music aesthetic is the separation of secular and spiritual forms of music, a separation which is reinforced by the mutually exclusive association of dance with secular music. Thus, although Black religious music (spirituals and gospel) clearly qualify as embodying the concepts of musicality and lyricism, spirituals are not dance music, and ditto for gospel (a music form which developed in the 1920s epitomized by the work of composer/pianist Thomas Dorsey and vocalist Mahalia Jackson). The recent attempts of Kirk “Stomp” Franklin and others within contemporary gospel notwithstanding, churches do not allow dancing.

 

This is a European splitting of the celebration of the body from the celebration of the soul. Moreover, because all Black dance celebrates the erotic, and because Christianity posits the body as sinful (as in “original sin”) there is a further demarcation and separation. But an African aesthetic does not consider the body sinful, nor does our aesthetic consider the erotic to ipso facto be lewd. Thus on the one hand dance and popular music are generally considered beyond the pale for good Christians, and at the same time within the Black community there is a constant cross-genre traffic.

 

Many of the major R&B artists originate in and get their basic foundation in the musical liturgy of the Black church and then cross over to the secular side of the street to become popular, secular music entertainers. These musicians carry the gospel way with them, for while gospel may have eschewed dancing, gospel retained a direct identification with emotionalism and with trance, which is a transformation of the body into a vehicle for sacred expression. We call it getting the holy ghost. While the number of R&B artists who started off as gospel artists is too many to shake a stick at, it is important to mention that it was Ray Charles who brought not just the expressiveness but adapted, on a wholesale level, the specifics of gospel and injected it into what was then newly emerged as R&B. For all practical purposes, if Louis Jordan was the John the Baptist of R&B, Ray Charles was the “Jesus” who had thousands of disciples, both male and female, who followed in his wailing footsteps.

 

At the same time that gospel was used to develop the “soul sound” of R&B, Black religious music was, and is, constantly re-energized by injections of Black secular musical forms. Gospel as we know it initially was spirituals “jazzed up.” In the twenties when Dorsey and Jackson first introduced this music they were accused of bringing he devil into the church and were actually forbidden to sing “gospel” in some churches because the church elders insisted that what they were really singing was the “devil’s music.” Mahalia Jackson’s retort is classic: Well that’s the way we sing it in the south.

 

What is even more significant than simply “jazzing up” gospel music, and also even more significant than injecting “rap” into gospel music, is the Afro-centric reintroduction of the drum into sacred musical liturgy. If any one factor represents both dance and Afrocentricity, it is the drum. That the drum is not only accepted, but is increasingly a mainstay of religious music, signifies a move toward the merging of secular and sacred music into an aesthetic (holistic) whole that is a hallmark of the African way of life.

 

In a very important and Afrocentic sense, music that does not merge both body and soul, feeling and thought, is not complete. Music that is truly a people’s music (i.e. truly “popular”) ought to contain and celebrate both elements as part of a continuum rather than separate one aspect from the other. What we are witnessing, whether we realize it or not, is the push and pull of African aesthetics toward wholeness.

 

The sound of Blackness is the aesthetic of psychological freedom.Understanding its psychological impact is the key to appreciating the attraction and importance of R&B specifically and Black popular music in general. This music is both a music of freedom and of honesty.

 

The freedom to acknowledge one’s self, body and soul, to say that I exist and I matter, and all of me matters, my physical and emotional as well as my mental and spiritual capacities — admittedly, the spiritual aspect of a music of pleasure is usually limited, but that part is there also. And the honesty to admit that the reality of the self, the spectrum of concerns we inhabit, is a spectrum whose poles are good and bad, beautiful and ugly. We all live on and in that sphere, and the extremes are never fixed—each quality is relative. What is good, bad, beautiful, etc. at any given moment changes as we change.

 

There are no absolutes except life itself, and even that is speculative, i.e. is there life after death? Many people don’t realize that all of this is contained in going up to Slim’s on Saturday night and dancing until you fall out and, hopefully, landing in the embrace of a special someone’s arms.

 

What is important to understand is that many of us have been taught that we are ugly, that the physical is sinful, that physical pleasure is wrong, and yet, through the magic of music we resist such teachings with a philosophy that refuses to separate feeling from thought, body from soul. When we dance we are arguing that life is wholistic.

 

R&B/Rap is philosophically important. To prioritize pleasure, a pleasure that we can produce and reproduce without “buying” something, is extremely important to maintaining mental health. To understand self-production as an activity that each of us can engage, rather than an artifact we own or purchase, such as an article of clothing, or a fat bank account, or even a fine physique; this understanding is key to why we persist in singing and dancing to the music. We do so because ultimately we can not exist without recreating our sense of self, our awareness of our own beauty and goodness.  And that is why we could, indeed “had to” sing a song in a strange land.

 

In our communities, aesthetic (a sense of beauty and goodness) awareness is generally an unconscious awareness, nevertheless, such self awareness is absolutely necessary to life, for we can not go on if we do not believe that there is some good, some beauty within us. That screaming and hollering that the singers do, those songs that move us so, all of that informs us that within each of our lives there has been some good, some beauty, even if only momentary and fleeting, even if we are crying and moaning because that good thing is now gone, even if we believe the exquisite moment shall never return, we are still emboldened by the fact that we can stand and proudly proclaim, “I have had my fun / if I don’t get well no more.”

 

Finally, fun is subversive, especially when one is the object of oppression and exploitation. For when the sufferers find a way to have fun, we not only momentarily transcend our suffering, we affirm that there is a part of us, an enjoyment within us which we share with our fellow sufferers that is beyond the reach of the overseer, the master, the banker, our creditors, the boss, the hoss, and any damn other person or thing that is intent on making our lives miserable. This subversive factor is the ultimate meaning of R&B/Rap, and is also the source of why the music is always damned by the psychological gatekeepers, i.e. ministers, politicians, educators & status quo intellectuals. When social pundits argue that R&B, or Rap, or any other contemporary popular music is a morally corrupting force, or that those forms “are not music,” that our music needs to be censored if not actually prohibited, then what they are saying is that we have no right to decide what to do with our own bodies for good or for ill.

 

R&B asserts that “I’m three times seven / and that makes 21 / ain’t nobody’s bizness / what I do.” The ultimate determination of self is the right of self expression, and those who would limit, circumscribe, prohibit, or otherwise legislate our self expression are the very same people who have no problem with capitalism (and if they were alive during slavery time, ditto, they would have no problem with slavery). In fact, during slavery time there were those who tried to stop enslaved Africans from singing and dancing. The power of popular music is that it asserts our existence centered in a pleasurable self-determined celebration. When we holler, “let the good times roll / laissez les bon temps roullez,” we are actually uttering a war cry against psychological oppression. And when we produce our own popular music and dance outside of the purview of the status quo, then we are (re)creating the/our “living self.”

 

There is more, of course, just as surely as Sunday morning follows Saturday night, but that more is for another time. Right now, I just wanted to share with you the “psychological significance” and “aesthetically-African origins” of popular American music; in other words, I just wanted to tell you why it is so important for us to have some fun!

 

photo by Alex Lear 

 

 

 

 

THE IMPORTANCE OF 

AN AFRICAN CENTERED EDUCATION

 

            This topic requires us to ask a question first, not just the obvious question of “What is an African centered education”, but what is required is posing the even more profound question: “an African centered education for whom and for what purpose?”

            I do not presuppose that a hypothetical African centered education is in and of itself of major value unless we know whom and what we are speaking about as both the subjects and the objects of that education, and unless we are clear on what is the purpose of such an education. My contention is that audience and purpose are the two least discussed sides of the African education triangle, whose third side is the content or curriculum of African centered education. Except for a brief comment at the end, I will focus my presentation on the questions of identity and goals.

 

            The dominant society Euro-centric educational modality presupposes that their education system is good for everyone, and if not good for everyone in the abstract, is de facto required of everyone over whom they have dominion, which is a large percentage of the world. Second, the dominant society presupposes that their education is a requirement of civilization. Unfortunately, many of us who reject Euro-centric educational information, often adopt Euro-centric educational methods and philosophy. We presuppose that audience is not a major question and that a dominating intent is a given.

            In addition to defining African centered education in terms of philosophy and curriculum, when we address this issue of African education it seems to me to be important for us to also clarify who the “we” of African education is and what is our purpose in obtaining an African centered education. Answering those two concerns, i.e. the identity of the audience and the intended goal of achieving education, will enable us to realistically define “African centered education” grounded in the context of functionality rather than abstracted into the context of rhetoric and fantasy.

 

AUDIENCE/IDENTITY

            Let us first, then, consider the question of the identity of our audience, which, of course, presupposes, that we identify ourselves. First of all, my concern for Africa is defined by Africa the people and not simply Africa the land. Wherever we are and whatever we do, taken in its totality, that defines what Africa is.

            Our ancient civilizations are important but they are not the sole criterion. Indeed, to the degree that our traditional life did not enable us to withstand the blows of the empire, to the degree that our traditional gods did not enable us to reject the missionary impulses or at the very least incorporate the new god into our beliefs rather than having the new god dictate the rejection of our traditions, to the degree that our traditional values and beliefs collaborated with the European invaders, to that same degree I suggest there are African traditions which, at best, need to be modified and, perhaps, even ought to be discarded.

            My first position is that I celebrate people and my second position is that I am critical not just of my historic enemies but also I am, and indeed must be, self critical.

            I do not buy the myth of race, the myth of racial universality, the myth of dualism, i.e. a thing, a person, an action is ipso facto either good or bad, and is not subject to transformation nor contextulization. I believe in the traditional African dialectic which recognizes that everything is contextual and all things are capable of transformation.

            Moreover, I believe, nationalism as currently practiced is not only a dead end in terms of social development, I believe nationalism as currently practiced is ultimately a socially negative philosophy that inevitably invites the demarcation of territory and the raising of the flag of individual ownership of the earth.

            There are no African countries in Africa. Each one of those countries are European defined entities which, at best, are administered by Africans, and usually Africans who are European educated. In fact, the concept of Africa as we speak of it, is itself a European concept, a bundling together of various peoples and beliefs under a racist label to facilitate colonialism. There will be no true African nationalism until the nation states of Africa are redesigned to facilitate the development of African people rather than maintained as a leftover form of colonial domination, forms which were established to serve the interest of English, French, Portuguese, and to a lesser extent German and Belgium colonizers.

            So I suppose, now is as good a time as any to deal with the question of what do we mean by African. What is an African? Is this a racial definition? Is this a cultural definition? Is this a political definition based on historical relations of the last five or six hundred years?

            Obviously, whether we want to or not, we must confront this issue of self definition head on. For example, are mulattos, i.e. mixed blood Africans, any less African than those who are unmixed? Be careful how you answer, because it is not our way to exclude. If we look around the room it is obvious that we African Americans are a mulatto people -- not by choice in most instances, but regardless we are mixed. Does that make us as a mulatto people any less African than continental Africans?

            The first task of an African centered education is to help us define what being African is. I believe that Africans, and all other people, are defined by color, culture and consciousness.

            Color is a racial definition, race in the sense of breeding population, a group of people with common genetic roots. I also believe that rather than create sub-categories, and sub-categories, and breakdowns to the point of absurdity such as quadroons, octoroons, etc., we should acknowledge quite simply a normative standard. For me, African is inclusive. One can racially claim Africa if some (although not necessarily all) of one’s ancestors are racially African and if one chooses to continue that racial identity. My qualifying “and” quite simply recognizes that if a single person who is racially African decides to dissolve him or herself into another group, be they Asian or European, then, over generations, the individual’s Africaness will cease to be an issue. In fact, my caveat is that color is not an individual definition but is a group and generational definition.

            Culture is a way of life, again defined by normative or group standards. The culture one exhibits is the culture that defines the person. We can learn, understand, and relate to many different cultures, but in the final analysis it is our social living which determines which culture we are. Most human beings are born into a culture, but it is also possible to adopt a culture, and over generations become native to the adopted culture.

            Consciousness is the critical element, particularly in the context of liberation. We must be aware of our people and culture, accept our people and culture, and immerse ourselves in our people and culture. Awareness means more than simple experiencing. Indeed one can witness and not understand, just as one can understand without being a witness. The best is to both witness, i.e. experience, and to understand, i.e. critically reflect on the culture. Given the reality of colonialism and neo-colonialism, it is impossible to be African in the modern world without being socially conscious of what it means to be African, what racism means, what colonialism means. To be African is to be self-reflective.

            Thus I define African in terms of color, culture and consciousness.

 

            African Identification Within The Context of the United States.

            I believe that there are three major categories of social identification for African Americans in the context of the United States in the last quarter of the 20th century. First there is the question of race, and more precisely, the question of racism. Racism has undeniably affected every area of our lives, and to the degree that an education does not address or avoids addressing the reality and effects of racism, to that same degree such an education risks being irrelevant, regardless of its nomenclature or subject matter. So then in a modern context, an African centered education will analyze and offer methods of coping with, if not out and out destroying, racism.

            Second there is the question of class stratification and class identification. Class stratification refers to a person or group’s economic identity vis-a-vis the economic or productive forces of that society. It is not simply a question of income. It is also a question of where one fits in relation to maintaining the economic status quo. A professional, a public school teacher or corporate secretary, may make a smaller hourly wage than a carpenter, but the professional has had to undergo specific social training in addition to skill development.

            The professional is expected to be more “civilized,” more “mannered” than the laborer. What does that mean? It means quite simply that part of being a professional is identifying with and adopting the social values of the dominant society. Indeed, the professional is responsible for propagating those values. In many ways the professionals are priests of the status quo. So then when we talk about a class analysis, income alone can be misleading. We should make an analysis of the relationship to and function on behalf of the economic status quo. An African centered education must attack capitalism, the economic philosophy which elevates the bottom line (or material acquisition) as the measure of social development rather than social relations within a society as the measure of social development.

            Third is the question of gender relations. I believe that the establishment of the patriarchy, i.e. male domination of women, was the first battle waged by Europeans in their attempt to colonize the world. Indeed, their whole mythology begins with overthrowing the matriarchy wherever it existed. Greek legends of the gods, Zeus raping Europa, or giving birth to a female god sprung from his forehead, are all nothing more than mythological rationalizations of patriarchal domination.

            Christianity and Islam continue this trend introduced by the Greeks. Christianity goes so far as to propagate the myth that a man is a “mother”, specifically that Adam, a man, through the intercession of god, gave birth to Eve, a woman. Furthermore, most classical Christian theology does not recognize women as fit to act as intermediaries to and representatives of god. Islam’s virulent strain of misogyny is even more oppressive. This question of gender relations also raises the issue of heterosexism in the form of violence against homosexuals for no other reason than homosexuals are different and not like normal people. An African centered education would elevate matriarchy and attack patriarchy.

            Although anyone of these three strains could be explored at some length, that is not the focus under consideration here. I simply wanted to identify, the three major lines of social demarcation in the contemporary context.

            Before moving on, I do think it important to point out, that one can be anti-racist but be capitalist and sexist, or could be anti-capitalist and be racist and sexist. I am saying that a progressive position on one side of the triangle, does not guarantee a progressive position on the other sides -- and, yes, I am defining as progressive, ideological and social struggle around anti-sexism and opposition to heterosexism, particularly opposition to so-called homophobia.

 

GOALS

            Finally, on this question of relevance, my basic contention is that in order for an African centered education to be meaningful it needs to be focused on development, meeting the needs of the working class masses of our people, both the employed and the unemployed, rather than focus on the career development of African American professionals, particularly those professionals whose day to day work is within the context of predominately, dominant culture, educational and business institutions. Moreover, African centered education should definitively be opposed to the development of a Black bourgeoisie, a Black class of owners who profit off the exploitation of the African masses.

            If an African centered education does not specifically address itself to the needs of our people then it has failed to be relevant to the struggle although it may have great relevance to individuals in their quest for tenure, for promotions, and for political office. As Sonia Sanchez so eloquently noted a number of years ago in evaluating a position put forth by some well meaning brothers, we should respond to all advocates of ungrounded and non-contemporary Afrocentricity with this phrase: “Uh-huh, but how does that free us!”

            How does that free us is precisely the question to ask -- especially when we are clear on who “us” is. I am not interested in joining any atavistic, nostalgic society that knows more about what happen four thousand years ago, four thousand miles away than it does about what happened forty years ago within a four mile radius of where we meet today. The purpose of calling on our ancestors is to sustain life in the present and insure life in the future, and not simply nor solely to glorify the past.

            Our people have very real needs today. We are faced with very real problems. For instance, as quiet as its kept, African American women are quickly becoming the number one victim of AIDS. This coupled with the dramatic rise in breast cancer deaths among African American women suggests a fundamental area of struggle far more important than arguing whether Alice Walker is dipping her nose in other people’s business in her crusade against female sexual mutilation.

            At the same time, I must note, that quite clearly, a contemporarily grounded African centered education would not only support the struggle against female sexual mutilation, it would also offer an analysis of that phenomenon and point out that sexual mutilation is strongest in those area of Africa where Islam is the strongest. Part of what we are witnessing is the brutalness of male domination of women, regardless of the fact that, on the surface it may seem like, women are willingly participating. We African Americans surely can understand self collaboration in oppression, we who have a long and regrettable history of house negroism.

            I reiterate the need to be self critical and the need to be grounded in the lives of our people. Far too many Afrocentrics are petit bourgeoisie professionals who are based at predominately Eurocentric educational institutions. Far too much of the focus of contemporary Afrocentrism is on the long ago and far away. Where is the community base? Where is the focus on the needs of the community? To a certain extent, much of what we see in some narrow Afrocentric theorists is an attempt to compensate for years spent suffering under the constant and withering intellectual onslaught of formal education teaching Black professionals that Black people are intellectually inferior. After one has invested so many years in academe, one sometimes spends an equally inordinate amount of time researching to prove to Whites that Black people are not only as smart as Whites, but indeed that we were the world’s first smart people. “Uh huh, but how does that free us?”

            The issue is not about proving anything to Whites. The issue is meeting the needs of our people, being grounded in our people. Furthermore the inordinate amount of energy devoted to the study, praising and admiration of African kings and pharaohs displays a serious sense of inadequacy and disdain for the common woman and man. What difference does it make to me how smart the leader was if the majority of the people are kept in ignorance? I don’t care what the priests knew about life, what did Ayo and Kwaku know, what did Bertha and Joe know? I don’t care how intelligent and spiritually refined the royal order was, what were the conditions, relative level of educational achievement and qualitative life of the people who were like you and I? Tell me about the lives of the masses, what we didn’t, what we did. Let us learn from our mistakes and build on our achievements in the context of building serious social relationships among ordinary people rather than this almost mystical interest in kings and things.

            I agree with Amilcar Cabral that the focus of the African professional ought to be to commit class suicide. Rather than identify with the dominant society via a focus on developing professional skills for the purpose of being a more productive professional or for self aggrandizement, professionals ought to focus their skills on the uplift and development of the African American working class (whether actively employed or unemployed). This is what DuBois had in mind as a mission for the so-called “talented tenth.” Today, too many who would qualify as talented tenthers on the basis of education have deserted the mission, and it was the mission, and not the level of educational attainment, which defined the talented tenth in DuBois’ perspective.

            Mission fulfillment is not a question to be taken lightly, because it is no small nor straight forward task to work in the interest of one’s people if most of the work opportunities are controlled by our oppressors and exploiters, and if the remuneration, both monetarily and socially, are so meager when one works in a predominately and/or all Black setting, that one is not able to sustain one’s self. We are faced with the task not only of waging political struggle but also we must engage in the very real struggle of economic support for one’s self and for those whom one has the responsibility of sheltering, rearing, or otherwise nurturing, not to mention economic support of the struggle itself. There is a subjective reality of survival involved in committing class suicide. But greater than the subjective question of individual survival is the objective question of group direction.

            The upliftment of the masses does not mean that our task is to turn our brothers and sisters into “junior Europeans” (to quote Kgositsile). The upliftment of our people does not mean that we are trying to civilize anyone, or to teach them how to wear business suits and ties, or to show them how to pay taxes and speak properly. In fact it means quite the opposite. The upliftment of our people means securing and returning to the hands of our people the power to define and determine our own lives. Upliftment quite simply means to end outside domination and exploitation, and to reintroduce our people as the subjects, the makers and shapers of their own destiny.

            In order to fulfill this mission, the petit bourgeois, the professionals, the educated, will have to physically and psychologically reintegrate themselves into the day to day life of the people who they hope to uplift. They will have to speak to and with working people about an expanded sense of the world and our ability to actively participate in building the future. Additionally, they will also have to listen to and respond to the concerns, aspirations and ideas of the working people. In short they will have to be organizers who both bring information and skills to serve our people as well as receive sustenance and inspiration to keep on developing. In short we are talking about the particular (the professional) and the general (the people) engaged in a dialectic of self-development and self-empowerment that neglects neither and enriches both —properly speaking a European language is not a prerequisite of this process.

            I hope that these observations with regards to goals and identity vis-a-vis African centered education make a contribution to the ongoing discussion and struggle to achieve peace and liberation for people of African descent wherever in the world we are today! In closing, please allow me this one additional observation.

            African American cultural expression, particularly African American music, on a world level is the single most influential force in contemporary African life. Moreover, among African Americans, our music is also the most expressive language of our community. The emotions, thinking, and soul of our people are expressed through our music. Indeed, before our writers and other intellectuals are able to articulate our realities, the essentials of that reality have been expressed in the music. Assuming that this assessment of our music is true, the question must be asked: how come many of us Black intellectuals can’t or choose not to sing, dance or perform our music? How come we don’t write about our music, do serious studies of our music which are detailed and insightful rather than non-serious miscellaneous general platitudes? If our music is so important how is it that in practice we devote so little attention to the study, documentation and propagation of Great Black Music? How come we don’t advocate the economic control of our music in terms of our own actual participation in the dollar and labor investment in the development of recording companies, distribution companies, production companies, and critical journals? If we are truly African centered, beyond listening to watered down versions of our music on the radio and owning five or six records, how come our personal libraries are so lacking in recordings, not to mention books on and about, our music? How come we are becoming experts on and conversant in Egyptian hieroglyphics but can’t tell the different between the sound of Johnny Hodges and Charlie Parker, not to mention have never actually listened to Robert Johnson or Rev. Gary Brown? How come we ignore our music? Could it be that we are not as African in the day to day expression and understanding of our culture as we talk and dress like we are?

            That’s just a little something to think about. I encourage questions and dialogue both now and after this particular session. I encourage sharp criticism of the system and sharp self criticism. I end with this poem.

_____________________________________________ 

There Is Nothing Inexact About Misty

(For Erroll Garner)

 

saints transform the world with the insistent

art of their actions

 

anviling the mundane inertia of america

into an ephemeral spiritual sublimity

 

unclogged by bathetic sentimentality but

nonetheless full of feeling, after all

 

which is more important: rocket science or creative

music emoting the ethos of its era?

 

far more valuable than scientific esoteria

is the subtle articulation of sensitive souls in motion

 

nakedly singing world witness, propelling

us to dare transformation into what does not now exist

 

to demystify technology, be unintimidated by history

& as adventurous as a kitten up a tree, look at

 

the lyrical possibilities of your life,

if you are brave and disciplined enough

 

to openly express your total self

secure in the primal knowledge that

 

no matter how high

you go or don’t, ultimately

 

all life is really

about is how deep you are

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

 

 

MURDER

 

our sister is thin. she is leading her whole family down the street. her four year old is just ahead of her. she and her little man, two year old malik, walk hand in hand behind skipping and giggling sekou. she is not paying any attention to things in the streets: the cars, trucks and busses whizzing by in both directions. they had missed the bus they needed. the evening was nice. warm. so why not walk and why not take a short cut down napoleon avenue, a thoroughfare what used to be one of white folks' big streets?

 

a camera swung innocently on her hip beneath the medium sized windbreaker, which enveloped her. although out of sight, the camera was at the ready because she liked to shoot. most of the time without film. she would "see" a scene. compose an artistic comment from a chance encounter. but not being able to afford as much film and processing as she would shoot if she had the green to match her ambition, she would just flash the camera and capture the still in her mind's eye, the image frozen in her brain as the sound of the shutter-click indicated the shot was complete. some people did not understand taking pictures without film. they either were not deep into art or else they were not poor. but poor artists know, you've got to practice your art anyway you can.

 

cause she was on a family outing. listening to her boys be themselves. actually coming back from standing in line paying a bill and headed to the house that barely qualified as shelter, not to mention was a poor stand-in for a secure and loving place she could accurately call home. because her braids were in place and would not need rebraiding for another three or four months. because the essential bills were now paid. and she did have thirty dollars in her pocket for two weeks of food. because sekou was singing "space is the place..." his favorite sun ra song -- oh, she was proud that sekou dug ra. i mean, what parent would not be proud of a four year old with the sensitivity to embrace sun ra? because she was making sure she was walking slow enough so that malik could keep up but fast enough so that sekou would not outdistance them. because malik was just getting over the flu and she kept hugging him from time to time both to cuddle and to take his temperature. because she was enjoying her kids. and had taken fifteen shots of them already today. the last one a little shaky because she didn't use a flash and the shadows were getting long, which meant shooting at a slow shutter speed and her hand had shook a little as she focused on the look in malik's eyes and saw the man whose seed spawned malik. the hand shake was not out of hate or even any particular rememberance of love or passion, but rather because this little man looked so much like that big half-a-man and she could not help but wonder would little man grow to become the whole man that the older man was destined never to be. she knew that was her task. to somehow teach these little sweet knuckleheads to become men, somehow, in the absence of a steady man on the scene. if you are a young woman. attractive but not gorgeous. black in color and consciousness. poor as a welfare queen, except not even food stamps stuffed into your bra. proud in the classic "we may not have much but we're going to make it" way, estranged from your birth family because you have become, some-terrible-how, exactly what your upbringing and college education was supposed to prevent: a poor, single mother of two, head of household, fatherman long gone. if you have struggled with being a statistic for three or four years running. cooped yourself up. did odd jobs here and there. hung on by a thread. managed to hold on to your decency -- i.e. declined to live off of ocassional dollars left on the bedside by dawgs who liked the way you jocked their dick -- managed to stay physically clean of diseases (and you have found the easiest way to suffer sexual deprivation is to do without completely, except, of course, for the casual hand job in the tub or a particular good spliff of reefer every other week or so), so you’re clean and have managed to hold on to your pride. no begging back to mama. no buckling under to stern papa's patriarchal nonsense. if you were wearing synthetic clothes even though you prefered cottons and wools. payless sneakers when rockport walkers were really what you needed, especially given that you walked most places you had to go--a buck a throw to ride the bus added up to a tremendous deficit in the pocketbook, and besides, it was usually three bucks to ride because it was cheaper to take family outings then to even think about paying one of the kids in the block to be a babysitter, besides what sense did it make to let kids who were little more than babies watch your babies? if you had finally sold some photos to some magazine for less than you hoped but for as much as you could expect, cashed the money at the corner, paid your electricity bill, paid the rent, and still had thirty dollars and change left over to buy food for two weeks until next payday, because of all of that, if you were shooting a photo of your youngest son and you saw the last man who dispassionately screwed over you staring out of your son’s two year old eyes, your hand would quiver too. all of the above is why her hand shook a little trying while squeezing off that slow-shutter-speed shot.

 

because of ruminating on all of that and because she just never would have expected it, she wasn't paying attention to the brother walking toward her until he stopped in front of them. went down into his pocket and began pulling out a pistol that was so long it seemed like it took two hours for him to keep extracting it from its hiding place. he just kept coming up, up, up with that thing.

 

why was he showing her his gun? was all she could think of at first.

 

brother was tall but not overly tall. just regular ghetto brother tall. tall enough to be playing ball instead of pulling a gun on her. was moderately attractive, except she did not pay too much attention to his looks because she was faced with the fascination of a lethal weapon about to be aimed at her chest. he maybe weighted as much as her whole family -- sekou was no more than forty-some pounds, malik was only about twenty-nine pounds, and she weighed ninety-eight pounds wringing wet -- she had weighed herself the last time she took a bath at her girlfriend's house, her girl friend, whom she hadn't seen or talked to in months now, kept a scale next to the tub, so when she stepped out, it seemed like the obvious thing to do, to hop on the scale and give it a go, the scale registered ninety eight and a half pounds, she had deducted half a pound for the water dripping off her and for the towel she was clutching and rubbing across her body as she dried herself -- so 98 plus let's say 30 was 128 plus say 45 was 163, no 173, yeah, he looked to weigh 200 or so pounds. shit. he didn't need no gun to rob her. he could have been like most men and just threw his weight around. but she couldn't help paying attention to that gun.

 

a gun is a funny thing when it's aimed at your chest, when it's in the hands of somebody who doesn't give a damn about your life, when it's loaded and maybe also loaded is the person holding the piece. a gun is funny in the macarbe sense that even though she was a statistic of poverty she had never thought of herself as eligible to become a statistic of homicide until she was confronted by a little piece of specifically twisted metal, phallic shaped and capable of spewing a metal projectile that can rent flesh, shatter bone and easily cause fatal harm.

 

we had embraced when we met, the huge of my bear hug almost wrapped completely around her twice, my right hand on my left elbow, my left hand vice versa, her living flesh encased against my chest, i could feel her breathing, her small breasts, the slenderness of her back, the top of her head not fully up to my chin, she didn't look sick or anything, or feel weak, but no one would mistake her for being at the top of her game, she had a semi-nervous gesture when i asked how she had been, both hands went to her hair and tugged the braids back on her head, hands over her ears like she didn't want to hear the question, and she looked down, away from me, before answering that she was just kind of coming out of seclusion. while she made those silent sad gestures, i was thinking about her children being sequestered in a cramped shotgun double, and, of course, trying to be a bit sensitive, i didn't ask how she was caring for her kids, i mean i was just another man who was not going to support her two young negro males, and if you ain't going to solve the problem what right do you have to tell a young mother that she ought to take better care of her kids, doesn't she know that every day she gets up, dresses them, feeds them, as best she can? i guess if i were she i too would have been in seclusion. and then she tells me that she almost got killed.

 

but that's life in the waning moments of the 20th century, everybody is almost getting killed, life, especially in new orleans a recent statistical murder capital of metropolitan america, life is murder. i could tell from the quiet, unhysterical, deliberate, clearly ennuciated, without eye contact at first but then the quick glance up into my eyes, i could tell that life is sometimes death from the way she said the word for the day around our way: killed. i could tell this was not an exaggeration.

 

you know the old saying, what goes up must come down? it's not the lift off that's scary, nor the arcing descent, what is scary is surviving the crash. i'm beginning to understand the anxiety of survival. sort of like how it felt surviving the middle passage. what am i living for? how come i'm still alive? when friends and kin fall all around you, you wonder why you're still standing. in this case, i was also wondering how she was still standing.

 

i mean it was difficult visualizing her on the sidewalk, pulling malik close to her with a firm hand that just moments ago was leisurely linked to his little palm. or how did sekou, big eyed and backed back against her thighs, how did he look while some original gangsta practiced his mayhem tactics on this family trio. sister got less than nothing--all the cash she will beg, borrow, earn and steal this year will not cover her annual debt, and some hardleg is trying to jack her up. what a tremendous disrespect for life this is. what kind of parasite would ripoff a whole family whose liquid cash is probably less than the cost of the bullets and the gun being used to rob them?

 

sister laughs nervously as she relates to me how big the gun was, pantomiming the gun being pulled on her, coming up out the dude's pants, she uses her hand with finger and thumb stiff at a perpendicular angle and just keeps raising her hand higher and higher until it's over her head. i imagine when all the money you've got is thirty dollars and it's secreted on your person, and your two young boys are scrunched up against you silently waiting for you to do something, and there's this big dude standing in front of you about to rob you or whatever, i imagine, at that moment, the gun do look like it will keep growing in size, bigger and bigger and bigger.

 

"i told him, you know you wrong for that. you see my kids..."

 

i could not imagine being bold enough to tell a robber he's wrong for robbing. but beneath the stress of crisis, she rose to protest the moment of her assault.

 

"i had to tell him, man, you wrong for that. and then i kinda instinctively backed toward the street. before i knew it, we were standing in the street. a car came along. the driver hit his brakes. leaned on his horn. swerved around us and kept going. i was yelling at the car: stop, stop. the dude hollered at me: give me your money or i'll shoot you. but by then i was standing in the middle of the street, my arms around my kids and then another car was coming. they was just going to have to hit me and my boys, or stop. fortunately the car stopped. i jerked on the passenger front door but it was locked. roll down your window, i begged. help me. please. help me. i pointed at the dude at the curb: that man is trying to kill us."

 

i watched her unconsciouly re-enact the escape as she narrated the scenario of resistance to assault. the unsentimental starkness of her words connected me to her like a fishhook in the flesh, each syllable held fast and pulled me closer because it hurt to back away from her. when i had asked how she had been, i had no idea how near she had come to not being and how out of it i would feel as she related to me the tale of her near demise.

 

although each one of her quiet words conjured up an image in my mind, everything i was thinking was abstract compared to the knot of feelings wrenching my gut as i stood transfixed by the mesmerizing sight of her pantomime, her body jerking through the survival motions: the desperate pulling at the car door, her braids thrashing as she frantically grasped for an opening; the fearless pointing at the assailant, her arm extended, ending in an accusatory finger aimed at some spot to the right of me; the protective collecting of her children, the hugging of open space with right arm and left arm, the hunching over, making a shield out of her body. i was hearing her words with one mind and watching her body with another mind, and both minds were marveling at what they witnessed. she sang and she danced. her words were warrior song, her motions, warrior steps. and yet she was unarmed, all she was doing was defending, defending her right to be, to be woman, to be mother, to be walking down the street with her children. you know we're in bad shape when a single mother and two children are viewed as easy prey, when a literally poor woman who obviously doesn't have big bucks can't take a family stroll through the afternoon without one of her brothers pulling a gun on her, threatening murder, demanding her money or her life.

 

i was simply standing there listening to her story, painfully aware that i was doing nothing but listening. she was not only doing the work of telling the tale, she had also first done the work of surviving the murderous maze of choices facing her that fatefilled afternoon. when a robber puts a gun in your face, most people's minds shut down and they become incapable of making calculated decisions, incapable of making any decision. most people freeze up and simply do what they are told. but this sister in the flash of a few seconds figured out how to be a survivor. threaded through the labyrinth of violence and somehow found a path to avoid the palpable possibility of getting murdered. this sister refused to go silently into the book of urban armed robbery and homocide.

 

i was emotionally exhausted as she continued the story of a murder that didn't happen. since she was here telling me about it, i knew that the story did not end with her murder, but as she revived the terror of the moment with the sound of her voice and the intensity of her movements, i felt the helpless chill of realizing just how fragile we all are in confronting the callous brutalities of contemporary life.

 

even though it would have been a tragedy had she been shot, the greater shame is that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, unbelievable about this story. if i didn't know it before, i knew it now: the realities of late 20th century new orleans had predisposed me to accept murder as a normal way of life. i wondered what i would have done had i actually been a witness to the attempted robbery. how would i have reacted if i were a passerby? would i have driven away, like the driver of the first car that almost hit them, or would i have simply stood motionless as a tree witnessing a black on black lynching, a black man assaulting a black woman?

 

"it was an older black man at the wheel of the car that stopped. i pounded on the window. i looked over my shoulder at the dude standing on the curb with the gun still out. please, help us, i shouted. the man unlocked his door. i pushed my kids in first."

 

then she addressed me. reminded me that i was not innocently an uninvolved spectator. by directly addressing me, she did not allow me the simple escape of observing her as though she was a television or a movie screen. she reminded me that i, a man, was looking at her, a woman. what was the relationship of my manhood to her? as "a man" i could be a perpretator or i could be a helpmate. she reminded me that manhood was no abstract choice. day to day, incident to incident, relation to relation, one on one, one to many, one to none, each man had to choose how he related to each woman. i didn't say anything as she interrupted the narrative flow, looked directly at me and made a parenthetical remark as she continued. what could i say?

 

"man, it was some shit like in a movie. it was happening so fast. but what was i going to do? i didn't want my kids to see me getting shot or nothing. or whatever that man with the gun intended to do to me." the awfulness of "whatever" hung in the air like the scent of foulness in a slaughterhouse. i said nothing and just waited for her to hurry up and get away from the man with the gun.

 

"at first i was going to tell the kids to run but they wouldn't move. they just kept clinging to me. so when i pushed them out into the street, they kinda was resisting. but it was the street and maybe getting run over by a car or else standing still and getting robbed and maybe getting shot. lucky for us, a car stopped. so after i got the kids in the car, i jumped in behind the kids. the man who was driving asked me what was wrong. i said just drive please. please drive. and he drove off. i didn't even look back. to this day i couldn't really describe that dude to you, but i can still see that big-ass gun."

 

and then it was over. she stopped talking. went into herself for a second or so to lock down whatever emotions that retelling and reliving the tale had set loose.

 

once she was back to the present, she looked up and into me in real time, swung her attention to my presence and calmly met my gaze without the terror of the past beclouding her bright brown eyes. she was no longer back at the scene of the crime, she was now standing in safety before me, a slight, very slight, smile creasing her face. silent. and then she said: "i'm alright now, but i been kind of staying inside, yaknow." and then she giggled nervously. i mumbled something about being glad that she was ok, and then recognizing that i had nothing substantial to add, i changed the subject.

 

days later, i find myself facing the question: what are you going to do about it? it's over but it's not over. murder marches on. armed robbery careens through our community unabated. no matter how i twist the combination of causes and effects, proactions and reactions, i don't come up with any great new insights into the problem.

 

in terms of dealing with our very real social problems, i am a beggar standing lonely outside a banquet of the damned. i don't possess any secret solutions or even any short term suggestions. but i know i must say something. so i raise up these few words and shout out to all my brothers: hey, my brothers, if you see a young sister, reed thin, dark skinned, walking down the street with two big-eyed kids, hey, please don't fuck with them. and brotherman, if you find them in trouble, please help them. that's the least a human being can do. help, and, most certainly, do no harm.

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

 

 

DOING BATTLE

ON THE CULTURAL FRONT

 

What is more important: reality or the perception of reality?

In the long run, reality is always more important than perception. For example, if we are sprayed with a poisonous gas, whether we could perceive that gas would not determine whether that gas killed us. Or if we were Sioux and made a treaty with the U.S. government, whether we believed in that treaty or not would not prevent us from dying at Wounded Knee, Wounded Knee (1 or 2 for that matter).

 

The facts are that in the long run, reality always rules. However, what we must contend with is the unfortunate truth that perception dominates human discourse more than reality. In the minds of humans, myth is more important that truth. How we perceive reality will determine what we do, far more often than reality itself.

 

In this context, cultural workers occupy a critical position. Through the power of our art work, we artists can either reveal the truth or maintain myths; can wake up the consciousness of our audience to the realities of our world or hypnotize people into believing that beliefs are synonymous with truths. The invaluable role that entertainment plays in stabilizing the status quo is why artists as entertainers are paid disproportionate to other workers (such as teachers and farmers) in modern American society.

 

Perhaps here we need to clarify the distinction between artists and entertainers, that is assuming there is a distinction. First of all, all successful art entertains, i.e. engages the imagination and emotions of its audience. That is the essential power of any art. So then being an entertainer is part and parcel of being an artist. An artist must be able to move people.

 

The real question then is not whether the art is entertaining but whether the art reveals truths or reinforces myths -- and because we live in a period and a place where truth is multifaceted and often contradictory, it is both easier to communicate received myths to the general public and for the bulk of contemporary Americans to accept myths than it is to communicate and have the bulk of people accept revealed truths.

 

Received myths are easier for the mass elements to swallow because these myths conform to the perceived reality of Euro-centric domination. Moreover, it is easier to market such myths, especially because the means of communication, not to mention the amount of remuneration, is generally tied to adherence to and propagation of the existing mainstream. Thus, even an avant garde which protest bourgeois values but does not lead a revolt against bourgeois domination is acceptable to the status quo as a safety value outlet of frustration that might otherwise be channeled into rebellion, or, "god forbid," social revolution.

 

An essential difference between art and entertainment is that art reveals the realities of history and the status quo, and proposes a vision of a significantly altered future, whereas entertainment reinforces social myths and proposes the futility of revolution past, present or future. Judge for yourself, but sooner or later, those essential characteristics will manifest themselves in all artwork. You can deal with this or you can deal with that, one way or another, you either conform to or transform the status quo.

 

Given our current state, which is a contradictory mixed bag (i.e. we both  conform and transform, but tend to conform more than  we transform), the real question for us as artists is how to mount and sustain cultural warfare with the avowed goal of winning the hearts and minds of our people away from conforming to the status quo, win our people over to transforming the status quo reality.

 

So that is the revolutionary duty of the artist: to reveal the truth. This is intrinsically a revolutionary duty because in a period of cultural domination the revelation of truth in and of itself is oppositional to the status quo which works to maintain hegemony.

 

We have tossed around two big words: reality and myth. Let us consider briefly, what we mean by these terms. Reality is simply what is. But reality is also complex. Reality is the event and the interpretation of the event; the conditions that lead to the event, the context within which the event took place, and the resultant outcome of the event. A myth is an accepted, symbolic explanation of reality. A myth could be true or could be false. By this definition of myth, it is obvious that I believe that there is nothing inherently incorrect about myths. However, within our contemporary context, a context of Eurocentric world hegemony, the myths of the status quo are intrinsically in opposition to the truths of non-European peoples.

 

For example, a Euro-centric myth is the belief in man dominating nature. Modern urban architecture (which I call "modern cave architecture") attests to this belief. The prevalence of air conditioning--enclosed spaces designed to keep the outside out. The drive to dominate nature is not just a reflection of atmospheric and environmental conditions. For example, the Inuit people live in cold weather but they don't try to dominate nature. No, I think the effort to dominate nature is a social characteristic which is intrinsic to Euro-centric thought. Native Americans, Africans, people of the so-called Asia subcontinent, and the peoples of the Pacific, all manifest either a reverence for or at least a respect for nature and see ourselves as part of nature.

 

A corollary of all of this is the Euro-centric move not only to separate man from nature (and notice when I speak of Euro-centric thought I specify "man," and when I speak of other modes of thought I specify people), but indeed Euro-centric thought puts man at odds with nature and even goes so far as to say that man has the right to control, or dominate, nature. Thus, we have this Euro-adopted trinity of sky gods, i.e. 1. Yahweh; 2. God the father, son and holy ghost; and 3. Allah, all of whom exist without a female principle (Christianity even goes so far as to make Adam the mother of Eve). All of these religions bestow to men dominion over the earth. and reserve the dominion of heaven (and by extension, hell) to the control of God. This then becomes the mythological justification for Europeans (even though Europeans did not create any one of these three religions) to conquer and control the world and all its diverse peoples.

 

I suggest to you that an artist who has not come to grips with the patriarchal and dominating nature of a so-called "universal" sky god, is an artist unable to break the psychological grip of Euro-centric thought, and hence, regardless of the so-called political content of their work, that artist will invariably end up supporting the status quo, and thus in the long run end up being an entertainer. Of course, there is much more to discuss in this context, because this is a very complex topic, but I think you see the general outlines.

 

All of this is the context within which I think our battle for cultural equity and cultural diversity takes place. I believe what we are struggling to do is defend and develop ourselves based first on revealing the truth of our day to day lives and our history, and second on taking responsibility for the shaping of our future.

 

Our social truths are tough and complex in that they include all kinds of contradictory social realities, some of which are shameful, nearly all of which are painful to reveal. Our failure to stop the colonizer was often because of a failure to unite with others who had a common battle to wage even if they were historically our enemy; a failure to curtail collaboration with the enemy; and ultimately a failure to overcome our own weaknesses in thought and action.

 

The fact is we were enslaved by the millions and the magnitude of that slavery could not have taken place without strategic mistakes and critical sell-outs. Fortunately, as our ongoing struggle makes clear, we have been delayed but not denied. So the task of our artist and art institutions is to reveal both the perfidy of the enemy and the pitifulness of our own weaknesses. You see when we talk about what needs to be attacked, the internal contradictions must be very high on our list. Most of the major slave revolts in the United States were betrayed from within.

 

So art must look unblinkingly at the past and the present if it is to offer a clear-eyed vision of the future.

 

Furthermore, the future of our struggles for equity and diversity, for empowerment and tolerance, must be grounded in specific realities and aimed toward a general embracement of the oppressed and exploited including huge sectors of the so-called "white" world who are more confused than we are, and certainly more spiritually and emotionally bankrupt than we have ever been. We may not have much wind in our sails, but there are literally millions of white Americans running on empty who live in a world of dread and angst. While I feel no moral responsibility to save them as whites, I do feel a responsibility to address them as human beings.

 

I do not fool myself into thinking that the majority of people who think of themselves as white will heed my words, but, at the same time, I am wise enough to understand that I in no way diminish myself by helping others, even if those others have historically bought into their alleged superiority over me. For you see, deep down in their souls they know, just as deep down in my soul I know, that none of us are superior, we are all humans struggling to survive, procreate and find a measure of peace and happiness.

 

The effort to accurately communicate the complex and contradictory nature of truth is the battle I envision as a human being, the battle I wage as an artist.

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

 

How We Sound, Is How We Are

 

How we sound, i.e. how we make music is the beat and best of us, the meaning and measure of us. Is how the world knows us and how we know ourselves. This essay will explore the historical development and cultural implications of the various music forms that, collectively considered, some of us call “Great Black Music.”

 

The term “Great Black Music” (GBM) is not a racial term per se, even though it contains a racial element. When African Americans refer to someone as Black, we generally mean a lot more than race; after all, we are a mixture of races. The biological is the least important of the three elements of Blackness, which are color, culture and consciousness. Culture and consciousness are the more critical elements. Culture roots the individual in a social group, a community of people who share behavior, attitudes, ethos, and ideals. Consciousness is identification with and examination of; to be conscious is to choose and commit to, not simply to be born into and experience. Consciousness is the most critical because an individual can be biologically Black and Black-acculturated by rearing, but still choose to serve as a representative of some other cultural interests. Additionally, just because a Black person does something does not make that act or creation representative of Black culture.

 

The music most of us refer to as Black music is not slave music. This music is the expression of an emancipated people. Although the music we revere has some historical roots in slavery times, three (gospel, blues and jazz) of the four principal genres (popular music is the fourth genre) all developed after the Civil War.

 

While it is common to divide the music along sacred and secular lines, to say that we had “religious music” that gave praise to God on one hand and “good times” (or bad times, in the case of the blues) music that gave praise to pleasure (or bemoaned the absence of pleasure) on the other hand, and although it is also popular to say that religious music preceded the other genres, the truth is a bit more complex, particularly if one equates religious music with Christian liturgy.

 

When we were enslaved during the African holocaust of chattel slavery and colonialism, with the notable exception of Congo Square in New Orleans, those of us forcibly brought to the United States were not allowed to publicly speak our African languages and publicly practice our African customs. We, of course, found ways to retain essential aspects of our African languages and customs, and these aspects are called African retentions, but the retentions were forced to reside inside European forms and/or Creole forms—in this case “Creole” refers to new cultural forms that resulted from mixing, amalgamation and adoption within the context of a multicultural, although White-supremacy dominated, context.

 

The reason that religious music was the first organized expression of African American musical talent is because of the restrictions of slavery. In the crucible of chattel slavery, we were denied the opportunity to practice our religious rituals and retain our languages. To the degree that anything beyond subservience was taught us, we were taught Christianity, and as scholar/historian Vincent Harding accurately asserts in his important book There Is A River, although we were involuntarily conscripted into Christianity, we shaped Christianity to meet our needs and, in so doing, became the authentic practitioners of Christianity as a theology of liberation.

 

 

GOSPEL

 

In ante-bellum America the initial development of Black churches and the development of unique forms of musical worship by African Americans took place exclusively in the North. Reverend Richard Allen founded the African Methodist Episcopalian (A.M.E.) Church in Philadelphia in 1797, and in 1801 Rev. Allen compiled and produced a hymnal which contained original musical compositions as well as variations of traditional Christian praise songs. This music was closer to what became generically known as “Negro Spirituals” than to what we consider “Gospel” music today.

 

In the South, where the overwhelming majority of our people were, the development of independent churches was not tolerated, and the compilation of hymnals was mostly by  word of mouth. In the early 1800s a wave of religious revivalism swept across the South. In many cases, African Americans were included in the services, although segregated either in special sections of the camp meetings or at separate camp meetings.

 

We practiced African-intensive religious modes of worship in these Southern camp meetings. The modes included trance and spirit possession, dance, communal chants and semi-sung oratory (“talk-singing”), improvised musical passages, and community sharing of hardships. Practices such as prayer services and the telling of one’s determination gave each individual the opportunity to “speak” her or his piece as well as the opportunity to seek her or his peace in the Holy Spirit. While some African American Christians deny the relevance of such cultural practices and consider them either quaint or reprehensible expressions of illiterate people, these cultural expressions are philosophical projections of an African sensibility rather than simply a reflection of ignorance of European culture.

 

The music that is considered classic “Negro Spirituals” was codified into a cultural force in the late 1800s when the spirituals were “spruced up” and presented as concert music in 1871 by the famous Fisk Jubilee Singers. Here begins the common practice of dating developments within African American music by its presentation to the Euro-centric mainstream and its acceptance by “Whites.” Here also is the nexus of cultural production and cultural authenticity—i.e., until Afro-centric cultures are produced for (or more importantly “produced by”) Whites, the culture goes unrecognized by the mainstream unless “money” can be made from controlling the sale of the cultural “product.”

 

It is worth noting that the selling of Black music is directly tied to the technology of reproducing the sound of Black music. In this case, it is no mere coincidence that radio and sound recordings, not to mention electrical amplification and movies with sound, all developed and came to fruition after the Civil War and before the Great Depression, the same time period that saw the development of the genres we known today as blues, gospel and jazz. The technology of capturing sound is important because Black music can not be appreciated or replicated solely as notes on paper.

 

The precursor of modern Gospel was Rev. Charles A. Tindley, who composed and published what some critics consider the first modern Gospel songs. Rev. Tindley was at his height between 1901 and 1906 and marked the beginning of known individual composers of African American religious music. The main creators of modern Gospel were composer and pianist Thomas Dorsey and vocalist Mahalia Jackson. It is instructive to note that in the mid-1920s when Dorsey, Jackson and others began to practice this new Gospel form they were rejected and, in fact, prohibited from performing in some churches because they were accused of “jazzing up” religious music or of bringing “the Blues” (i.e. the “devil’s music”) into the church.

 

Nearly a century later, the “contemporary” Gospel movement as exemplified by Yolanda Adams, numerous “mass” choirs, and composer/choir director Kirk Franklin, represents a continuance of the Dorsey/Jackson rejuvenation of Gospel to “include” the significant and essentially Afro-centric musical developments of the day into the religious music canon. Those who reject contemporary Gospel artists today because they are making worldly music and calling it Gospel are of the same temperament as those who rejected early Gospel in the 1920s.

 

In the overall scheme of contemporary Gospel music, perhaps the single most significant development is the insertion of the drum. The drum, considered the “most savage and pagan” of all instruments, was indelibly associated with our African origins. The drum had always been excluded, indeed condemned, in Christian music making except, of course, drumming through hand clapping, in which we used our bodies as a percussion instrument. Next we developed an unrivaled facility with the small hand drum, known as the tambourine. But it was not until the Black Power era of African affirmation that Gospel music actively embraced the drum set as an integral part of the instrumentation of religious music.

 

That the drum today is found in the choir stands and on the stages of  almost every Gospel concert is an amazing development that indicates not only the strength of African retentions but also the inevitability of Afro-centric cultural expressions surfacing among the masses of African Americans, even among those who had consciously rejected the drum in previous times.

 

Gospel has retained much of its African character precisely because it is ritual rather than commercial. Indeed, except for a handful of professional recording artists, most Gospel artists seldom tailor their performance to commercial considerations. Moreover, the network of independent churches provides both a stage and a conservatory for the development of artists apart from the vicissitudes of popular tends. This is not to say that there are no trends in Gospel music. Certainly Gospel is subject to fads and the mass adoption of certain styles in a given era, but the adoption or rejection of commercial influences is not a life-and-death issue for Gospel artists.

 

The primary audience for Gospel music is an audience of “believers” who partake in the music with the expectation of being moved to religious ecstasy. Through their collection offerings the Gospel audience (i.e. the church) supports the vocalists, choirs, instrumentalists, and musical directors. This audience validates the worth of the artist, not some recording executive, not the status on the commercial charts, not television (or radio) popularity, although all of these certainly play a role in contemporary Gospel music.

 

 

BLUES

 

Contrary  to popular belief, the Blues is not slave music, even though slave-era work songs, field hollers, chants, and the like were some of the basic ingredients of the Blues. In fact, the archetypal image of the wandering blues musicians, roaming from town to town with his guitar, is de facto testimony that blues musicians, as we know and mythicize them, could not have existed prior to Emancipation because our people did not enjoy freedom of movement during slavery.

 

The initial form of itinerant Blues must that became known as Country Blues is best exemplified by Mississippi’s Robert Johnson. Johnson, who was born in 1911, was not the first to record nor was he the originator or even popularizer of the Blues or various Blues vocal and instrumental techniques; however, he was easily the most developed and forceful Blues musician of his era to record.

 

An extraordinary guitarist and seminal composer, as well as a mesmerizing vocalist, Johnson, who recorded only 29 songs during two different sessions in 1936 and 1937, set standards for acoustic Country Blues performance that stand today. Literally thousands of performers, including many of the most popular and best known rock recording artists, have extensively “borrowed” Johnson’s melodies, riffs, and even whole songs, often without crediting Johnson.

 

A second form of Blues is known as the Classic Blues, the only modern genre of music that has been led by women. In a country dominated by patriarchal values and male leadership (should we more accurately say “overseership”?), Classic Blues is remarkable. Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters, Ida Cox, Alberta Hunter, Sippie Wallace, and the incomparable “Empress” of the Blues, Bessie Smith, were far more than simply female fronts for turn-of-the-century Blues Svengalies. These women often led their own band, chose their own repertoire, wrote or co-wrote their own songs, and certainly composed or chose their own lyrics. Moreover, those who were truly successful, like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, actually ran their own production companies. The was not one major male singer of Classic blues.

 

Never again since the Classic Blues era of the 1920s have women as a group performed leadership roles in the music industry, especially not African American women. The entertainment industry intentionally curtailed the trend of highly vocal, independent women—most of whom, it must be noted, were not svelte sex symbols comparable in either features or figure to slender White women, but rather these sisters were robust, dark-skinned, African-featured women who thought of and carried themselves as the equal of any man. America fears the drum and psychologically fears the self-determined empowerment of the bearer of the first drum, the feminine heartbeat that we hear in the womb.

 

Indeed, chronologically, in terms of recordings, the Classic blues came before the Country Blues. Aesthetically, the music the Classic Blues divas sang was closer to an amalgam of popular music of the era infused with blues elements than it was to Country Blues per se. When Russian-born immigrant Sophie Tucker was unable to make a recording date because of contractual conflicts, vaudeville and Blues musician Percy Bradford convinced Okeh, a small record label at that time, to allow one of his featured singers, Mamie Smith, to r4ecord. Eventually, they produced “Crazy Blues,” the first Blues record. The record was released in August of 1920, selling over 75,000 copies in the first month and over one million within a year. Soon the then fledgling record industry was literally rushing to record every Blues-singing Smith woman they could find, thus beginning the industry trend of churning out clone after clone of whatever is perceived as a “hit formula.”

 

The third category of the Blues is the Urban Blues—the up-South, big city, electrified variation of the mainly acoustic Country Blues. Most of the founding fathers of Urban Blues, such as Muddy Waters, B. B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James, Willie Dixon, and literally hundreds of others, were Mississippi-born transplants.

 

These artists laid the foundation for modern pop music. Except for the wholesale raiding of Robert Johnson’s repertoire, there has been no larger cross-cultural appropriation than the coveting and covering of Urban Blues songs by White pop artists—especially the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, two groups that, unlike their American predecessors and peers, actively acknowledged that they got their music from African American Blues artists.

 

Although White American artists such as Elvis Presley became rich copying “Hound Dog” from Big Mama Thornton and recording the songs of Otis Blackwell (an African American composer who would send Presley tapes so that Presley could learn to sing the songs), most White American singers did little to acknowledge and celebrate the sources of their riches.

 

By the 1990s, other than a handful of legendary figures, and a larger number of relatively unknown elderly practitioners, Whites dominated Blues—or, more correctly, they dominated the “representation” (as opposed to the creation) of the Blues. One central fact needs to be kept in mind: Other than the three schools of the Blues (Classic, Country and Urban), over the last fifty years there have been no real developments of the Blues as a form, although there have been significant transformations and off-shoots. In terms of ongoing development, the Blues is at a dead end.

 

One of the most vexing and seemingly contradictory aspects of GBM is that the majority of Blues fans, and arguably the majority of Blues musicians (no argument if you only count people 35 and under), are White. Why don’t Black people listen to and play the blues today?

 

There are all kinds of theories, but there is one simple fact: GBM is functional. Unlike Western culture, which is obsessed with eternal life, African culture accepts the inevitableness of death and rebirth through generational transformation. Thus, when something dies, we grieve and then move on, carrying the spirit of the deceased within us as we create anew.

 

The Blues is dead because the soil that produced the blues either lies fallow or has been covered with concrete, and because the social conditions that produced the Blues no longer exist in the same configuration as during the Jim Crow era. However, the Blues sensibility, the impulse to rise above by declaiming just how tough times are, the laughing to keep from crying, the celebration of the transformatory power of violence—all of that is found in the Blues music of the turn of the 20^th century, which is, of course, Rap.

 

We as a people have never been hung up on perpetuating the American status quo. Our goal has always been to either flee Babylon or burn it down, to leave it or fundamentally change it. In the case of the Blues, as a specific reflection of Jim Crow America, we did both—we left the Blues as a specific genre of music and we transformed the Blues into other popular forms of music. In fact, what is Rhythm and Blues but post-WWII Blues, and what is Rap but a literal recitation of the Blues over “phat beats”?

 

What we must distinguish is the difference between process and product, between focusing on a sensibility that informs the creative process as opposed to fixating on the forms that are the result of a specific creation. The Blues as a historic genre is moribund. The Blues as a sensibility is very much alive. The Blues is dead. Long live the Blues.

 

 

JAZZ

 

One of the most common and inaccurate myths about Jazz is that it was born in the brothels of Storyville at the beginning of the 20^thcentury in New Orleans. The truth is that Jazz was born in the streets and parks of the New Orleans African American community. Initially, Jazz was primarily an outdoor music performed at social occasions such as weddings receptions, funerals, parties, births, parades and picnics.

 

The immediate precursor to Jazz was a piano-based music known as Ragtime. The major figure of Ragtime was Scott Joplin who composed numerous popular rags and also composed a ragtime opera, Treemonisha. Ragtime was a highly syncopated, up tempo, happy music and reflected the high hopes that our people had during the period of Reconstruction that grew out of the North’s victory in the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation. Ragtime was also the first American-born cultural expression to achieve international acclaim. The dance steps associated with Ragtime, most notably the “Cakewalk,” were a worldwide rage. However, the end of Reconstruction also marked the end of Ragtime as a major musical form.

 

Jazz played Ragtime but with a major infusion of the Blues. Jazz was also a band music, whereas Ragtime was primarily, but not exclusively, a solo piano-based music. It is also interesting to note that the technology associated with Ragtime, piano rolls and the “player piano” were eclipsed by the development of records. Whereas a player piano could only replicate piano sounds, the record could replicate every musical instrument and the human voice. What cds have done to vinyl, 78-records did to piano rolls.

 

There are many other elements in the development of Jazz, which moved up river from New Orleans to St. Louis and Chicago, and from there to New York and the entire East Coast, as well as to California. Jazz became so dominant a cultural force that the advent of modernism in America, i.e. the 1920s, is popularly known as the “Jazz Age.”

 

Key to an appreciation of the cultural dominance of Jazz is the fact that from the beginning there were White practitioners who, not surprisingly, received more acclaim than their Black peers (who were the chief innovators and creators of Jazz). Thus, the first major commercializer of Jazz was the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (ODJB), an all-White group led by cornetist Nick La Rocca. In February of 1917, while performing at Reisenweber’s Café in New York city, RCA gave the ODJB the opportunity to record the first Jazz record.

 

From 1917 on, there has been a continuous racial boosterism of specific Whites as the dominant forces in Jazz. Over the years, ODJB was followed by Paul Whiteman, Benny Goodman, Dave Brubeck, Kenny G. and so on. This complicates the appreciation of Jazz as GBM, but just as Blacks singing opera doesn’t negate the fact that opera is a European Classical artform, the existence of Whites as Jazz musicians in no way means that Jazz is not an African American artform.

 

The major eras of Jazz were New Orleans Jazz at the turn of the century as the founding style. Then came “Swing” Jazz, followed by Bebop, the Avant Garde, Fusion and finally what is today called Smooth Jazz.

 

The dominant figures of early New Orleans Jazz were trumpeter Louis Armstrong and pianist Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton. For swing music, the reigning trio of big band leaders were Fletcher Henderson, Count Basie and the incomparable Duke Ellington, all of whom were consummate arrangers, with Duke being the greatest modern American composer (George Gershwin notwithstanding). Bebop is undisputedly led by saxophonist Charlie Parker, trumpeter Dizzy  Gillespie and pianist Thelonious Monk. The Avant Garde was championed by saxophonist John Coltrane. Trumpeter Miles Davis is most often cited as the popularizer of Jazz Fusion. Smooth Jazz is the result more of marketing than of any significant musical developments, although the mixing of Jazz with Soul music by musicians such as saxophonist Grover Washington Jr. and pianist Ramsey Lewis, directly led to a style that is now dominated by Whites such as saxophonist Kenny G. and mainly White groups such as Sypro Gyra and others too numerous to mention.

 

Jazz is quintessential 20^th Century American music. Jazz embodies the basic concepts of freedom and democracy more so than any other music form or genre. However, at the beginning of the 21^st century, Jazz is at a decisive crossroads and its future is unclear. The major problem with much of today’s Jazz is that many young musicians are so intent on recreating old forms that they have nothing new to say. A major part of their silence evolves form the fact that they are the products of an uneventful assimilation into the American status quo. Their music has no fire because there is no fire in their personal lives. And, as Charlie Parker (the legendary “Bird”) said, what comes out of your horn is your life.

 

Historically, poorly paid Jazz musicians were the epitome of “starving artists.” They persued their art despite economic injustices and inequities, not because they wanted to starve but because making money was not the main reason for creating Jazz. Jazz was their religion, rather than simply their career.

 

After the 1980s Jazz became a middle-class, respectable pursuit. So is it any wonder that much of today’s Jazz does not relate to the lives of the working class, under- and mis-educated, poor and de facto segregated urban masses of African Americans? At the beginning of the 21^st century, Rap has over taken Jazz, and unless there is a radical development, Jazz will go the way of Blues.

 

 

RAP

 

On the one hand it is undeniable that Rap is the dominant musical artform and on the other hand is equally undeniable that the majority of Rap is merely entertainment during a period of extreme trauma in the Black community.

 

My basic contention is that if our popular music is in sad shape, it is because we as a people are in sad shape. What we are witnessing (and too often participating in and collaborating with) is the total commercialization of our music. Thus R&B (regardless of whether it is called “Neo-Soul” or “Funk” or whatever) and Rap are both designed mainly not only to sell records but also to sell to an audience, the majority of whom are not African Americans. If this audience was mainly the large majority of people in the world who are the descendants of the colonized, this would be a good development. However, the “auditors” of fame and fortune in America are mainly White: White youth in momentary revolt against their parents, a White music industry who capitalize of the sale of Black music, a White-controlled media that exists as an adjunct (and advocate) of the business sector and that uses GBM to sell products.

 

The integration of African American artists into the mainstream of entertainment media necessarily results in a dilution and/or prostitution of the music. There is no better example of this co-opting and corrupting phenomenon than what has happened to Rap music.

 

While some adults still argue about whether Rap is really music, Rap has become “the” major force in American popular music and a major force on the international music scene. Regardless of what one thinks about the language of Rap, the reality is that Rap speaks directly to and for African American youth, as well is influential on the lives and outlook of youth internationally. These youth, especially those in the working class and underclass segments of society, are alienated, marginalized, mis- or un-educated, abused, and socialized into a life of crime and/or dependency. Most over-40 adults have no idea how hard it is to be an African American teenager in an urban setting. In fact, many adults will never understand, because much of the more dangerous and damaging social and psychological pressures felt by youth did not exist in preceding generations.

 

On the other hand, the adults who run the recording industry callously exploit this reality. Driven by both the need and the greed for profits, the recording industry—the same industry which commercialized Blues and Jazz—is now pushing Rap for two reasons: There is money in it, and there is a large talent pool.

 

The existence of this talent pool (i.e. surplus creative labor) is critical to Rap’s profitability as a commodity. Literally thousands of would-be Rappers daily submit demo tapes to record executives in the hope of landing a contract so that the aspirant star can “get paid” and “live large.” This talent pool nurtures and grooms itself, and in many cases delivers “demo” tapes that are virtually finished products. There is no necessity for the recording companies to make a major investment in studio time to record these potential million-selling artists. At the same time to make it difficult for the artists to avoid signing with them, the major record companies in union with cable television have made having a professionally produced video the new gold standard. In order to “go gold” a recording artist is almost required to have a video, which costs a couple of hundred thousand dollars to produce. But, again, as has been the case throughout the history of GBM, technology plays a major role in the status and development of the music. Digital video is on the verge of making video production affordable and accessible, and could also pose a serious challenge to the strangle hold major record companies currently have on emerging artists. The stakes are high because the music industry is a multi-million dollar industry.

 

Rap has a genre has brought two major innovations into popular music: First, Rap reintroduced the Afro-centric oral tradition as an artform, and Rap demonstrated a profound advancement in the use of computer technology in the service of art. Rap’s use of electronic instruments and recording equipment is an advancement whose far-reaching significance is akin to the African American appropriation and elevation of the saxophone at the beginning of the 20^th century.

 

The verbal wordplay of Rap is a major advance on the general state of lyrics in pop music. Whereas most pop lyrics are content to use end rhymes, commonplace metaphors and similes as their main literary devices, rappers have significantly upped the ante through the employment of a sophisticated approach to word play. It is not uncommon to hear rappers use rhymes within as well as at the ends of lines; the metaphors and similes range from the satirical to the surreal; and the use of onomatopoeia, alliteration, and other forms of word wizardry is, in the mouth of a master rapper, astounding.

 

But Rap is more than just technique. Rap has also reintroduced the relevance of “saying something”—i.e., political and social commentary. This is especially important during a period when Black popular music had become little more than hip elevator music and commercials for consumerism run amok.

 

In terms of using computer-aided technology to create pop music, rappers are pioneers and originators. Just as few people think of the fact that African Americans created the trap drum set, many people are unaware of the technological innovations created by Rap artists. Sampling—using selected passages of pre-existing music mixed with other elements to form a new composition—is Rap’s best known, but by no means only, innovation. The use of environmental sounds and noise elements as part of the music bed is another example. But perhaps the major achievement is the turning of computer and electronic instruments into drums used to produce poly-rhythms—and not just simple backbeats, but complex cross-rhythms of “found” (sampled) and “created” (programmed) sounds, creatively patched together in an aural quilt of musical scraps turned into a magic carpet of head-bopping motion.

 

As an aesthetic, Rap is both a throw-back to basic voice and body percussion and a look into the future when music becomes simultaneously more natural (in that it draws on every available sound in the environment) and completely synthetic (in that it can be created without using “musicians” per se). Rap is both the literal creation of music without musicians and a major redefining and expanding of our perception of what a musician is and does.

 

Although the technical achievements are awesome, perhaps the most significant effect of Rap as been to create more space for musical artists in every genre to make overt political statements and social commentary in their music. The political immaturity of “gangsta” Rap notwithstanding, Rap has reintroduced the concept of the artist as social critic at a time when popular entertainment threatened to inundate us with romantics, clowns and minstrels.

 

Philosophically, the major deficiency of Rap artists is buying into the mainstream assertion that “racism” alone, and ipso facto, is the only problem stopping African Americans from enjoying the good life. Unless and until rappers confront the need to oppose commercialism and other divisive “isms,” such as patriarchal sexism, the music will never achieve its full potential and will always end up debasing itself for the dollar.

 

 

THE WAY AHEAD

 

Whites now seriously compete with African Americans both as producers and as artists in all genres of GBM. Although White domination of the genre has not yet happened in Gospel, White rapper Eminem is widely recognized as a major, if not the most popular, Rap artist. Some people view Eminem as an abnormality and point out that the overwhelming majority of major Rap artists are Black and that Jay-Z, the most skilled Rapper, is also Black, and that therefore there is no chance of Whites taking over. However, that same argument was made in Jazz thirty years ago and we see the color of Jazz today. Not long ago there were serious statements that one could tell if Jazz musicians were White or Black simply by listening to them. Obviously, that is no longer the case. Not only do some Whites sound Black, but a number of Blacks sound White—assuming that one even entertains a discussion of sound being synonymous with biology.

 

On the other hand, from a cultural and consciousness perspective, “sounding White” is simply accepting the status quo and attempting to conform to a standard that has been established as the paragon of sound. “Sounding Black” is making an individual statement within the broad social context while utilizing the basic principles and traditions of GBM. Thus, any individual person, White or Black, can sound White or Black depending on the individual’s culture and consciousness.

 

We need cultural workers and warriors who understand that, within the broad and capitalist-driven American social context, “sounding”—i.e. making music—can not uphold the status quo and at the same time contribute to the development of African Americans precisely because the status quo is based on economically and politically exploiting us. (For those who doubt the extent of this exploitation, any examination of social index figures, whether it is wealth and income; or sickness, morbidity and life expectancy; or education; or incarceration, and examination of such figures will show that not only are we as a people disadvantaged, the examination will also show that the gaps are widening. Moreover, we have only to look at what happened to Black voters in the last presidential election to get a clear and undeniable picture of the political exploitation of African Americans by the American mainstream.)

 

Any and all music worthy of the designation GBM must oppose the status quo exploitation of African Americans. Throughout the history of GBM, African American artists have struggled to create their own record companies, to secure their publishing rights, to control venues and how the music is presented, and to form collectives, associations and businesses to bring these objectives to reality. The challenge facing GBM, and facing both Rap and Jazz in particular, is how to regain the independence they had when the artists existed either on the periphery of or totally outside of the music industry mainstream.

 

There are many other challenges, for example: no major African American-owned publications which seriously focus on and critique GBM; the declining significance and existence of Black-owned radio stations; the almost total lack of community-based, Black-owned music venues; the abysmally small number of GBM festivals, conferences, and special events which are controlled, organized, and curated by African Americans.

 

Today we have more African American musicians and entertainers who are millionaires than ever before. At the same time we have less control, less ownership, and less independence than at any time in the history of GBM. What we face is neocolonialism of individual musicians who, in exchange for big salaries, do nothing to confront some of the very real problems and deficiencies GBM faces. What we have is the near total control not only of the production and distribution, but also of the discourse about and documentation of GBM by forces that are de facto siding with the status quo in the continued exploitation of GBM.

 

In the final analysis it’s all about context and control—what we do with and in our own space and time. Everything is informed by its own time of creation, existence and demise: what was happening when it was going on.

 

The social and aesthetic significance of African American music is neither abstract nor biological. The social and aesthetic significance of GBM is very precisely its warrior stance in the face of status quo exploitation and its healing force for the victims of that exploitation. Ultimately, the best of our music helps us resist exploitation and reconstruct ourselves whole and healthy. Traditionally GBM is been both an inspiration to keep on keeping on and a healing force in the universe. That is why GBM is such a joyful noise!

 

—kalamu ya salaam / 2006

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

 

SOUND is ProFound Sense 

  

music is

more than model

 

coordinated sound

is inspiration

 

is literally breath

indispensable

 

the taking in

of the material world

 

the exhale of

the spirit self

 

into the atmosphere we go, journeying into the cold but bringing the warm of our movements, the friction heat of our singing, our sounding, & of course the daunting ferocity of our memory which makes impossible us remaining slaves no matter how long we've been downpressed

 

like the old man sayz: i ain't never been free, but i done had a good time or two

 

i am telling you people hold on to the music, worship sound if you just got to bend your knee to something, a god who can not sing or at least pat foot & keep time is no god at all

 

humble in the light may i never forget the sounds from which i am sprung, may i always remember to give thanx through song

 

give thanx

 

for the gods who came amongst us and were given earthly names as they gifted us with vibrations.

 

Ashe.

 

for the tranes who ran underground through us sound transporting us to another place & time, prettier weather, a hipper clime, where we could be free, & if not be free, at the very least envision freedom. imagine ourselves unlocked & unshackled to "devil & sons, incorporated".

 

Ashe.

 

for the birds who flew above us. brilliant doves in their love calls, those grace notes which opened us in places which had been closed so tightly we never even knew what was inside. how high, how fast we flew fueled by bird's incandescent warble. for black imagination unafraid to totally express itself, unafraid to approach the whole world, unafraid to listen to anything, to everything & righteously respond.

 

Ashe.

 

for the oh so hip holidays we celebrate as we struggle through day to day, as we survive & resist with a song like billie turning even the most maudlin, most juvenile, most pop trash B side into A-1 lyrics of love & sophistication, cool as prez riffing with his legs crossed, & horn held at the sacred angle of ascent, weaving obbligatos of concern & support beneath, behind & all up around the sound of our great lady igniting life passions with the blue flame torch of her voice. for all the sister love ladies, of all our sacred days.

 

Ashe.

 

for the taciturn monks who told us so much more than we will ever know, left us rosetta stone platters to comprehend whose total decoding & deciphering may take us another million years or more, & for the dizzy lecturers who left us reeling in a sublime spin of shining notes. for the downhome mary lou's who knew how to twirl the ivories and obsidians into an enticing swirl of sounds. for the james named europe who elevated the afrikan in us. for all our bold buddies with their arms so strong sonically lifting us. for the djalis frenchified and angolicized into jellyrolls, and for our best smiths whose striking songs anviled the cruelest moments of our solitudes into defiant anthems of braveheart blues.

 

Ashe.

 

For the hues of our spectrum's vibe from the funk filled foundational brown of james to the anything but bland midnight blues moaning of B. O.  B - B.  Y.

 

Ashe.

 

to all we have not mentioned (e.g. the gaye wondersongs, the jimi rigged i&i brothers, & the diva bright willing sounds, the earthy aretha moans, & on & on), to all of them whomever they are/were, we will never forget you. to all, to each & every one we owe our very breath.

 

Ashe.

 

our music is more than model

well coordinated sounds are inspiration

 

are literally

indispensable breath

 

the taking in of the material world

the exhaling of the spirit self

 

into the atmosphere of this bitter earth

sweetened only by the honey of our song

 

people have asked me why am i such a fanatic about the music, i in turn wonder why they are not, & if not music, what? dance? carvings? cooking? what? anything we do, if it is done well will have the music in it, be influenced by the music because music is literally organized movement & the very definition of being alive is to be able to self generate motion, since the beginning of time, life has been nothing more than a measurement of movement, how well, the vibrations we leave in our wake, how we sound doing whatever we do, how the motion of our coming through the slaughter affects all whom we touch & we got this essentialness from the universe itself, we are born in motion spinning on the planet, circling around the sun, thousands, & thousands of miles an hour, moving. being still is an optical illusion. we are all in motion. & music is nothing but the organization of the sounds that motion makes. which is why black people operate on vibes. nothing metaphysical about it. motion. vibrations. music. that's real. in fact, motion is the primal reality & this is why & what we respond to.

 

the cosmic timing

of the evolutionary rhythms

 

of starlight

pulsing

 

a pulsing that is eaten

through the moist eye

 

of

visionaries

 

digested and transformed into aural red cells of sound which enable human movement. without starlight we die.

 

looking up in rapt wonder beneath the velvet, star-studded quilt of the heavens, a child asked her grandmother what the silver twinkling was called. "big mama, my mama's mama, how do yo call all those holes in the night sky?"

 

big mama laughed without looking up & then tilted her head toward sirius. "those are our ancestors winking at us, letting us know they are watching and that we should always make them proud."

 

big mama gently tugged the little girl's hand. "come, it's time to sleep. when you dream tonight, the starpeople will be inside your head."

 

when we dream at night, stars illuminate the interiors of our heads, populate our souls with visions we could never think of on our own. the power push & pull of star light is pervasive. in fact, it is the rays of the closest star to us, the rays of the sun which strike the earth and make the world go round. i mean motion is necessary cause stillness is death.

 

without stars we die/decay

into mere matter

 

far, far more than any day

we need the deep of night

 

to unfetter

our imaginations

 

which is why most musicians are night creatures who roam the earth singing & swinging, representing the advanced thought of their time, deep art is the imagination of its age, the most disturbing, the most beautiful, the most unnerving, the most insightful visions we can imagine & make real.

 

sound. sound. sound.

sounds. motion. sounds. vibrations.

music is the architecture of higher life forms.

i do not understand silence

except as a pause between noise

a preparation for the next sounding

a momentary rest from the preceding sound

 

if you study the music

you will understand all that is necessary to know

until you study the music

you can not understand anything there is to know

 

study sound. study sound. study sound.

because our music is more than model

sound is the necessary

the necessary

the very necessary

sunshine of our existence.

 

& music

music is more than model

the sound

of our music

is literally inspiration

 

the indispensable

breath

 

with which we take in

the material world

 

through which we exhale

our spirit self

 

—kalamu ya salaam

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

 

 

 

exit left

 

when i came to i didn't know where i was

on the ground, prone, near the levee bottom—i blacked out

while jogging, got up, walked home, still laboring a bit

between deep gulps i told nia as much as i could remember

 

my brother is a cardiologist, nia urged me to call him

tuesday morning early i take an ekg and the results are so disturbing

keith schedules me for a battery of tests an hour and a half later

i still have a meeting to do in between, my blood pressure was normal

 

i reappear, am radioactively injected, get wired up and climb on

a treadmill, lay under a nuclear camera, chat as though nothing

was wrong, submit to a sonargram, nia is there the whole time,

the results are negative, acceptable, i did not have a heart attack

 

keith can not determine the etiology of the alarming ekg

but i know the hard truth: at fifty i am almost through

i am dying and perhaps there is a metaphysical reason

no physical break down showed up on the machines this time

 

as the world unravels around me i coolly center the resulting chaos

within the calm of my karma's core—this is how i exist: i dare to do

all the good i can, i accept the uneveness of chance, i simply love

life for what it is and when my time comes, i am not afraid to exit

 

—kalamu ya salaam

____________________________________

 

Music—"Monk's Mood" by Thelonious Monk

 

Kalamu ya Salaam – vocals

Stephan Richter – clarinet

Frank Bruckner – guitar

Georg Janker - bass

 

 

Recorded: June 14, 1998 – "ETA Theatre" Munich, Germany

 

 

 

my eyes wide open:

an open letter to my executioners

(Take 2)

 

 

if you

catch me, so be it

 

my dark face knows

bush joys

i laugh at your square world

alternatives, everything you offer

smells like jail

 

my hair has been clipped

many, many times

but i continue to let it grow

choosing my beard over the edge

of your razor

 

track me with your dogs, spy

my toe prints on the mud

where i ran, where i danced

 

catch me if you can

and if you do

so be it

 

but before i'd dine on your

stolen feasts

i'll drink rain,

wash myself in the streams of life

and keep steppin'

keep steppin'

keep right on steppin' down the road

past my people's martyred bones

broken and stacked in irregular piles

by the wayside, past skulls

perched on poles, cruel totems

which i decline to heed

 

even if i have to go

totally nude to fight your dragons

you will not detour me

i will go

i will live while i'm alive

i refuse to die while i am alive

  refuse

 

i will even go to your white wall

place my firm handprint on the

  damp stucco darkened by body

  fluids siphoned from murdered comrades

reject the charity of your blindfold

wink as i stare down your bullets, and

greet sweet death with

my eyes wide open

 

catch me if you can

and if you do

so be it

 

—kalamu ya salaam

 

____________________________

 

 

 

Kalamu ya Salaam – vocals

Stephan Richter – clarinet

Wolfi Schlick – tenor

Frank Bruckner – guitar

Roland HH Biswurm - percussion

 

Recorded: May 31, 1998 – Munich, Germany

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

 

Kalamu ya Salaam – vocals

Stephan Richter – clarinet

Frank Bruckner – guitar

Roland HH Biswurm - vocals

 

Recorded: May 31, 1998 – Munich, Germany

 

 

photo by Alex Lear

 

 

Haiku #133

 

no heart can be whole

til its been broke, mended &

then — re-used again

 

—kalamu ya salaam