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 for pleasure is the fundamental hunger of life. Even at the basic survival level, we prefer down home cooking that gives us pleasure to food that solely give us nutrients. The first law of human nature is survival. The second law is find a way to enjoy surviving!
Pleasure is essential because life is hard. 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?
Plato never trusted music precisely because music foregrounded emotion and backgrounded cognition. Christian ministers condemn Black popular music as the “devil’s music” pointing out that such music inflames pagan passions. In a sense, they are partially right. Music does communicate at a visceral level, connects through sensations, feelings. Popular music = emotional expressiveness.
Pop’s first commandment is “feel it.” Feeling always 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 reactions to the world presented with emotional ardor. When we sing we are not only making music, we are also expressing our conscious and unconscious thoughts. All popular music expresses a worldview, a reaction to and feelings the world we live in.
Thirdly, R&B has a strong beat, it is dance music. The emphasis on dance is also significant. The birth of R&B happened precisely at the same time that jazz ceased being dance music. Initially, R&B was nothing more than a branch of post-World War II jazz that emphasized lyrics (often humorous and/or bawdy) and a strong dance beat. A founding figure of R&B was saxophonist / vocalist / bandleader Louis Jordan. Jordan’s music was sometimes known as “jump jazz,” a term which made the dance connection obvious.
Emotionally-based, lyricism with a strong dance beat is the triumvirate of essential ingredients in all popular American music, however, just as Black aesthetics have affected American culture, Euro-centric aesthetics have also affected Black culture.
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 exclusive association of dance with secular music. Thus, although Black religious music (spirituals and gospel) clearly qualify as embodying the concepts of feeling 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. African aesthetic does not consider the body sinful, nor does our aesthetic consider the erotic lewd. Thus on the one hand dance and popular music is considered beyond the pale for good Christians, and at the same time within the Black community there is a constant cross-genre traffic.
Ray Charles was the most important creator of the fusion of gospel into R&B (which was jazz and blues-based). The “Right Reverend” Ray Charles infused into popular music not just the expressiveness of gospel, he also used specific gospel techniques. For all practical purposes, if Louis Jordan, the founding father of R&B, was the “John the Baptist,” then Ray Charles was the “Jesus” of Soul music and had thousands of disciples, both male and female, following 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.
Today, what is significant is the 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) oneness 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 body and soul/feeling and thought as part of a continuum rather than dualistically separate one aspect from the other. In the infusions of soul into R&B and of the drum into gospel, 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. Black music is a music of freedom—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 aspects.
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 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.
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 intent on making our lives miserable.
The subversive factor is the ultimate meaning of R&B, and is also the source of why the music is always damned by 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.
The blues asserts that “I’m three times seven / and that makes 21 / ain’t nobody’s bizness / what I do.” The power of popular music is that it affirms 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!
--Kalamu ya Salaam