Tracks
kickin it back for a bit for the weekend:
party time riddim for a friday!
supposedly great Satire song about Welfare?
Black Music in America – An Historical Perspective
Over the years, Blacks in America have developed many musical styles, influencing all forms of American popular music…
Spirit has many ways of expressing itself. One of those channels of expression occurs through music; the melodic, harmonic, rhythmic voice of our soul, reflecting years of feelings and experiences. From early times it has been known as a healing force. We used it to record family histories and communicate between communities.
Work songs were used to lessen the harsh conditions of a prison chain gang. Chants were used to accompany all sorts of rituals. Slaves used it to pass on details of an escape. Retail stores use it as an incentive for buying. Without it, the world would not know the pleasure of dance. But music, like other aspects of life, comes in hundreds of different forms. Those forms are interpreted through various styles. Style shapes the structure of the song and how it is performed.
Over the years, Blacks in America have developed many musical styles, influencing all forms of American popular music. The greatest exposures of these styles are manifested in what we hear on the radio, music videos, movies and commercials. What is most interesting, we are quietly going through a black popular musical revolution right before our ears and eyes, and not recognizing it. J.H. Kwabena Nketia, considered the father of Afrikan music, and a master musical researcher, consistently says, “We are always looking into the past while neglecting what is occurring in the present.” So as not to violate that bit of wisdom, we will start our black popular musical journey with the 1940s, concluding with the present musical styles that are causing the present black music revolution.
In the 1940s, swing music was the prevalent style of popular black music of the period, popularized by and given credit to white musicians (Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey). If we had to identify any single American Afrikan individual for swing’s creation, we would have to turn to Fletcher Henderson, who composed the first swing song and wrote Benny Goodman’s charts. But what was to occur in the 1940s has influenced black popular music from that time to eternity.
A black music revolution occurred that would turn the music world on its heels. Progressive musicians of Afrikan descent were getting tired, bored and disgusted with the repetitious rhythmic structure of swing. The music just didn’t say anything to them. It was nice to play to make a living, but the creative and revolting urge was too strong for them to remain in that style of music.
Late at night, after their regular gigs, musicians such as: Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Parker, Thelonious Monk, Charles Christian, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, Max Roach, and so many more, developed what they described as “Be Bop.” This was a musician’s music. It set the stage for those who called themselves master musicians. If a musician stepped on the stage and couldn’t read or play, their feelings would be terribly crushed. This decade saw the great black musical innovator, Thomas A. Dorsey, foster the beginning of a style of music that would later infiltrate black popular music, gospel music.
The 1950s saw American Afrikan popular music reach another plateau. Blues musicians had already migrated from the South to the North, mainly to Chicago. Industrialization was the theme of American business, but also musical instrumentation. Electrical instruments began to reflect what was happening in the larger society. Instruments such as the electric guitar and amplified harmonicas formed the basis for the new bands that became established in the North. Rhythm sections were expanded to include the electric bass, drums, piano, and solo instruments like saxophones and trumpets. Rural blues changed to urban blues, which became rhythm & blues and planted the seeds for rock & roll. We saw this progression created by artists like Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf, Junior Wells and several others. When rhythm & blues became the dominat musical force in the later 1950s, some of the major artists were: Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, The Platters, Johnny Ace, Jesse Belvin, Dinah Washington, among many others. Jazz was slipping in terms of being categorized as popular music, but the most dominant modern jazz album of that decade, and probably any others, was “Kind of Blue,” featuring Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Wynton Kelly, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers and James Cobb. The seeds that were planted earlier for rock & roll, a black popular musical style, began to blossom with artists like Little Richard, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and others. Rock & roll would become the dominant style of music among whites, who also attempted to claim credit for its creation, as they tried to do with jazz and swing.
The 1960s was a decade that brought about huge cultural and social changes. Music did not escape the cultural revolution of this period. Popular black music transformed into message music, popularly known as soul music. This was an era that evolved from a Civil Rights Movement to a Black Consciousness Movement. Many young people of Afrikan descent were changing their allegiances from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Minister Malcolm X. Being black was elevated to being beautiful, rather than ugly and degrading. James Brown captured this theme with his song, ‘Say It Loud, I’m Black And I’m Proud.’ Wearing the natural hair style, Afrikan clothing and changing ones name from what was called a slave name, because the European names given to Afrikans started on the slave plantations, were common occurrences. Many felt that this was the decade of the best black popular music ever made. The late Frankie Crocker, America’s leading disc jockey for many years confirms, “Well, I would say there was more [good black music] in the late 60s then there was throughout all the 70s, with a few exceptions.” Every style of black music was being transformed, which also carried over into the 1970s. People such as Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Ray Charles, The Impressions, The Temptations, Curtis Mayfeild, Otis Redding, The Isley Brothers, Earth Wind & Fire, War, Sly & The Family Stone, Martha & The Vandellas, The Fifth Dimension, The Dells, The Chambers Brothers, Smokey Robinson & The Miracles, The Spinners, Ike & Tina Turner, Jerry Butler, Isaac Hayes, Gladys Knight & the Pips, The Supremes, The Jackson 5, and of course later on, Stevie Wonder, and so many, many more produced such a high quality of black popular music that it will likely never be repeated again. The man who elevated this new style of music to its highest level was none other than the true king of rock, Jimi Hendrix.
White producers developed a style of popular music with a very simplistic, monotonous beat. It became a musical standard in the disco clubs, thus, it became known throughout the country as ‘disco music.’ Donna Summer was crowned the disco queen.
After several revisions and name changes, it finally became known as ‘rap music.’ An entire sub-culture evolved out of the Bronx in New York City. Hip hop was the next musical evolution as bebop was of the 1940s. It was the musical, poetic personal expression news wire that went through every youth community in America, and ultimately the world. Young black America had a music they could relate to and didn’t need adult approval.
Aright so, do you consider Nicki Minaj a Feminist?
Feminist is a strong word first off…
Here’s where I got this from, I was watching a video on Tumblr with Nicki Minaj discussing some gossip issue with two male Radio Hosts and some of the comments were of course in her favor. But one of them that kinda confused me was “She’s so smart and beautiful and perfect and feminist”
Again big word-so, Dare to Agree or Disagree?
Let me just point out a few things, plastic surgery, implants, relies heavily on sex appeal (what would she be if she didn’t/could she have found another way to get big without using it), her lyrics are very sexual/odd (ex: “cum on a cone”), nowhere have I seen anything pro-women in all of this. Her struggle might’ve been memorable but what about the rest of us.
one my fav Michael Jackson songs/video…
watching him live, he puts all of his energy and creativity in his performances, love it.
interview with Miles Davis
[…] “When I’m playing, I’m never through. It’s unfinished. I like to find a place to leave for someone else to finish it. That’s where the high comes in. If I know I left a perfectly good spot for someone else to come in – like, there it is! – then sometimes they don’t come in. Sell out your plans! Specially when you put all that time in.
“When you sing you can go dah-dah-da-daaaa and guys go doom-doom-doom in between that. But I don’t sing. I have to play. When you do it, it seems like forever if you’re not doing it well. When I hear it again I think – damn, I thought that was too long.
“I was talkin’ to Bob Berg [sax in the current band]. I said, Bob, don’t fish around for a tone centre. There’s certain numbers where he just stands up and goes doo-dur-dum- trying to find the key. The key is already there! I say, Bob, when you start playing just try and finish what somebody’s left. Don’t just play till it dies. If he tries to find a tone centre, he’ll just fuck around. Play flatted fifths. I hate flatted fifths.
[…]
“You’d be surprised,” he cautions. “Drummers ape each other. The way every rock’n’roll record sounds like something else but not all together. Everything other drummers play, if you’re playing drums, they all hear. They know how to play everything now. It’s the flood of records. Drums and trumpet and bass … it’s like a big tree of goodies. You can just buy this record and pick this off and get this bass and flap it up! The good drummers don’t play all that in-between stuff, only the bad drummers do to break up the time. Because they can’t lay in the pocket. He has to learn that basic stuff first.
“My drummer’s my nephew. He’s in his 20s. He’ll go buy a jacket like you got – no, a grey one. Grey, black, white – but he won’t do this.”
Davis gestures to his own clothes. Sumptuous black leather trousers, a beautiful red and black wrapover.
“He won’t buy nothing red or yellow – nothing that shines. Me, I like to wear shit that shines. A l’il chain here.
“I look into the mirror, I start bleeding into the woodwork. ‘Cause I’m brown. See this shit here?”
He waves at the soupy brown decor.
“All this shit is jumping out of my colour! I put on all brown last night. I was going to take my wife out to dinner. Shit, I took that shit off, man. It was raining and shit. I said, wait a minute! Let me get this shit off! So I wore a l’il short blazer bolero jacket, put this belt on … I was alright then. I had all that brown on and I said Goddamn!
“That’s the second time I done that in my life. I did it once and walked down 8th Avenue. A brown suit I had made, big shoulders … maybe 35 years ago. I looked in the mirror and didn’t see myself.
“So I stopped and bought me a yellow tie.
“I got shit to cheer me up. Shit I wear after six. Shit I wear after 12. Shit I wear in the day time. Shit I wear while I’m riding my horse.”
[…]
It’s a show of strength when a musician like Davis chooses to treat such tunes as standards. Melody might be dying in pop music: if, in Frank Zappa’s words, it’s all just hamburgers, made for people to dance to, whither a good tune?
“What d’you mean? How’s it gonna die, man? With all those singers?”
Aren’t they singing hooks, not melodies?
“Just hooks? Well, you see,” says Miles, putting down his pen, “the way you’re talkin’, Richard, it’s from listening to too many tapes. And all that shit starts running together. Of course there’s hooks in songs. But there’s still melodies to be played. I got one of them on that tape over there … what’s that thing by Toto, something about Africa? That’s a nice melody! I can play that melody!
“You don’t have to do like Wynton Marsalis and play Stardust and that shit. That’s way back then. Those operas are all old. Tosca and all that shit. Why keep repeating that shit? Why can’t Human Nature be a standard? It fits. A standard fits like a thoroughbred. The melody and everything is just right, and every time you hear it you want to hear it some more. And you leave enough of it to know what you want to hear again. When you hear it again, the same feeling comes over you. Time After Time will be a standard, partly because I played it, partly because Cyndi sang it, but it’s also a good melody. On oboe, accordion, everything.
“I sat down at the piano last night and the first thing that came into my head was dah-dah-dah … All the Things You Are. That little part in there came right out of my fingers, man. That’s the reason the song’s a standard. ‘You are the things I love …’ “Who wrote that?”
Jerome Kern.
“Yeah? That’s a great song. But look at the stuff Paul and the Beatles wrote. A lot of the stuff you’ll hear this year will be standards. Muzak has that shit covered. You go up in the elevator and you hear all that stuff.
“I mean, I can’t play Honeysuckle Rose. Fuck that. I was playing that shit when I was 12. It’s a nice song for a show … there’s gotta be some different stuff, man. You can’t keep playing The Barber of Seville and stuff.”
[…]
“You know I don’t like the word jazz, right?” he says, speaking in what might be a conspiratorial whisper. “You’ve heard that? I hope that’s one of the things you’ve heard. George said about the Copenhagen set – we’re gonna call it contemporary jazz. I said, George – no. We’re not gonna do that to that music. I told him to put ‘new music’ down. I had him swear on some bibles and shit so he won’t change it with his dumb self. That kinda bourgeois shit of his. I’m not gonna jump up and down so I can play with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra. So what?
[…]
Seems like I heard a familiar name back there. Marsalis, the brilliant young Turk, seems to have little but contempt for what he sees as the fraudulence of Miles’s current work. Yet his own work, as dazzling as it is, seems laden with ironic references to Davis’ music of the 60s.
“Sure he’s a good player. I talked to Wynton and, uh … George is gonna fuck him up, man, ‘cause he’s too young to think like an old man. He keeps playing all those things we did in the 60s, and he’s a young man. He should take a step and stretch out a little bit. That stuff we played when Coltrane was with us, that kind of modal thing … he’s too young to stick to that. And George Wein’s VSOP – he made that up because he thought I was coming back and playing with them. If I’d gone with that, look where I’d’ve ended up – like him, playing that same shit. Nobody wants to hear that. I know, I went through it.”
Even so, going through the Davis canon reveals several directions left tantalisingly unfulfilled. Most notably, the unfathomable ESP LP from 1965: severe, abstruse, full of weird chimes at midnight. But Miles disdains the impulse. He touches his lower lip, which looks bruised and wounded from the decades of hard metal pressed on to it.
“These things make critics comfortable because they know exactly what that is. They can wake up drunk and review it and they know exactly what it is –well, it sounds like Miles and Coltrane in the 60s and that guy plays like Herbie Hancock – it’s the same fucking thing. I don’t wanna hear that with my own ears.
“There’s a lot of beautiful ballads besides all those. My Funny Valentine, it’s beautiful, but it’s been done to death. I’d rather play something that you can learn and like that you don’t know. I don’t want people to know what I am.”
He drops his voice, if that’s possible, to an even lower pitch.
“I just don’t like to think back to those days. Reminds me of some old bitches I used to know.”
I still think that the popular song is in decline as a player’s vehicle. Miles could prise the most melancholy emotions from Sinatra tunes like It Never Entered My Mind – and that was mainstream stuff. Maybe today isn’t on that level. Will Prince still be played when his time’s up?
“You can play Purple Rain. That’ll be played. If I say, Prince, write something for me, he’ll write for me. When he writes for himself, he’ll write for himself. When things are written for people, like dancers, they say I’ll go and jump in that corner with a red suit on and feathers. Composer’ll say, OK. A reason for writing music makes another style, sometimes. Firebird Suite. Red Shoes. That’s a great movie, remember that movie? Dancers make styles, they wear shit that they really need. Aerobics. New music is coming out of that because they like that tempo.
“Space music’d be really something … but they don’t have no gravity up there. You couldn’t have no downbeat!
“Gil told me once, the only reason a chord will sound wrong is with the next chord. No such thing as a clinker.”
But one requires a selective genius to make sense of that choice.
“It’s just sound. One sound leads to another.”
[…]
When he gets into reminiscing, Miles leafs through years as if it were all some vast scrapbook he can turn to at a moment’s notice. Follow some of this.
“That was one of Charlie Parker’s styles, because his father was a tap dancer. Ba-ba-bip da-dah-d’n-da dee-da-dee-deh – like tap dancers dance! That rhythm, you hadn’t heard no shit like that! Hey, you got it on that tape! Give it to me so I can put something to that rhythm!
“And Bird played like that. Nobody wrote like that before. The first time they saw the music to Moose the Mooche – before that Stravinsky and Alban Berg was the hardest thing. Lucky Thompson was saying – what? What is – ? The notation! Everybody had to learn that.
“That was one style. Sonny and I used to play that style. Now Sonny’s the only one playing it, only one who could. And me.
“Coltrane could do it. He started with a style imitating Eddie Lockjaw Davis. But he was something else. People don’t know it but it took him a long time. I was going with a girl who was an antique dealer in France. She gave this soprano sax to me and I gave it to Coltrane. I gave that thing to Trane, man, and it’s probably still in his hand. He probably died with it in his mouth! He never did take that thing out of his mouth.
“Then I gave him some progressions. I said, Sonny – I mean, Trane. I had them both in the band but I have no tapes of that band, shit. We had this thing by Khatchaturian – you know Rachmaninoff’s modulations and stuff like that, three or four keys? I gave him a tone centre of E natural and said, you can play F, G minor, E minor triad, C triad, all these chords … and he’d play all of them. In two bars. In that order, and then in a different order.
“I gave him all these little things, like – play this for me, Trane. And it’d sound like – blablablablublurp…. that’s the way it sounds, if you play without stopping you sound like Coltrane. But you have to be doing something. It has to fit the chord, the day, the weather and everything.”
Wasn’t there a time when Coltrane thought he must have played everything?
“You would say that, you’re not Coltrane! He was a very greedy man. Bird was, too. When I was 17,18, my allowance was like $40 a week. My wife would cook something, a little cornbread, and I’d say to Bird, Come on downstairs and eat. And he would eat all of the cornbread! He would sit down and leave a little piece like that and then leave! Did that a couple of times and I said, Fuck Bird! After a couple of times I didn’t leave him anything to gobble up.
“Like when Bird died. They asked me to say something about Bird. I said, Man, if I said something about Bird, you wouldn’t believe it. Don’t ask me that! He was a big hog. A pig. No such thing as no with him. And Trane. And Sonny. Only three people I knew like that. And Dizzy, when he was young. I suppose geniuses are like that.
“Trane would find a note he liked and run all kinds of chords on it. But he was a big hog. I seen him with a whole ounce of dope once, the dope was spilling over and he wouldn’t give it to nobody. So much that it was running all over everything! Guys would ask him for some, he’d say no.”
Stories, stories – maybe he embellishes, but who knows? Will we ever see his memoirs?
“My wife keeps asking me to do that,” he says, almost smiling. “I say, Cicely, I can’t tell them things. I can tell you about Coltrane, but I can’t tell you about the women.
“Bird – that’s why we called him that, he used to squeak on reed a lot – and Trane had the same trouble. When I first recorded Trane, the guy from the record company, said, Miles, who is that out there playing saxophone? I said, man, just record the shit. You want us to play, we’ll play, if not we’ll go home. I mean, Trane was a big thing to be dropping on people! That was hard shit to just think of! […]
one of the reasons why I really love Miles is, he experimented with different sounds and styles.
This is,
hugs for miles
there’s a difference between Dancehall and Reggae music.
A common misconception here in America amongst all folk of color and not…is that the music that comes from the islands, artists like Sean Paul, TOK, Rupee, Beenie Man, Patricia Roberts, Bob Marley, Lady Saw etc. That all of them fall under Reggae.
Not True.
Here are the different genres folks can’t seem to classify correctly: Reggae, Dancehall, Soca, Soca Chutney, Ska. They vary between origin, musical composition and how they came about.
From Yahoo answers I’ve found a way to describe Reggae and Dancehall (similar, Dancehall’s roots lie in Reggae but there is a variation between the two that’s very distinct):
Reggae music stems from the Rastafarian culture and from the drum pan sound and ska horns of post WW2. This style of music was made famous by the late Bob Marley as well as many others such as Jimmy Cliff, Peter Tosh and Burning Spear. This is what you would consider ‘roots’ reggae because it is derived from the roots of the Rastafarian culture. Dub music, which is a different reggae style comprised of strickly instrumentals and looped samples over a continuous beat, also came from this era. Augustus Pablo and King Tubby are two of the most well known dub artists. Modern dancehall reggae, which is basically reggae dance music, is a pretty broad spectrum of reggae and is what makes up the majority of reggae hits these days. The most influential dancehall artist (arguably) from the early days is Super Cat. Many soon followed or changed their ‘roots’ sound to a more upbeat sound in order to give the young ‘dancehall’ folks something to skank (dance) to.
since it is summer time all I can really think of is the amount of Soca Carnival Dancehall Reggae life I am missing…due to college life brokeness cannot afford to go the islands and jump and wave there.
So I shall jump and wave at home. Here’s some old school Soca.
The truth in Kanye’s anti-prison rapThe backdrop to Kanye West’s “Saturday Night Live” performance was a lie. Projected behind the rapper, as he let loose with two rage-filled and politically fueled tracks, were the words “Not For Sale.”
Yeezy wouldn’t have graced the set if he wasn’t hawking a soon-to-be released LP. But his incendiary performance was peppered with damning truths: Angry and pointed condemnations of institutional racism and the prison industrial complex, which disproportionately jails young men of color to fill state budget holes and enrich private corporations.
In the final verse of “New Slaves,” a track released Friday with the coordinated projection of a video on 66 buildings worldwide, and the second performance in his “SNL” set, West raps:
Meanwhile the DEA
Teamed up with the CCA
They tryn’a lock niggas up
They tryn’a make new slaves
See that’s that private owned prison
Get your piece todayCondensed and reduced to flow in rhyming verse, West’s lyrics smack of the conspiratorial. But he is correct: The War on Drugs, abetted by and fueling the private prison industry, currently serves to incarcerate hundreds of thousands of black men in the United States, who provide dirt-cheap labor. Various industries — from call centers to weapons manufacturers to retail companies — rely on prison labor. Private prisons pay inmate workers as little as 25 cents an hour; prisoners who refuse to work are regularly held in isolation. These are the de facto “new slaves” of the prison industrial complex. The CCA (the Corrections Corp of America) is one of two major private prison corporations (along with the GEO Group) that share in a market worth $70 billion.
And West’s implication that the CCA and the DEA are “tryn’a” lock up black people, leaving racist intentionality aside, is supported by troubling statistics. While the entire U.S. population is only 13.6 percent black, 40 percent of its vast prison population (over 2.5 million) is black. In 2010, black males were incarcerated at the rate of 4,347 inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents of the same race and gender, compared to 678 inmates per 100,000 for white males. The disparities are striking, especially when the majority of those held in U.S. prisons are guilty of minor drug offenses. This brings us to Kanye’s reference to the DEA.
As attorney and author John W. Whitehead pointed out in a HuffPo comment piece last year, states specifically opted to make sentencing laws for minor drug offenses harsh in order to fill private prisons — prisons which promised to fill gaping holes in state budgets:
[W]ith an eye toward increasing its bottom line, CCA has floated a proposal to prison officials in 48 states offering to buy and manage public prisons at a substantial cost savings to the states. In exchange, and here’s the kicker, the prisons would have to contain at least 1,000 beds and states would have agree to maintain a 90 percent occupancy rate in the privately run prisons for at least 20 years. The problem with this scenario, as Roger Werholtz, former Kansas secretary of corrections, recognizes is that while states may be tempted by the quick infusion of cash, they “would be obligated to maintain these (occupancy) rates and subtle pressure would be applied to make sentencing laws more severe with a clear intent to drive up the population.” Unfortunately, that’s exactly what has happened. Among the laws aimed at increasing the prison population and growing the profit margins of special interest corporations like CCA are three-strike laws (mandating sentences of 25 years to life for multiple felony convictions) and “truth-in-sentencing” legislation (mandating that those sentenced to prison serve most or all of their time).
As has been well-documented, young black men are disproportionately targeted by police for marijuana arrests. In New York City, for example, nearly 90 percent of the people arrested for marijuana possession are blacks and Latinos. The logic is simple: If states rely on minor drug arrests to fill privately run prisons, and young black men are targeted in minor drug arrests, then states rely on young black men to fill private prisons.
Or, as Yeezy put it: “See that’s that private owned prison/Get your piece today.”
