| One thing that fascinates me about both Rammellzee and Tricky is the deep bitterness they invoke in their work to make their ideas more valid. Is there any way that African culture can deal with a more positive aspect of how the culture is evolving? Look at Brazil where they have people like Carlinhos Brown, an artist based in Salvador, Bahia, who I consider to be the Brazilian Rammellzee, but he teaches kids about drum patterns, and yes, he wears weird costumes, and yes he has a whole "futuristic" angle to what he does: but it's based maybe on a more dynamic and intriguing engagement with Afro-Diasporic values of cultural reconstruction. One angle leads to looking at the past as a source of nihilistic rage (lots of psychology there on the misogyny in hip-hop and alot of other music traditions), and the other looks to the past as a way of seeking fragments that heal and allot space for anger and rage, but in a constructive engagement. It's a nebulous world, but music has been a way to navigate the terrain.
In vodoun it's Petro versus Rada, which to me, not only represents bi-polar aspects rage and psychological pain, but how communities heal in the face of total atomization. Hip-hip is the american equivalent of the hard-core rage side of vodoun, cybernetically extended, but I think that it's fascination with minimalism (let's not forget that minimalism was a NYC tradition amongst art composers like Steve Reich and Phillip Glass--what these composers were doing in the same tradition of Débussy and the impressionist compers in France who included asian and african compositional techniques into their styles at the turn of the century), were looking at a way of incorporating other styles into the western classical canon--the parallel with hip-hop as a successor to dub and disco, and drum n bass as a successor to hip-hop is pretty obvious: minimalism uses music as kind of "lego block" process or a kind of additive synthesis (this is what Arthur Jafa was hinting at in Tim Hasslett's quotation). Sometimes I think about the 1979 incident in chicago where a Dj named Steve Dahl set fire to a whole bunch of Saturday Nite Fever records in an arena called "Comiskey Park" and the burning fragments of vinyl rained down over the attending crowd. It was an anti-disco rally, and as the records burned, the chant "disco sucks" rang through the air like a faint echo of the rallies in Third Reich Europe during the 40's: libidinization, repression, dispersion: a new entropy heat death... the fragments of burning vinyl, a new music spectrally drifting through the tiers of the arena, as repressed white american's chanted "disco sucks."
The music of "trance" whether it's in the form of Moroccan jajouka or the drum "casse" (the break) in intense drumming in vodoun that summons down the spirits, gets a very weird remix in American culture because of these variable. Hip-hop is the music of the break. It focuses on isolating the break, extending, shredding it down to its core components. It is minimalism writ sonically. Maybe that's where Warhol's idea of making paintings has its resonance in the studio process of recycling drum beats and patterns of sounds. Move from the painting studio to the music and film studio, and it's all syntax. That's why I mentioned the linkage between Hype Williams' filmic representations of Busta Rhymes (esp. "Put Your hands Where I could See") and Harry Smith's film scores for the works of Mingus and Monk. Pop epistemology folks...
The difference between Rammellzee/Tricky mindset and people like me or Carlinhos Brown, Saul Williams, Nalo Hopkinson, and Kodwo Eshun, is the sense of looking to a future where different values can co-exist within a dynamic and relatively positive framework. Maybe this is why more "gangsta stuff" (a la Rammellzee on the art tip, or Tricky and RZA's new Bobby Digital persona) is easily accessible to white audiences while bridging some sort of wish fulfilment in black audiences as well. It's easily containable, but like Pete Rock and CL Smooth said a while ago, "it's all about ghettoes of the mind." There's a movie I did the score to called Slam that's set in the jails of Washington D.C., the city that I'm from. An M.C. (played by Saul Williams) rhymes his way out of a situation that is a false construct (it's synopsizing alot by the way, 'cause to describe the movie in full detail, well... that's another post), by making the other in-mates realize that the structure of the jails is in their minds as a reflection of a reality built as a containment device--D.C. on the real has a statistic of something like 50% of the African American males between the ages of 18 and 35 are either in jail or on parole. It is ultra hardcore. The narrative crucible of jails, to me, is parallel to the whole sense of the middle passage. It's a fire that forges a very strange mettle.
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