This post
has been on my mind for a while and I am glad it has finally come to
fruition. I was not planning on writing it this soon into my blogging but I was
on Twitter the other day when an @Africanindiaspo sister I follow wrote
something on her feed that triggered a response from me. Her tweet was about
how she cannot help but enjoy and dance to music she finds derogatory towards
women due to the overwhelming talent of the artists. I was amused by this
sentiment which is shared by many @Africanindiaspo sisters but never owned
up to by @Africanindiaspo brothers who are also often insulted by many songs
they consume.
As I said
this is something I had been thinking about prior to this incident. I
had been reflecting on the lyrics of Western/Caribbean/African black
people's songs, lyrics such as:
1. 'Catch you slipping I'mma kill
you, I aint playing hear what I'm saying homie I aint playing' - Heat - 50
Cent'
2. 'I just got rich took a broke
n****'s chic' - Loyal - Chris Brown
3. 'That's why I f****d your b**** -
Hit 'em up - Tupac
4. 'I stay flossing in that candy
paint, Blowin dank, Sippin drank on 84 swangers, Tearin up the lane' - Flossing
- Mike Jones
5. 'Wanna put my fingers through
your hair, Wrap me up in your legs, And love you till your eyes roll back, I'm
tryna put you to bed, bed, bed' - Bed - J Holiday
6. 'All I want is your waist' - Ur
Waist - Iyanya.
7. 'So f***in inna wata f***in inna
sea f***in inna bushes and f***in inna tree' - Dutty wine - Tony Matterhorn
This list
could be much, much longer but I am sure you catch my drift?
Although,
I have always known that black music/culture to be predominantly geared towards
either promoting violence, taking each other's women, showing off to each
other, the objectification of black women or the mass sexualisation of
young black minds I had never thought of one thing. I had never thought of why
black people embrace this imagery so much whilst white people do not - at least
not to the same extent. After all this very music is available to whites as it
is to blacks. In fact in the past I had even passionately debated with friends
and colleagues about how the powers that control mainstream media are
responsible for projecting certain behaviours onto blacks by constantly
bombarding them with debased music and films as an acceptable way of life
but here I was now asking myself whether it was fair to absolve black/African
people of their part in this mess. To do so would be to suggest that black
people are incompetent/mindless individuals who can be involuntarily programmed
to behave in certain ways would it not?
I know
some may argue that it is typically the instrumentals and catchy
choruses that lead to garbage music being widely accepted by our
brothers and sisters and to a certain extent I think it is a fair thing to
say but even then why does ‘white music’ not promote the same level of
animosity towards your like-skinned brother/sister as black music does? It also
has catchy choruses and well-produced instrumentals but how often do you
hear a white RnB gangsta artist sing about how he wants to take the
significant other/b**** of another white man who is not in a great financial
position today but is probably one of the many that supported him to be
who he is today? How does that even compute? I helped you Chris Brown
to become a celebrity by buying your CDs/MP3s when you were a little boy
with dreams of looking after your single mother and now all of a sudden you are
calling me broke and taking my woman? My @Africanindiaspos is it still the
white man's fault when I continue to buy tickets to go
to Chris' show to listen to him remind me of how horrible my
life is and risk having him take my new girlfriend backstage? I really
have to be under a spell to do that don't I? At this juncture it would be expected
of everybody to hate Chris (lol) or at least boycott him and yet the
opposite happens as artists like him gain even greater followings amongst black.
Also, as a side note, how does a man who hits such high notes as he
does still maintain a respectable thug image? Imagine Justin Timberlake
being embroiled in a thug lifestyle after singing cry me a river. I do not
think his fan base would remain intact and yet we as black folks (although we
may be stirred) do not seem shaken by the behaviours of people like Chris
Brown and Usher.
Heck when
we are not at threat of losing our better halves to Chris Brown and
his other coloured friends (let it
sink in) we are being threatened by the likes of 50 Cent and his G-Unit crew or
whatever it may be these days. Picture a stadium packed with white people
listening to an esteemed white gangsta person and his friends (who
have genuine criminal records) singing to the crowd about how they
will kill them and the crowd dancing away. This is what our brothers and
sisters do, we buy into this culture of provocation and terror. Therefore it
comes as no surprise that at times there are fights and/or shootings
at these live shows as black men kill black men. Notorious B.I.G and Tupac
died over a long-standing feud, T.I and Floyd Mayweather fought over insults,
The Game beat up a man called Glocc 40 and was a victim of physical abuse
himself at the hands of another thug who ended up being murdered. But hey it is
not our fault though, it's them damn white folk and these good beats that have
put weapons in our hands and sown dissension amongst us from the days of
slavery. We have no choice in this. Yes we do not, because if the KKK released
a mixed tape about lynching blacks and how they love slavery we would dance to
it if the chorus was catchy and the instrumentation was ‘popping’. If not then that suggests to me that we (independently-minded
and intelligent blacks) love the behaviours/lifestyles promoted by the songs
sung/rapped by brothers and sisters, not just the beats. Now that is food for
thought. To add, when have you ever seen white celebrities shooting at each
other or fighting in public as I just previously mentioned?
I wish
this culture was restricted to black Americans (who I no longer admire like I
did as an impressionable teen in Africa) but it is also promoted here in the UK
in places like Manchester, London, Birmingham, etc. by some pathetic Grime
musicians and unfortunately this cancer has spread and affected African
music/youth culture too. I have experienced, first-hand, young black men fighting
over territories and school crests in order to live up to the fallacious,
egotistical personas propagated by hip hop music which they know to be
deviant based on their cultural values and religious upbringings. It seems then
that the conscious attraction to this demeaning music subconsciously yields behaviours
consistent with the messages it promotes. And unfortunately we cannot ignore
how over-sexualised we as blacks are made to be from the sleazy R&B music
that also forms part of our culture. Which other race of people has a genre of music they call baby-making music. Which
other group of people has all of its teens rubbing themselves on each other in
the name of dancing (Jamaicans are the worst at doing this)? This
combined with the lack of sexual health education makes for a ticking time bomb
with soaring rates of HIV affecting blacks more than whites. HIV may have been
developed in a lab as some conspiracists believe, but we willingly spread it
amongst ourselves with such music that measures a black man’s manhood not by
his ability to provide for his family or to be the head of his home/clan but by
how many women he can say he has slept with.
My dear @Africanindiaspo
brothers and sisters let us boycott such destructive culture if we desire to be
different. One thing that helped me was to realise, as an adolescent, that most
of the rap music I was being influenced by was being written/produced by
unintelligent thugs who have absolutely no care for the effects their music has
on their own kind. Since then I have discovered more sophisticated genres of
music such as jazz, neo-soul and I have even reverted to my traditional music
heroes such as Oliver Mtukudzi, Leonard Dembo, etc. This music inspires me to
be and to do better in life. It does not seek to rot my moral fibre and neither
does it drive me to kill my brother nor push me to prove my manliness through
infidelity.
‘The ‘demise’ of the black race cannot be entirely blamed on
white supremacy but rather due to the lack of self-responsibility’ -
@Africanindiaspo
