Topic: Those “Muddy Root” Sounds we call Jazz Entry 3, Part 3 in the Series

Title: Without the Mud the Roots wouldn’t be Grounded: Hip Hop’s Rose that Grew from Concrete as an outreaching Metaphor for Urban Blues Part 1

Video Inspired By: The Spirituals are the Blues, A New Cultural Expression of African Philosophy (Episode #055)

(LINK) https://youtu.be/HxqeF04YpCg

As I recounted in the first part to this Entry series, when listening to Jazz for the first time in decades, my initial reaction was to reject it, but over time I began to soothe to it, I began to desire it and my Soul began to yearn for it. Emotionally, spiritually and mentally; Jazz in its many tributaries became a soundtrack back dropping my soulful growth. Having spent my teenage and early adult years listening to rap, Hip Hop and urban pop music mostly (there are difference between the three music styles; Hip Hop is more innovative, more structural, more developed and more culturally attuned; rap music is purely produced for the rhyme-of-it-all, it should have substance but doesn’t always contain much and is usually built around demonstrating ones skill-set; urban music is more formulaic, it lacks depth, overly relies on basic music concepts which are degraded using synthetic noise producers or instruments and it is forgettable – but I digress); having spent those years listening to various iterations of those music styles as well as some alternative rock music, techno music and what passed as new gospel music (this later style I abandoned for more traditional gospel music rather quickly) Jazz was an afterthought, though I did frequently listen to NPR and PBS programs featuring acoustic artists, but rarely did they ever feature Jazz artists on those programs – again, but I digress. Baba T’Shaka, through his lectures interweaving of Jazz as a philosophical foundation, encouraged me to think about Jazz more fluidly as a cultural touchstone whereupon contact with it encourages lifeblood for our people to flow throughout the community cleansing us from deadened senses and revitalizing us for our continued journey towards our liberation.

With this in mind I want you to think with me about the above lecture title. At some point in the future I will utilize some of the brilliant content Baba T’Shaka produced in this lecture for the structure to some other Articles I will write, but for now I want you to think with me on the title. In the foundational cornerstone lecture “The Spiritual Blues”, Baba T’Shaka remarks that Hip Hop is the Urban Blues; I think he is correct though I would add a couple points. The first point I would add is for our people these are not simply Urban Blues, but Ghetto Blues; the distinction is important since Hip Hop artists in the past have referred to the Industrial wasteland where our hoods reside as a pen where our people were corralled for surveillance and extermination purposes. This view is about 30 years old as of this writing but it may not be too far off from our current reality considering where this country is moving. The second point I would add is the Urban Blues label should involve one more word, “Uprooted”. Our placement in the Urban environment was the result from the Great Migration, during that decades long relocation of our people from our Ancestral homeland in the Southern United States to the North and Midwest Regions, we left behind our carefully constructed and curated cultural networks, networks Baba T’Shaka acknowledges constantly were the primary reason we survived enslavement; for the chaotic reality distorting concrete mazes called cities where our networks had little to no basis for reconstruction. As Dr. King pointed out in 1967, the disruption of life by city dwelling made cultural gatherings for constructive purposes impossible since they were seen as short bursts of undirected activity without the possibility of sustaining themselves (he was speaking about the future for the Civil Rights Movement). With these networks left behind, new formations had to be developed to keep together the structures those networks had nourished; unfortunately history tells us the actions necessary to carry out this work were not easily produced. The result was the slow fragmentation of the community, it’s societies, its networks and finally, the family structure at its center. This is why I believe the Urban Blues are in fact the Uprooted Urban Blues or even the Uprooted Blues (this latter label, “Uprooted Blues” would do much to explain the current state of music in the Black Community since our music has always been connected to our cultural, social and Ancestral intelligences; with these intelligences heavily relying on the aforementioned networks, their straining, breaking or dissolution would have a broad impact on those tributaries projecting from them).

This leads me to why I am focusing on the title alone and not it’s content (just yet). The idea captured in it is that our – let me stress OUR – creative processes that produce something so extraordinary as musical genius, musical innovation and the dynamics in musical soul power; can be utilized more broadly to understand our world. This fact is not something new to us; since it lives in us, but its statement is relatively new to our experience here in the Maafa. Had I not been exposed to this concept, to say nothing of the deep wellspring of Dr. T’Shaka’s lectures detailing it; what you read in the two previous paragraphs might have still been written in some form, but not in that form. For those who are reading this, please innergrasp the significance of knowing your ability to create this art form holds in it an ability to project into reality the essence from a system that has been nurtured and protected through this Maafa; it is a system that is philosophical and gospelic, it is a system that marries the ancient to the modern and the modern to the unforeseen (future), it is a system that is unstructured but concrete in its orientation. I believe Baba T’Shaka’s long awaited book “Sba” will prove these statements as true. As our people move into a period when a conscious choice between our culture and the Eurocentric culture surrounding and attempting to possess us, will have to be made; so too, will a choice to continue forward with or without reconnecting to these networks.

In the next installment for this article, I will explain the connection between the “Muddy Roots” called Jazz, the “Urban Blues” and the Rose that Grew from Concrete, I think you probably know where I am going with this, but. . . .until next time.