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| "Black Power" (2008)--Hank Willis Thomas |
Turn Up the Dial? The Cultural Values of Black Youth Culture
by Bill Banfield | special to NewBlackMan
“In advanced societies, it is not race politicians or rights leaders who create the new ideas and new images of life...that role belongs to the artists and intellectuals of each generation.”—Harold Cruse
“I would send words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the humanity for life that gnaws in us all, keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inescapable human.”—Richard Wright
“Music is supposed to inspire, so how come we ain't getting no higher?”—Lauryn Hill
Live a bit and you see a lot. The sea of identity signifiers and mega cultural currency today has created a wave of youth style, images, worldviews that leave many of us wondering if our own plainness can stand the weight of its loneliness, back in the day-ness, against the constructed, projected new normalcy of today's more common expressions.
The Main Theme
The permanence of internet, media saturation of youth commercial culture many times has us by the proverbial throat, strangled and coughing up lots of blood even. I raise this idea before us; Who turns it Up, Down, and Back, Values on The Cultural Dial?, to share perspectives from the creative, and process part of the equation that allows us equally to more critically examine the meaning and the mattering of commercial music products, and entertainment in today's marketplace. What prompted this essay was the piece “What’s Killing Our Culture? It’s Not the Mainstream and Tight Jeans,” by clinical psychologist Adia McClellan Winfrey, recently published at NewBlackMan (in Exile), which addresses our mis-placed blame on hip hop for tight and baggy jeans among other things.
As to an option for how to alter aspects of popular youth culture, any of us older people, do not really matter. I say, let the hip hop community, entertainers, speak about their own fast flight, falls, failures, potential refining and set the new fabulous finishing and continuum lines, and even meaning and values. The problem I have with the "hip hop bandwagon cultural criticism," is it lacks consideration of creative process. Books and media apparati are many times just " hot topic moments." Scholarship about culture and entertainment needs to be substantive and sustainable, but that too, informs and is interested in the art forms and forums of music and creative expression and culture.
I read many cultural critic opinions riding high on the waves of selective advocacy for all hip hop culture. It tires me and bores because too many of these commentaries even if they are from Dr. Somebody who has a book out or teaches a class in a college, are re-acting far too late actually. There are no ripe ready apologies for our current cultural participation in foolishness, whether it's the media, young people or inept artistry that gets projected as the last act or song standing.
The Dissonant Note
As to baggy jeans, especially the ones that hang so low you can see underwear, I'm sorry, I must say, I live in Urban America. I ride the public train everyday. Anyone who still tries to defend pants hanging down, skin busting out from everywhere anger, aggravation, youth angst and anxiety, popular culture and the "mainstream" hip hop swag, and stay blind to the weight of cultural chaos on our young people, has their head in wholes. We all need to “Wake Up” and not defend the cultural spirals we see ourselves in, the old and the young, and in many cases our communities are as much the problem as the media or the marketplace that provides the silent support for so much of destructive culture.
Let's be clear, when anyone speaks about problematic aspects of contemporary music culture, they are not talking about being loud, loose or unladylike like. Hip Hop is Black music culture, but that's not what people are screaming about. Hip Hop didn't create any of this madness, it, just like all the other entertainment voices, is stuck carrying it. Today, the stuff we have at our fingertips is too much and over the top. It's a saturated shelf of things that we race to, and we pull all the stuff down off the shelf onto ourselves, and we are simply left digging through the piles.
Billy Gorgin of the Smashing Pumpkins recently stated that, "Modem technology, media, has lowered, degraded the price point...We've lost the graduated rational decision of what music is worth. Music and popular culture have become a service culture...People no longer trust the price point you are giving them." I think this also leaves people desensitized and simply looking for any old thing that's the next thing to look at. Further, I think neither do they really value music, entertainment as much because music, in particular has been diminished to a commodified, media- fed, disposal, "onto the next flavor of the month thing." And so no wonder today it's all wild and free style with no common sense of judgment, value, what's good, in poor taste or acceptable-not.
Too many of our debates are fueled and informed by "misguided popular/ media cultural hot air," which provides very little about the matters, the meaning, the practice nor the process of music making or other sustainable and meaningful cultural expressions. Media heads only know how music and entertainment are measured and weighed commercially on the mainstream market scale. Time to allow the artists, educators, thinkers and practitioners in music and arts to speak out and about what drives and determines contemporary musical culture and entertainment art.
Today's mainstream popular trends such as piercing, tattoos, gold teeth, weaves, underwear showing and hot tight jeans, or what some non-musician producer thinks in participation with the mainstream entertainment and media monster, have very much to do with where we are mega-culturally. This poison partnership in terms of stylistic tenants of everyday expressive culture, also has very little to do with where we can be going really. Largely, because these entertainment figures don't create culture, they simply manufacture a mess of commercially saturated pop.
Don't misread me on this. Every generation creates their own beloved pop- youth culture, and it's never loved nor appreciated fully by older people or cultural snobs. I am as well not saying popular culture needs to save the world in every song. Popular Culture is supposed to be fun, young and rebellious too. That is not what I am taking about here. There is vibrant, relevant contemporary popular culture and expression and there is trash, and every generation knows the difference. The problem is today we hear, value less the articulation of a cultural critique and challenge of the pop status quo by those young citizens whose right it is to say and demand more.
When I feel myself slipping into passing judgment or being and old fart, I shake myself first. Now that I have slapped myself; I am awake, but the nightmare we walk in daily is that we have become complacent and lowered our humanity codes to such a low level as citizens and consumers, that everything now is ok, and ushered in under the baseless excuse of "free speech', "youth culture, " entertainment value," "keeping it real," or "everything is a party," Really? Really? We need to Wake up and do a Michael Jackson and look in the mirror.
One of the points I want to raise which could be incorrect, is that not enough is being brought to the table from a critical creative perspective. In other words, my concern, is that in terms of the impact of popular culture on shaping our current cultural dynamics, we are not holding creative people accountable. We are simply talking about the commercial after products and their measure as commodities. There is little talk about the intrinsic meaning, worth, or the process of creative expression which bears the weight of and impact of commerciality, and yet needs to redefine commerciality.
And so we spin all these post causative reasonings, and more time in my way of thinking should be exploring critically why we accept the decline of our mega- societal values, a lessening of craft, education. We clearly have a weakened industry infrastructure that is blindly looked to for manufacturing art, culture, entertainment with value. The industry and media are "pop pimps" and are clearly bereft of art, culture, music and entertainment value. So this is the reason too many of our contemporary popular expressions hang in front of us, so empty and thinly conceptualized.
Again, this is a sharing of the creative, and process part of the equation that allows us to more thoroughly question commercial music product in the marketplace. For example, there are few critical rebellious commercial/ popular voices today that matter. Bob Dylan was a voice. Bessie Smith was a voice. Woody Guthrie was, Tupac was, Green Day, Arrested Development, and both John Legend and Alicia Keys are powerful meaning griots in the Donny Hathaway, Nina Simone song tradition. These are a few examples of commercial artists who were not in revolt from fringes, but actively invested in mainstream popular messages and materials.
Our times lack courage. People are content to let too much slide, so we all settle for less, and silence becomes comfortable and expected.
I love the movie, The Matrix. Morpheus asks Neal: “Do you believe in fate Neal? Neal; “No.” “Why not?,” Morpheus asks. Neal responds,” Because I don’t like the idea that I’m not in control of my life.” Morpheus;” I Know exactly what you mean.” He continues, “ What you know, you can’t explain, but you feel it. When you go to work, to church, when you pay your taxes. …You can’t explain it, like a splinter in your mind driving you mad… It’s the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth… That you are a slave…born into a prison for your mind.” Morpheus offers two pills, and Neal takes the pill for truth.
Take the red pill people!
Black Music Matters
In specific historical real terms with Black music, it has always mattered from many angles. It mattered socially, culturally, historically, artistically. What song in rotation at this moment today can anyone reading this name, that matters artistically, socially, historically and aesthetically? You get my point. I remember as a youngster hearing pride songs, spiritual songs, political songs, funky shake your butt songs, silly songs and serious songs, and Oh yes, Love songs. It all mattered, and it all shaped me. People it seemed until very recently, expected to hear a broader range of ideas going on, and they expected this too from young artistry. Of course there is the internet, and it has definitely provided options other than mainstream madness.
Black Music Means
The music in every period I remember always mattered and meant things. "I Love Rock and Roll," "Born In The USA," "The Message" ( “It's Like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder..."). Popular culture has got to mean something again, and in that shared value moment, there is a sustainable reckoning of sorting worthwhile entertainment and things to compare, and so the buying public can distinguish and make better choices, because they care about what the purchase means, and how it matters to them. That's a conscious choice, not just another sales selection. When we become less defined by complacency and cultural sleep walking we will re- start a fresh way towards cultural re- definitions.
Final Cadences and Coda
So as McClellan Winfrey asked, "What’s Killing Our Culture?," I would answer that again by saying, our lack of true cultural definition, and our inability to know how to " dial up" on the cultural codes. Artists begin making expression with intrinsic value, given gifts and earned skills, but now they are being asked to compromise that for a growing need of market stupidity that benefits empty capitalism, all for the sake of satisfying someone's broken attention span. The "Big bucks pop farms" (American Idol, Dance America, America's Got Talent, The Voice, Duets) as well encourage empty materialism and fast fancy fame that produces nothing substantive nor lasting.
We need a new standard, the marketplace for all kinds of creative entertainment from music to film and TV to electronic games to the way our news and media information is presented to us. We must write the new maps, and convert back again the disillusioned. That's the charge in arts today, media and entertainment. We are vying for peoples attention span, that’s the reality. But we have to give them something that holds their attention a little longer, and in that milli-second of longer, you have to inject them with something that's going to make a difference in their experiences. People are open to be transformed into someone who did not purchase or watch or listen to just another any old thing, but lives now being made- over by something, music or other forms that have "intrinsic- worth value" because of its "believed in and experienced worth".
I believe the formula, especially for popular music, is the long proven model of a good song, great singing, carried in great musician based creative music that lives beyond the next market spin. We need to stand up, realize what time it is really, and partner with she who turns on the values on the cultural dial, but the principle hands on that dial must be the informed and creatively dynamic youth.
1. So in short, dial up, substantive sustainable values that matter.
2. Dial up on real music and culture traditions not mechanized unoriginal artists and ideas.
3. Dial up on the visibility of critical thinking voices that see, speak and send the culture forward, not downward.
4. Demand excellence at every level, stand up against trash and stupid stuff.
5. Encourage, love, love, love, support and challenge every young person we see and inspire them all to ask the deeper question, what kind of human being am I going to be? What change, difference, inspiration can I contribute to in all I do?
No young person should have to settle for stupidity and should be boldly encouraged to turn up the cultural dials in all directions.
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Dr. Bill Banfield is a musician, teacher, author Director of Africana Studies Music and Society/ Africana Studies Center, Berklee College of Music, Boston.
