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A brief mid-pandemic reflection to share today:
February 2021, for most of us terrestrials, is a ball of confusion, especially here in the United states.
You know the song that Motown group called the Temptations sang in the 1970s? It was a hit with us teenagers and young adults. We who were hip called it Psychedelic Soul! . . .RIGHT ON, RIGHT ON
Cautionary lyrics were musically powered by Detroit session musicians The Funk Brothers band whose pulsing baseline, congas punctuating the beat, complimented brass and horns accenting hooks, wailing electric guitar, strings flowing a smooth rhythmic groove adding to the concrescence. The song painted a sound tapestry of our inner angst. "Ball of Confusion, That's What The World Is Today." We stomped the dance floor for hours on a sweaty Friday night trying to boogie away our frustrations. This was music as social catharsis against the unrelenting pressures of hidden deterioration.
And we all seemed unable to, like today, rarely rage against and disentangle ourselves from negative oppositional cultural filters distorting our reflection. Coded discourse embedded in our music by conscious musicians (woke musicians in today's terminology) was only one way of pushing back against the covert pungent, sticky, socio-political funk of it all.
Amiri Baraka is credited with coining the phrase the changing same.
"In his 1966 essay The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music), music critic Amiri Baraka (then known as LeRoi Jones) wrote, “We are bodies responding differently, a (total) force, like against you. You react to push it, re-create it. Resist it. It is the opposite pressure producing (in this case) the sound, the music”1
Seems like some of us old folks are right here again, at the changing same life depot, waiting. It feels uncomfortably like the 1970s. Echoing in the air are the haunting words of the original question/song asked by Marvin Gaye whose work survives his troubled life: What's Going On?
We were the emerging 1960s generation of change.
Some of us began to turn inward for spiritual strength and moral growth. We knew that we needed more than material wealth if we were gonna reshape the world! We did much work then. We still are working with today's young world changers. We let them know despite media hype...THIS WORLD CHANGING WORK IS ONGOING.
In 2020, we still search for a a flicker of ethical vibrancy; we stand with this generation's world changers struggling for spiritual and moral strength during this Pandemic.
Hopefully today's positive, globally minded youth will continue in coalition, seeking what to do and how to do it, to bring light that glows into a faceless, looming, darkness.
May God grant us strength,
Delores Fisher
END NOTES
1. https://timeline.com/the-cricket-magazine-politicized-black-music-85e971395195
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