Continuing a conversation from EP142, Derek looks at the cultural damage done when musicians co-opt musical styles to promote their own propaganda, which is often at odds with the social struggles of the oppressed class that created the music.
After briefly investigating the history of reggae through the lens of indentured servants from India, he discusses artists using two genres—reggae and hip-hop—in such a way that strips the original intention of the music of all value.
-- -- --
Support us on Patreon
Pre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada
Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | Julian
Original music by EarthRise SoundSystem
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Across the long distance of a clear Atlantic Ocean, the Blundell Hunter lands on the shore of Old Harbor, Jamaica.
The ship was island hopping to drop off cargo, indentured servants from India to the Clarendon Plantation.
261 Indians set foot on island soil for the first time, and never again would Jamaica be the same.
An article in the Falmouth Post stated that these Indians were immediately embraced by local Africans, themselves ancestors of men and women transported across the same ocean during slave trades.
As history tells it, the oppressed became fast friends.
So backtrack a little bit.
In 1834, slavery had ended, and the former slaves were offered a six-year apprenticeship where they would basically be indentured servants.
Having nothing to their name, having been stripped of identity, what choice did they have to go from earning nothing to earning next to nothing?
And as those six years ended, many stayed on those farms because they just had nowhere to turn.
Yet some groups of freed slaves began forming what would eventually become Nyabinghi communities, living from the soil and sun the way their ancestors had, reconnecting with the land and tossing aside the forced religion of their keepers.
And so, the former slave masters needed more cheap labor.
British-controlled India became a target.
So, employed for a 54-hour work week, these Indians were promised work on tea farms.
But they were lied to.
After arriving on the island, having signed a contract making them indebted to work, they were forced to toil on coffee and sugar plantations.
Now neither Indians or Africans were fully people in the political sense of the word, so their camaraderie isn't that surprising.
There was a philosophical connection anyway.
Both of these cultures were the product of natural theologies, a fact that would go on to help define the great revival movement on the island in the 1860s, and 70 years later, the Rastafari movement.
Today, rosters are known globally in large part due to a dreadlocked, pot-smoking vocalist named Bob Marley.
Few images have made an impact as broad and important to liberation movements around the world as this warrior named Nesta, and his music continues to be shared, explored, loved, and remixed.
Yet few people realize the influence that India had on the movement behind the man, or how the merging of cultures creates new forms of art and culture.
What Indians brought with them were practices like locking hair, which would eventually become the defining feature of Rastafarians, known as dreadlocks, They shared particular preparations of vegetarian food, which would inspire the practice of Ital cooking.
And of course, they brought a peculiar herb that made everyone's head a little bit funny.
The Indian cold drink, known as tandi, gave Jamaicans their first taste of ganja.
Of course, Africans have their own heritage to point back to, especially its affinity toward Ethiopia thanks to Haile Selassie.
Yet the Nyabingian and later Rastafarian cultures, using Indian objects and ideas, like the notion of karma, which was particularly appealing to African spirituality, they would resist their oppressor.
The men who had stolen their forefathers from their land, tortured and often murdered them and raped their women, and in many ways, they continue to resist today.
It is of this history, and this struggle, that reggae music was born.
The struggle against oppression is the origin story of virtually every folk music on the planet.
This is true for flamenco, balkan brass music, fado, tango, gnawa, reggae, and of course all black American forms from jazz and gospel and rock to soul and hip hop.
And in every case, at some point in its musical history, the oppressor class has co-opted the oppressed's music.
In Spain, castanets were added as flamenco was shuffled into cafes to become flashier and less reliant on the gitano, the soul-rending cry that is the foundation of that musical form.
The same has been true of every black form of music in America, from soul-rending cry to capitalist derivative.
This is also true of any genre of foreign music that gains mainstream attention in America, as well as reggae.
Or, specific to today's discussion, White Reggae.
Now let me pause for an important distinction.
The term appropriation is overused and often incorrect.
I spent 10 years of my life as an international music journalist.
I interviewed hundreds of artists from around the globe, and I reviewed hundreds of live concerts.
I also spent 15 years working with international artists as a producer and DJ.
And these are two things that I'm quite confident stating.
I don't think I've ever met an artist who didn't want more people to listen to their music.
Musicians are sharing their craft, and therefore bearing their souls, in order to connect with others, and it really doesn't matter where those others are from.
Most musicians love collaborating with people from other cultures.
Just as most every folk music was born out of struggle, every folk form is a combination of older forms, usually from disparate geographic regions.
Collaborations push genres forward, and they bring about new ideas for the musicians to play with.
So this notion that one culture appropriates another just by attempting to perform the music is ludicrous, and no serious musician is going to turn down an opportunity to share their music with others.
That said, there is a barrier to entry, and that's respecting the music and the culture the music comes from.
Honestly, it's not a high bar, and most people who love music forms foreign to their culture take the time to learn something about that culture and the creation of its music.
Appropriation might be overused as a concept, but it's also real.
And that happens when someone freely borrows a sound without respecting its soul.
That is, its history, its culture, and the context in which that culture created its music.
Which brings us to one of the most derivative white reggae attempts I've heard in a long time by an artist named Presence.
I gave a quick 101 on Presence during this week's main episode, but let's recap.
Grant Elman, otherwise known as Presence, and he spells Presence with a Z, he talks about his prodigal skills on piano growing up before branching out into other musical forms.
And he seems to have found an audience on the conspiritualist scene as he created the song you just heard, Scam, in collaboration with former singer of the Mighty Mighty Bostones and RFK Jr.
for Del Bigtree's show.
He also livestreams with noted anti-vaxxer Andrew Kaufman, and now he's turned his attention to Reggae Muzak, and we played a little bit of his karaoke version of Scam from the Conscious Life Expo on Thursday.
He didn't have a band, he was playing a backing track.
Okay, let's dive in a little bit here.
Earlier I mentioned that music forms evolve and adapt as cultures clash and mingle.
And the same happens with language.
So a patois, like a pidgin or a creole, are non-standard forms of language.
The Jamaican patois blends the languages of Europe, like England and Portuguese, with Chinese, Amerindian, and African languages.
Now, why would such a mashup ever be needed?
Well, first, it reflects the merging of those cultures, but of equal importance is its social role.
The language is created to evade detection of the oppressor.
Mixing in languages, while also reversing the meaning of certain words, allows the oppressed to have private conversations in public, and to communicate across what would otherwise be a boundary.
The biggest red flag I hear in that song, Scam, and his musical catalog overall, is when Grant tries to sing in a patois but speaks in his normal English voice.
Now, step back for a moment.
Code switching is common.
Barack Obama famously spoke differently in front of black churches than when, for example, giving the State of the Union, and it's completely understandable.
It's actually usually unconscious.
When I go back to New Jersey, my syllables start clashing together even more, and my inflections on certain words change.
I don't do it on purpose.
It just reflects that I'm in a different environment with different people, and I'm sharing the dialect that I was raised with with those people.
But what someone like Grant is doing is different.
He addresses his audience in his regular voice, but then tries the code switch in an attempt to sound like the oppressed fighting the oppressor.
He imagines that he's in this epic fight against the system without realizing what he's fighting against.
So in this case, widespread access to public health interventions, and in that ridiculous song I just played, 5G, when a lot of indigenous people lack access to public health and to network communications.
These are effectively what the oppressed have been fighting for.
So what this song sounds like is privilege porn.
I have access and opportunities to more than most people, but I'm going to cosplay being oppressed.
And that's what I mean when I call it white reggae.
It's this transference of desiring to be fighting against something, when really, you have a lot more than you imagine, and so you strip the music that was born out of struggle of any meaning.
For context, let's hear Bob Marley talk about the evolution of reggae, which pulled not only from the aforementioned sources that I cite, like the Indian culture merging with the Nyabinghi culture, but also from Black American music.
Now, notice that his patois is thicker when speaking than when he sings, and that's actually intentional, because he very much wanted the messages in his music to be heard and embraced by global audiences.
And so he focused his pronunciations in a way that the English-speaking world would better understand.
It used to be a music almost like a half-blows.
We used to play before the ska started, you know.
Even people like Joe Higgs... You know that music?
He used to play that plenty.
So, from there now it developed to people start... You know?
and then for rocksteady it's like jeng jeng jeng
for reggae now it's jek jek jek
you know?
so you have three different feel now, to be completely clear
white people can play reggae In my experiences, two things need to happen.
There needs to be an understanding for and respect of the culture that the music comes from.
One example that comes to mind is Groundation, which is a group of white guys from Northern California who put together the band in the late 90s out of a jazz program at Sonoma State University.
They're the only band that I've ever actually seen play live on three continents, and they crush it every time.
But there's also this deep respect for the music and the culture.
The founder, Harrison Stafford, found a synergy between his Torah studies from growing up as a Jew in a continually anti-Semitic culture like America, and the plate of the Rastafari.
And Harrison went on to teach a college-level course on the history of reggae music, and he's collaborated with some of Jamaica's most important reggae artists.
Groundation is also indicative of the second aspect of music that's required.
They play behind the beat.
Now this might sound a little more subjective, but in general, the musical transition from black to white cultures tends to be the history of moving from swing to static rhythms.
Great reggae artists, like great jazz musicians, play slightly behind the beat.
You have to wait a moment for it.
Musicians like Presence, well, it's right on the beat the whole time, which creates this real sonic monotony.
So let's listen to a little groundation to highlight what I mean.
Notice how you're just kind of waiting the whole time and how good the resolution feels when the beat arrives.
That's a feature of good music.
It's musical maturity.
Now, the other band who does this is New Zealand's Fat Freddy's Drop, who, just out of pure happenstance, I actually caught on a double bill with Groundation in France years ago.
Now, as Fat Freddy's Drop members told me after the show, they don't consider themselves to be reggae artists, and their catalog isn't limited to that genre, but The band is comprised of Maori members, the indigenous
people of New Zealand, and when they play reggae, they show respect musically and
culturally by honoring the rhythm as well.
Take my eyes that I could be so blind I could not see it was there waiting
Lost and found the second time around Was it for me? Now I see
Would not waste a moment, oh no Midnight, rose, midnight
Okay, so I really don't want to get too inside baseball.
I just wanted to highlight that when people say things like white reggae, it's not really about the color of the skin of the musicians.
It's more the approach and knowledge of that music and its history and implications, which translates into the actual music that's produced.
I'm sorry, but you can't fake soul, because there are people with ears that hear what's actually going on.
Now, if that's not a satisfying enough response to scam, consider the entire story of reggae music.
This is the story of Africans ripped from their homeland and shipped as cargo around the world, and the culture on Jamaica's intersection with other oppressed people, as I mentioned with Indians and Jamaicans at the time.
Slavery is not a word to be taken lightly by these cultures.
It has real social and ancestral meaning.
But now let's listen to Grant describe what he thinks slavery is.
Essentially, they have the right to steal people's product of their labor or some
percentage of the product of some people's labor. Let me ask you a question. If slavery
is robbing 100% of the product of one's labor, at what percentage is it no longer slavery? 50%?
50%?
25%?
10%?
5%?
1%?
Yep, you guessed it.
It's all slavery.
Doesn't matter what percentage the government is stealing from you.
Doesn't matter if we are stealing 100% of the product of somebody's labor like was done in the United States when black men and black women were slaves here.
Or, if the government is robbing us of 50% of our labor, 25%, it's all slavery.
By that definition, all government is slavery, because all government collects and levies taxes and forces people to pay A slave tax.
Hey Grant, go fuck yourself.
You fucking whiny, privileged little child.
You enjoy the benefits of America's infrastructure, communications technologies, and healthcare, because if and when you need it, it's going to be there.
And you don't want to pay a penny for it?
Then you have the audacity to compare your situation in society with slavery, you ignorant fuck?
Since you're too lazy to Google anything, let me help you for a moment.
Here's what American taxpayer money is actually used for.
19% goes to Social Security.
You know, looking after old people, which some of us feel is pretty important because in the best case scenario, we're all going to get old.
And most of us can use a bit of a safety net, especially since we've been putting into it for so long.
Now 15% goes to healthcare, 14% to income security, 12% to national defense, and some people believe that number is too high.
When it comes to certain contracts with certain companies, I certainly agree with that.
Now 12% goes to Medicare.
Those damn old people again.
11% goes to education, training, employment, and social services.
You know, like helping those oppressed people you claim to care so much about in your music?
And the rest goes to things like veterans benefits, transportation, and infrastructure, the boring parts of government that affect your life without you ever having to realize it.
And don't get me wrong here, our infrastructure needs massive work.
Our for-profit healthcare system can be a disgrace.
The lobbyists from the pharma industry to the government pipeline is a disaster and that needs to be reformed.
Regulating our communication systems so anti-vax idiots will be flagged for spreading disinformation is not too bad of an idea.
But you can't both enjoy the benefits of a system and then refuse to give into the same system.
We don't get to choose where we're born, but we certainly have the right to be mature enough to recognize that changing the system means actually taking part in the system.
And ideally, it means not being a moron when standing on a soapbox to make fucking horrible analogies.
So, lack of presence over here isn't the only one using an art form with no understanding of the cultural complexities of which that art form arose.
I'm not going to do a deep dive into hip-hop, but suffice to say it grew up out of a blending of African-inspired storytelling from the poetic traditions of Last Poets and Gil Scott Heron and Amiri Baraka, the DJs identifying and looping breaks from soul and disco records.
The toasting from Jamaica's reggae tradition, and the dance and art culture from late 70s New York City.
Hip-hop too is a music born out of struggle and meeting, and a feeling of wanting to seek a place in society.
And so you have Hi-Rez, whose breakthrough video features his uncle, anti-vax Don Robert Malone, and J.P.
Sears.
And here's another ridiculous anti-vax song, but it goes beyond that into the anti-CRT and anti-trans culture wars.
Hi-Rez is wearing a blue wig and skirt in the video, and honestly, it's just trash all the way down.
Better not be in here telling these children that men can't get pregnant.
Of course not, Mr. Smith!
And did you tell all the white children that they are racist?
And colonizers and bigots, yes.
Very good.
I'm only highlighting this garbage to say that this is the playbook
of right-leaning culture warriors.
If they can strip art of any meaning, then they can manipulate it however they see fit.
And honestly, Presence and Hi-Rez don't really seem bright enough to know that they're consciously doing this, but they're doing it nonetheless.
It's why they can cast aside CRT, public health initiatives, and trans people so carelessly and easily.
They have no understanding of the history of other people, nor do they even care enough to read a book or listen to a lecture to learn a little bit about them.
And if you can deny that music has a deep history rooted in cultures being oppressed, well then you can steal that music and co-opt it for your own purposes, no matter how shallow you sound, no matter how ridiculous you look to people who understand the implications of that music.
Look, I'm a white dude too.
When I talk about the social privileges they have, it's because I know I'm also a beneficiary of them.
I just at least try to understand that my experience isn't the experience that everyone else has, and that in order to develop any sense of empathy toward the experience of others, I have to step outside of myself for a moment and listen to what they have to say.
I spent so many years of my life working in music because of how much I love the music and how it hits me, and I wanted to know what it meant to the people who made it.
But I at least wanted to know where that feeling comes from, even if I never had the experiences myself.
That's why these musicians create their music, to share their experience and connect with others.
But they certainly don't create it to be shit on, which is all I hear out of this new crop of wannabe contrarian conspiritualists.
In his exceptional book, Go Ahead in the Rain, Notes to a Tribe Called Quest, the poet Hanif Abdu-Rakib writes about the history of jazz, which in his framing is also the history of hip-hop, which in the larger picture is the history of black music in America.
He writes, It is said that the entire story of jazz is actually the story about what can urgently be passed down to someone else before a person expires.
Jazz was created by a people obsessed with their survival in a time that did not want them to survive, and so it is a genre of myths, of fantasy and dreaming.
Of drumming on whatever you must and making noise in any way you can, before the ability to make noise is taken from you, or until the noise is an echo in your own head that won't rest.
Music is a primal scream demanding to be heard.
If that's not where the music is coming from, it's just more noise.
