A “Money Bomb:” the Future of SOMM

This month Ovation TV is airing a program titled, “Electric Purgatory: The Fate of the Black Rocker.” The gist of the documentary is that black people have been and continue to be systematically excluded from the musical genre of “rock music.” This, despite the fact that the foundation of rock music is based on the playing of three chords, often in some form of the I-IV-V chordal pattern that is blues music.

Like so much that is allegedly Euro-American - the “flutterby” for instance - rock music and its first cousin, blues-rock music, is inherently Black music. And like the term flutterby, the word slaves used to described a North American flying insect that flitted before their very eyes, flying much like a leaf on the wind. White people appropriated the word and chose to rend it into something unrecognizable and not at all related to its manner of flight.

They termed the insect a “butterfly.”

And as Black men and women have and do play blues, blues-rock, and rock music, in the tradition of the observation of a flutterby, many, many White people co-opted what was ours, wrung it through their guilt-ridden minds, and out came something that, to its roots, is today nearly unrecognizable - a butterfly. But when Whites remain true to the three chord paradigm of roots music, some of the most compelling music known to modern human is more often than not the result.

But the stars of rock music are not Fishbone or even Bad Brains, but their White compatriots the Red Hot Chili Peppers, No Doubt, and Green Day, just like they were Led Zeppelin and Cream, the Rolling Stones, Faces and the original Fleetwood Mac with guitarist Peter Green, instead of Albert King, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Bo Diddley.

Sure Jimi Hendrix seeped through the cracks. Yet he was made famous in large part though the verbal aegis of members of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and then called “England’s own.” But as soon as Jimi wanted to stretch out and experiment with his music, as soon as he wanted to return to the primal collective unconscious root of the three chord archetype and turn it on his perfect pitch ear and give us something far beyond Charlie Parker and Miles and Trane and the Gypsy Django, or even Wes when not constrained by an all-white crowd and the ever-present tug of paying the rent for his family - and do it with two other brothers instead of solely with Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding (though Mitch was a devotee of the circular pattern of jazz drumming of the one and only, Elvin Jones), Jimi became a “problem” requiring containment through threats and kidnapping and getting busted, and finding he had no money with which to realize his dreams.

And ultimately, when it was understood that Hendrix could be a far more profitable commodity out of the way…

it was required that Jimi be dead.

But you say, oh no! There is R&B and Hip-Hop, and Rap.

But understand Barry Gordy was the equivalent of a a sell-out assimilationist with his perfectly dressed and coifed Jackson 5 and Supremes. Understand that Man-Tan is Li’l Wayne and Flo-Ri-Da, and even Curtis Jackson as soon as he came to the understanding that his White CD-buying constituency was far engrossed with his bullet-ridden body than his lyrical prowess, and began to remove his shirt each and every concert to either expose his slug-scarred abdomen, or expose his bullet-proof vest. the vest amounting to a call girl’s silk, see-through Victoria’s Secret “I’m yours” top.

And fully know that Justin Timberlake replaced every Black male R&B singer with his Disney-developed pipes. And now has every Rap “artist” wanting the Tennessee-born and Mickey Mouse-bred White boy on his new project for that “hittin’” hit single.

John Legend, stick to the piano and crooning for David Stern.

As I watched “Electric Purgatory” a lonely feeling came over me. It was the feeling I dulled with all manners of illicit drugs and drink when I played rock music in bands and was the only young, Black rocker around for as far as the eyes could see. The depth of the feeling just a few nights ago made up for all those gigs played hearing drunk crackers yelling, “Let’s see if you can really play and play some “Skynard,” in refernce to the white, Southern band Lynard Skynard, know for playing with Confederate flags waving from all corners of the stage.

That lonely feeling was also for today.

It is for what happens to Black writers who spring forth through the will of their work and their willingness to touch the bottom of the collective unconscious’ well and bathe ourselves in the deepest waters of the ancient spoken and written I-IV-V. Assimilationists tell us how “important” our words are and how ‘important” our voices are  while stabbing us in the back in front of their White masters with double-bladed daggers. Whites tell us how much they love the “potency” of our work while also telling us they’d love to publish us and extol our virtues to the world ———– if only what we’ve written wasn’t written before, or if only they could figure out where on the shelves of the national bookstore chains our writings belong.

All of which are codes for, “Fuck you and what you write you unchained, don’t want to be slaves-ass niggers. We’ll teach you to attempt to tell people about what lies behind the veils we’ve so painstakingly created to dull the minds of the populace.”

But thanks to all of you who read SOMM, the lonely feeling only lasted a minute. I realized that I am fortunate enough to have an audience of well-educated and aware people who care about THE story rather than his-tory, care about our present and our future, and love it when that care is put into words every day.

And so…