A Little R&B From The U.K.
By Fantasiac
What's up fellow earthlings? This is Fantasiac back at you with the second
installment of my two-part series on UK R&B. Now, I'm about to express my
personal reason for the focus that I have.
At this point in my life, I find myself going back to the R&B, acid jazz
and trip hop, as well as other rhythmic, adventurous and mellow music from the
UK, in preference to R&B and hip-hop from America. Both style and content
have more to do with it than anything else.
Once upon a time, black music in America reflected and spearheaded the mental
and
emotional being of the African-American community, in what was believed to be
a
general self-perception, no matter how soapbox political or privately intimate.
We were not afraid to draw in rhythms and concepts from the many parts of the
African Diaspora and embrace them, some more enthusiastically than others; it
was, at least, a genuine acknowledgement of the natural diversity that manifested
itself within our universe.
We gave credence to historical precedents and, yet, we looked forward in a
positive way, trying to project progressive possibilities in our relationships
toward one another as individuals and collectively in our relationship to the
rest of the world. That creative feeling climaxed at the end of the 1970's and,
as the new decade came Into being, the music itself, while a lot of it still being
good, became more superficial and mechanical. The business became more sophisticated
and the artists began making an increasing amount of concessions to technology
and materialism, narrowing the realm of stylistic expression by blocking off the
natural exploratory impulses of creativity and confining themselves to the environment
of commerciality for the sake of survival in a changing pop culture.
As music videos became an increasingly dominant force in the industry, affecting
everyone's self image, careers were being made or undone by the artists' ability
or inability to adapt to the medium's requirements for success. By this time,
the non-musical executives at the multinational entities that distributed entertainment
product
exerted their corporate influence more readily, which was good for business, but
bad for the music.
Meanwhile, hip-hop music was evolving from harmless, good-time party music,
made by people with little to no musical skills, to a raw expression of individuals'
viewpoints,
experiences and fantasies at a profoundly street level. So-called ' gangsta '
rap was the culmination of the linguistic and attitudinal downward spiral, according
to some, with a white suburban youth listenership buying heavily ( 67% of sales
tabulated ) into the explicit and questionable content that professes itself to
' keep it real '. The aesthetic that the present hip-hop youth chooses to embrace
goes against the flow previously expressed by 60's / 70's youth. These days, R&B
singers have to be as ' ghetto ' as rappers, fronting no less realness, too much
of it in the music being just rudeness, hostility, immaturity, materialism and
narcissism.
Now as subtlety, romance and futurity fade from the popular black music landscape
in America, along with hard-earned, legitimate musicality, I am more apt to embrace
the familiar yet different rhythms and tones coming from the UK. They've taken
the best of what Black America had to offer from the 60's through the 90's and
distilled that with their own tastes and attitudes. Black British have a cultural
concept with a timeline of being in the UK only since the end of World War II,
so they maintain and readily indulge in their strong personal ties the Caribbean,
Africa and other parts of the earth. It comes out in their music, both sublimely
and overtly and stimulates their attitude of maintaining a worldview, instead
of being psychologically on lockdown in the 'hood.
Because the black population in the UK isn't too big, combined with a non-suppressive
attitude that the dominant British cultural forces have toward its minorities,
generally speaking, blacks in the UK are more likely to socially mix with whites
without losing their identity.
Bands and groups are integrated in the UK soul scene, in a way that would not
happen here. Social discomfort and the rejection of middle class affectations
('being soft') in hip-hop has resulted in a superficially re-segregated structure,
with American whites just being consumers and observers of the points of origin
in hip-hop.
Anyone that cares to respond to this columnist can do so directly by email
to fantasiac@webtv.net or on the Blackradio.com
message
boards. In the meantime, to the artists: Stay On It and One Love!
