The whole point is not to talk or think
I avoid as far as I can any party, club, reception or event when or where rap music is likely to be predominant. I do not think this is only because I am getting old and crotchety about the inexplicable likes and dislikes of the younger generation. Surely even among the young there must soon be a revolt against the hideous and repetitious cacophony which goes by the name of so much music these days. It is not music, it is simply high decibel noise accompanying lyrics which are inane or vulgar or both. These are not songs, this is not music to which one can listen to with delight, this is simply harsh and repetitive nonsense that drugs, deadens and corrupts the mind. Occasionally there is an exception but such relief is very rare. The only rap artist I ever admired was Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali who did it better before rap was even invented. Do you remember his glorious ringside inventions: “It started twenty years past. The greatest of them was born at last.”
In recent years the ‘songs’ which are most popular plumb the depths of dissonance and dross. Inanity rules club-land and the airwaves. It is becoming laughable how repetitive, unimaginative and shudderingly inept such lyrics have become – apart from rap there is hardly a piece that does not depend on the relentlessly idiotic repetition of the words waving, jumping, jamming or “wining.” The words hardly change, the sense never does. There is not a glimpse of originality, picturesque spiciness or mordant wit. A committee might as well get together and compose an all-purpose lyric entitled “Wave, jump, jam and wine” or perhaps “Jump, jam, wave and wine” or even “Wine, jump, jam and wave” and let that represent popular music at the present time.
The great old calypsonians – not to mention Bob Marley – must be turning circles in their revered graves. The likes of Spoiler, Attila, Growling Tiger, Kitchener – and indeed Sparrow and Shadow as we knew them in their younger glory – would scorn the current travesties of their art. Vulgar garbage was never their style. Spoiler, who “made them weep with a laughter beyond mirth,” would have groaned with disgust to hear the trash that now assumes the honoured name calypso.
I am not sure which I loathe the most, the noise or the mindlessness. The loudness of the music overwhelms all mental activity. Do not our most valuable moments take place in rooms where it is possible to think and talk? But in the presence of this music, thought and conversation even at the most elementary level, not to mention any kind of civilized discourse, are silenced. These amplified sounds demand either semi-sexual gyrations on a dance floor or sitting in dumb acceptance of one’s fate while drinking heavily. One is not meant to indulge in any mental or social activity which might compete with the brute attraction of the all-pervasive beat. This is brutal sound unanchoring the soul.
And since the whole point of the exercise is the beat, the all-consuming beat, nothing but the beat; there is no point in attaching any importance to the words which accompany the music. The words need not make any sense whatever and most often they do not. This is music for illiterates. This is music for those who have not the slightest desire to think, converse, feel or understand anything but the crudest and most basic emotions. It is, in the end, despite its brazen party spirit, music of unutterable sadness and despair.
I find most of rap music loathsome. It possesses no saving grace whatsoever. In his lovely work The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Milan Kundera writes: “Stereotyped harmonies, hackneyed melodies, and a beat that gets stronger as it gets duller – that is what’s left of music, the eternity of music.” How right he is! As the dullness grows so the beat gets stronger, trying its best to hide irredeemable mindlessness.
One despairs about whether anything can be done about all this. It would help, of course, if whenever and wherever such music is played the volume could be lowered by, say, 90%. But that will not happen since the whole point of this music is to turn the sound up until it extinguishes all thought.
This music possesses all the attributes of vulgarity. It is loud, it is intrusive, it favours the obscene, it is utterly insensitive and unsubtle. And, of course, such music is a symptom of the times. Who can doubt that on all sides we are descending into vulgarity? Vulgarity is a state in which man has convinced himself that “he is what he is,” reduced to one or two elementary instincts, and that he deserves to be freed from all the problems of life and death, released from everything that challenges or limits him. A vulgar man is one-dimensional, stripped of memories or hopes, cut off from the past and holding off the future, insensitive to mystery, indifferent to subtlety in human relationships, completely unaware of any intimations of immortality. He is totally absorbed in the throbbing beat of the moment.
What can be done? The answer, in music as in so many cases where standards have dropped out of sight, lies in better and more widespread education. Most popular music today is music for the illiterate or the barely educated. In so far as more and more of our young people are functionally illiterate or barely educated so too will this style of music grow in popularity, overwhelming all other kinds of music. What we are forced to listen to more and more is school dropout music par excellence.
The best chance of combating its rapidly increasing influence and domination, the best chance of combating vulgarity in all its forms, is to give our children a better education at school and at home.