Essay 6: August Town
Eusi Kwayana

Duane Stephenson’s “August Town” is quite an experience. It is the kind of song you can hear once and be with it. It is rich in instrumentals and in rhythm, almost flawless. It is rich in genuine sentiment.

This is an impersonation of a young boy who grew up in the once heroic August Town, a typical Caribbean village. He was born in liberation and began falling through lack of change of the behaviour of Power, through deceit and entrapment and exploitation of poverty.

He had been nurtured by Jah into the truth but was swept away by forces in the society that appeared The football “field” became a “battle field’’ and to him it was “all surreal.”

This Artist is musician, actor , and penitent combined, and suits the vive to the verse of the lyrics. Gifted with a readiness of word wonder and theatre, he allows the song to stay with us, not only because of its music, but because of the genuine agony. His cry is to Jah, the “Father” these stubborn masters of this genre seem to not entertain the idea of goddess, although born of Woman. This how these geniuses are and we have to take them as they are. Perhaps their goddesses are some few rungs lower down the ladders, not quite at the bottom as some of us mischief-makers might and meddlers want to think.

This reggae shows how the alliteration of opening consonants (like the repetition of the consonant sounds “l” and “p”) in a line can be casually repeated with less planned intent than in some famous poetry. His speech images are not forced, but flow from a lurking talent that should take him far as a creative worker. His metaphors and similes are much the same. Generally, Stephenson is admitting in deep and lovely poetry and sound that he had been wayward, while knowing better -not following what he knew to be best.

This lands him in big, big trouble, hurts others. He calls himself a living example of the fact that crime does not pay.

Look at the power and beauty of heart felt simplicity:
When my life got dark
You were the only spark

Dion Riverte referred to lamenting music (blues) as, “is the naked heart crying for union with God.”

This August Town gem in that sense is a blues-reggae, although the genre is given as Reggae. The singer goes on his “bending” knees, before Jah, the Most High, not in random praise but to say “I turned my back on your teaching and now I feel the
scars.”

This song is not only a listener’s delight, It shows that those in August Town, or any place, who have stumbled, and the class they come from have the built -in power of redemption.

Essay 5: Generation Cry

BY: Queen Ifrica

This path –breaking cry is not from the agony of guilt like August Town but from the agony of innocence, directed against them meanest form of abuse

It is a song of self -emancipation in a sensitive, hidden area of what we call, with a lot of disappointed hope, Life. It is a pity that such a use of art has become necessary. It would be a tragedy if this inspired and active Artist made light of her insights and her muse in place of this signal traffic light. The world must bless her for not turning her back on a worthy cause the cause of silent, dutiful youth who put the family’s shame foremost. As they mope and pine in the silence of their self pity, Queen Ifrica calls on their dry spirits to refuse consent.

Some will rail against against the song because it shook their smugness, whether the smugness is from an uneasy conscience, that is guilt, or generational. or gender male or parental solidarity. Crime is very inventive of defenses and pleas for mitigation. Some listeners are silent because they must close ranks as an age group, or as a class ,or as a race, or as a faith See how the Roman Catholic rulers in that holy kingdom, the Vatican, closed ranks
Queen Ifrica advises mothers how to go about entrusting their daughters to men.
Pay attention even if di man a pastor
Yuh affi mek sure before yuh trust him wid you daughta
And the offenders
Yuh cyan hide nuh more now yuh affi meet yuh karma

With all my respect I argue that these violations when they are not just diseases, are offshoots of those cultures that insist on respect for elders, regardless of their conduct, and leave out the equally vital side of respect, u, respect for youth.
UNICEF, so far, has acted positively. The song accuses one, but campaigns against a line of behavior. The song ought to be. It is on the free air, it is on the web, in cyber space and I hope has the universe as its destination. For these offences occur in secret and must be proclaimed to make offenders uneasy.
The one word I disagree with is “daddy” It should be Ifrica’s word: Creature.

Essay 4: NUBIAN QUEEN

Taurus and Bob Marley.

This Taurus Riley marriage of lyric and music can in no way be brushed aside as common place, or treated as one of the mass produced works of fun. We who dare to write about works of art have to find a way of letting readers know that we are not laying down the law for artists, or their consumers., but trying tomake the art object a focus of discussion and interest.

Art flows from the heart and is not mindless. It is the outpouring of disciplined talent, not of callous activity. It strikes us most not only when it is most sentimental or most appealing, but when there is a seriousness oozing out of every part of it. This seriousness is not a seriousness of long faces, but of purpose, of sincerity. Whatever is sincere is serious. Saying serious is not like saying severe. It is more like saying studious.

That is how all art comes to the point of being born as a work of art. The quality is a good measure of how studious, how serious, and how sincere the artist is. In addition, joy that comes of it is another kind of measure. That joy is a measure of how accomplished the artistic worker is, or of how well it has achieved its purpose.

Know too that we are not preaching to the artist, as we have no right to do so. I have done this in the past, but now have doubts about doing it. All a critic can do is to give the work a kind of focus and so start an enriching discussion around it. We are in fact all critics. That is, persons with an opinion, but we do not all have writer’s itch, which is one of my illnesses
“Nubian Queen” walks in the great tradition of lyric praise song, this time, as often, of a lover. She is “royal,” the poet finds and here, he is hardly thinking of an aristocracy of blood, but one of bearing and beauty and charm. Still, it is an aristocracy.

Praise beauty all you can, but not in such a way as to give others the impresssion that they have no beauty because they have no praise songs to them.

Often the poets and lyric makers are so resentful of the raw deal women, especially Black, African women, and also brown or dark skinned Asian and Native women have received for centuries. I should say received publicly. This may be one reason that drives praise song writers to making reparations to compensate by driving themselves into the royal imaging.

Is there a better way? Rastafari whose great image priority is to restore the African royal institutions are not likely to seek another way.

Like most lover- poets Taurus redeems himself in his praise and adoration. The music and the lyrics justify each other in a fine harmony.

What is written is written. How do we overstand it? These productions help us, the onlookers and consumers, to share our own overstanding. Without this feedback the whole experience of the work, the song the music, the craft works is incomplete.

For all the beauty and merits of this song, woman is still the beautiful picture, his Queen, “my queen” with everything that can satisfy the man’s desires. The woman’s whole purpose is to give pleasure and excite admiration. The man has pride of ownership, and is glad that to find someone to satisfy all our desires, to satisfy all our yearning and flatter our egos; glad for someone elevated that is our Queen. What she feels, whether she cares to be Queen, whether she has said that she wants him in her life, that part of it is not even considered. Whether her feelings matter is the big question.

This is where the Cock of the Rock Bob Marley comes in with instructive experience. During one of his serious musical flights, he asks, responsibly “ Is this love, is this love, is this love that I’m feeling.?”

It is a question that can set much that is wrong right.

It is a question males and females can do well to ask before it is too late. It lies at the bottom of all sexual abuse and many of the issues facing us daily.

Essay3 : Week of Juneteenth, 2007
Detailing Suffering
And only then organizing...

Where do We Go ?
Kelly Love Jones comes over like an innocent, looking at things around her and finding that the things are not making sense; innocent, because she does not come with a doctrine with what they call a ‘consciousness’ She does not come over like one of the “bad” sisters or brothers who is angry to start with, and picks up the evidence strewn all over the place, to explain the anger.

We’re not saying that she is not conscious, only how she chooses to come over, or come across. Is it clandestine subversion? She reflects that she has “seen ‘em sleepin in the parking lot on cardboard boxes’ Now there are three human wrongs in that little line: parking lot, cardboard boxes and sleeping. S-l-e-e-p-i-n-g? Guyanese would say it aloud or to themselves but think “Ting na regulah!” in fine change this means “Something wrong here. Things are not right”

Still hoping for the best in her eyes’ journey, she glimpses another life slide that holds her attention-and challenges her reflection. “She’s seen em go to war and come back to unemployment “Even when they did not go to war, and toiled from nine to five at home it is’life without fulfillment” Fulfillment. That’s a good standard for civilized life, not burn-out-ment but fulfillment And who says any one is entitled to civilized life? The Constitution ? No, that offered only “pursuit of happiness” not fulfillment. We’re free to pursue it at our own risk .It’s not like a guaranteed, though rationed, right. You have no claim on fulfillment.

KLJ keeps on discovering there are other humans ”reaching through the garbage for leftovers” That’s the last extreme, when a human resorts to another human’s trash.
The trust of the almost damned, with the last cent likely to be spent on ‘winning games of numbers’ playing scratches, “taking any chance to get another chance
to escape the cancer of poverty…” that trust has nine lives and lives on like a cat

The more you get into these lyrics, the more the subtle, off- hand technique reveals itself
By the third stanza. from the ordinary incidents of living and seeing KLJ has decoded the shape of the social trap: what you see at the garbage can, in the parking lot after hours is only the coughing that betrays the flu; bits of inhumanity helping the picture to unfold

Victim of circumstance
Product of environment
Caught up in a system

Then comes her call; Where and when do we go from here. Action time is now; not only where but when.

“We need to fight together, together, together .”

And in her vein, as she took time to explain, we’ll not be fighting in vain. Our aim will be to decide what we could not decide

Why “ once high on the high school track team, now only runners
Please tell me what happened to our sons and daughters”
Join the human chorus. These are the handcuffs that restrain us!

Essay2 : Week of March 11th
Liberation Music: Yard and tion

Some of the new music is direct and engaged. It does not sing of freedom in general or of oppression in general. People need not only 'overall freedom' such as we get when a country become independent or when an official system of oppression is officially cancelled.
General, or of general oppression is at one level. Then you have to examine the communities to see what weighs on them. In this one Ras kofi puts the finger on a social Šthat is wreaking havoc on particular people., usually Black and poor.

Ras Kofi is caught in a place between membership of a community and its love and the fact that active youth of such a community along with youth from outside of it should be turned into a military adventure. This armed group offers the community hope of deliverance, but also fear and lack of freedom of movement and speech. And the armed group is not self- acting. It is the idea of politricksters from outside.
New means of entrapment often come from city to village or other rural area or small town, in the Hoods and projects. This happened in the USA and is recorded in the New York Times, when the CIA dropped rugs into black neighborhoods to confuse the youth It comes with the man in the shiny van, the slick truck, truck, the dream car. He brings gifts that seem destined for you, answers to your prayer.
The local agents have his business card with P O Box plainly written and no street address. This is good for a home, but why will a business hide itself?

The lyric makes it all simple and does not even go into the offers of free cruises The intruder has gifts from the gods to offer: new games for old, new means of livelihood in place of tilling the soil and minding livestock- mechanical and trade skills, clean technology and education. but these new gifts depend on his weekly or monthly visits. Then there is the new education, new religion, everything new. Some new this are life giving but most are deadly. And how do we separate and detect them?
Some couplets will show the drift of the composer's sense of destruction and sense of creation and recreation. It is a cautionary message, forcefully given not to lose our base.

It opens with the Proclamation" This is the Fahrenheit's creation Š
Musical vibration going out to alt the nation"

It calls the nation Israel, the Israel of the Rastafari vision.

The groundings are there it is saying.,

"We na need dem cheese and bun,
Marcus Garvey self -reliance liberation sound."

One form of inducement goes straight to the palate and the hunger or the taste.. The other we shall see. is not just "cheese and bun" which iss only the intro.

The lyric means perhaps that where Marcus Garvey trod there is enough example and teaching to encourage black people to follow a self ordered path, not get caught up in new attractive tempting solutions, though they may look like deliverance. This is so, but how alive is the tradition? Other temptatiollow.

"Spit upon den grease dem grease and gun
War upon the land and Mama can't have no fun."

The crazy gun is a limp solution, when you look at it at the women and the family who are held prisoner by the fear of flying high- powered bullets,. with no herb they still know of to heal thetearing wounds..

What is a better thing to do? muses the muser.
"Plant you bungo peas and done
Sow it in the moon and reap it in the sun."

Although, more prssure for doing ruight, because trade is unequal-

It looks like this :

"dollar by the bag and a ship it it by the ton." And that is oppression, we have traditions that pointed another route.

Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvment Association and Communities League (UNIA) had organized small communities over many years ending up with a UNIA membership of some two million Africans in the USA,. the West Indies,, Latin America and two African countries. UNIA was the largest voluntary grass roots organization perhaps in history..Garveyu had a vision of expanded trade tying up small communities and growing business organizations under theshadow of self governimg and just African govrnments .

We should not forget that without millionaire and government backing, without grants, the UNIA and Garvey in the days of SEGREGATION and lynching, yet established and put on the water a shippng enterprise "The Black Star Line" for Diaspora trade.

The composer's remedies are simple, but not far- fetched, except that some of the cultivation would not succeed with fractured drainage in the farming areas

The composer sees some of those caught in the militarizing trap like people who should know better, lying down in dangerous places

"lie down wid de a rattlesnake an and frt bout de harm
After two thousand years you suppose to know what a ' guh on"

It is sure there also is need for the flattery of "cheese and buns"> There be small temptations and large temptations. And Africa showed us that liberation armies work. But there is a difference between liberation armies and gun rule. You remember Jonestown. They were well armed. But was it was it a liberation army.

Then the composer takes a swift glanc at those trying to make Jah's reproduction bodies, the seeds, better than Jah made them, Let us say that they think they got that right and got power from Jah, Well what is their witness? He warns against consumption of foods coming out of artificial genes.
He watereth the hills fromhis chambers

Father heaven and Mama Earth
Su na bother eat genetic
and expect fi flex electric.."

It has been said."A poet can do nothing but warn."

This writing gives samples of a reggae that looks at special areas and levels of empowerment and finds Garvey still an inspiration/.

WEEK OF FEBRUARY 25, 2007

Redemption Music. Professor Norman Cameron of Guyana, a World Prizewinner in Mathematics from Cambridge University, records one of the oldest songs made by the former enslaved just after they broke their chains. It was found both in St. Vincent and In Guyana.

"Emancipation Bill guh pass Backra man sah eat long grass" .

The Africans had to sing and chant their earlier freedom songs away from the hearing of the colonial slave militia. As first of August 1834 drew near, nothing could contain them. As they would have said 'Boat gone a falls, he can' turn back". This language is close to Gullah. It means that a boat cannot turn back once it slides ]over the edge of a waterfall.

Between those first open out bursts of freedom songs and the fairly recent Marley genre burst on the world and shook it. Culture was not asleep all that time. There was a sharp struggle going on. The overlords wanted everyone, especially those they saw as unequal, to step right by following the overlords' culture Then there was the culture of the nigger yard and of the later bound yard the flames of the people's hopes.

The trouble was that very often they all flowed together. Apart from the Maroons, those people who had pulled out of slave society as in Suriname, Jamaica and other places for a shorter time including Brazil. There was no chance of keeping cultures watertight.

Children of parents who wanted them to "get on" and rightly so, sent them to school Parents also dragging their children went to church. In those two places, the whole idea was to strip the newcomer of all his or her sense of life , regarded as superstition, and fu-ill the empty spaces with the lef-lef ( unwanted stuff) of overlords' beliefs.

Calypsonian King Sparrow of Trinidad and Tobago is a talented genius who sometimes uses his talents for mere entertainment. But whenever he wanted he came out with a shocker of deep meaning, One of these pointed out the dangers and follies of the official education program. He asked why teach children in a nursery rhyme :"The cow jump ova the moon." In the cholls allover the Carubbean and in the USA the culture program did its job. On high days, when all emotions are trained for rejoicing or perhaps mourning, there were the "patriotic songs. These were a real menace. They worked up emotions and along with the emotions pushed ideas of a kind of submission, which was in some form disguised with the rhymes and the music. Look at the main songs they drilled into their pupils. The British national anthem, :"God save the queen:" had us begging

"Send her victorious Happy and glorious Long to reign over us God save the queen." The queen's enemies were ours and we were trained to as k God to scatter her enemies, confound their "knavish" tricks and make them fall.

At a grand university graduation in the USA, in a big city, the band lighted up the auditorium with "Land of Hope and Glory" The massive crowd as moved and flattered by the lively beat. The song is also well known in the ex British Caribbean as a "patriotic" song. But again we were praying for domination of ourselves. We were begging that the country should take over other countries and be a great world power.

"Wider still and wider May thy bounds be set God who made thee mighty Make thee mightier yet God who made thee mighty Make thee mightier yet."

And generations without thinking have become cultural sympathizers with the whipping of others by those who whipped us. For a change, the Rastafarian anthem, composed on liberation times Does not pray for domination of one people over another It is full of human vibrations.

It has in mind the invasion of Mussolini's Italian troops of a peaceful self respecting nation. and the God bless our Negus, Negus I To keep Ethiopia free Advance with Truth and Right Advance, with Love and Light One God for us all." These are some of the conflicts between domination songs and songs of redemption.