Wanting
to talk about the 80s and its music is making me feel like I am embarking on a
prehistoric journey because of the things I see in today´s music. Music or what
is referred to today as music has changed so much and so rapidly that what we referred
to in our own youthful days as music now appears to be anything else but music.
Anyone still remember groups like The Jackson 5, Soul II soul, The Gap band,
The Whispers, Shalamar, Lakeside, Dynasty and a host of other solo artistes
like the now late king of Pop himself, Michael Jackson, Madonna, Whitney Houston,
Lionel Richie, Anita Baker and a host of other talented and beautiful singers
of the time, whose music continue to be classic and evergreen even today.
I knew,
like it had also happened between me and my father that a day would come when I
would have to defend everything about my youth days before my children to see
which was better and particularly more sophisticated between my days and theirs.
I knew they would want to question and even laugh at my choice of music and
especially too my mode of dressing, which was often the trend we copied from
any of our favorites stars in those days. Our hair cuts were replicas of the ones our
stars wore on their heads then, There was the afro hair style which gracefully and
happily has come back to be a tendency today among many black boys and girls. I still have
friends who wear the brothers Johnson hairstyle today, because they cannot imagine
their faces in other style of haircuts, friends who appear to have stuck in the
past without any regrets. I have succumbed to the vicissitudes of life, cutting
my dreadlocks off and wearing a skin cut that started surfacing in the early
90s with the new rappers who came to retire the very talented and revolutionary
ones of the 80s.
Today
everything is changing at the speed of light, music inclusive. I don´t want to
sound so drastic as my father did to my own 80 songs; because he would say
without mincing words that those were not music but total rubbish, haven heard
the music of the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s. Let me be honest, some grooves
today are still worth my very special and expensive ears but a lot of them
would rightfully take my father´s adjective, rubbish.
Most of
the music today does not speak to the souls and the minds like the music of yore
which I was lucky to listen to up until the end of the 80s, a lot of today´s
music only go straight to stimulate your sex organs or directly to put your
brain into disarray, with senseless and cheap lyrics, some of them very repulsive
and annoying. In our own youth days, It used to be I am black and proud, today
it is “nigger kill the nigger” and where in my own days you heard African American
artistes call their ladies “queens” and “beautiful ladies”, today they are hos
and bitches and somehow it makes them feel on top of the world. What kinds of
girls are excited to be called hos and bitches? – Hos and bitches!
And
then this craze of singing naked, with just a string lost inside the asshole…. Or
this trousers that drop on to the lap exposing the brief that has made thugs of
all black gentlemen. I thought it was the voice that mattered when singing, why
then are singers naked like slots these days? If when we danced like Mc Hammer
in our days my father would say we were crazy, he is very lucky to have died
before the doggy-style dance and now another debasing one, that consists of turning
the back to the audience and going down while at the same time moving the butt
like a propeller, they call it twerking, and it has become so popular that some whom my genaration called queens but who today are delighted to be called hos would drop their little babies anywhere once they begin to hear those hipnotizing beats comanding bitches to flap it or drop it. I sincerely wish I had not been around to see this level of black degradation.
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