Music, The Many-Sided Coin (Originally published on WKRB.co.za)

“True love waits in haunted attics.” – Thom Yorke

“This is necessary. Life feeds on life, feeds on life, feeds on life…” – Maynard James Keenan

To I, it’s about the message. That moment when insightful lyrics infiltrate your consciousness and you know you’re listening to someone intelligent. I have been subsumed by Dub/Reggae for the past seven years. The hunger for knowledge finally took me to the place I feared and loathed the most. Religion. Music can be said to be spiritual, can’t it? There’s a transcendental feeling inside when you hear a bass line that catches your attention, or that steady drum kick, hypnotic, inducing a reverence and love for that band/artist. But music has a dark side to it, too. It can stimulate, nurse and nurture feelings you’d rather keep silent.

Studying Political Science is one of the most dangerous things I’ve ever done, for the world and my self. It enlightened me to the Western mind. It showed me, through access to information, that the West knows what it has done and is doing to the world. The literature is there. Midnite, a Reggae band from Jamaica, speak of artifacts being stolen from Africa. “When (will) the British return the Ethiopian scepter? For the scepter shall not depart from Judah…”

Restitution and reparations are sensitive issues, but once done to a beat, a rhythm, it seems to cut deeper. Yet, even though it does, we still sing the lyrics about injustice, violence, hunger and our search for peace. We press rewind. Are musicians not just a battalion in the revolution’s army? Well Reggae, often thought of as peaceful music, has a dark side too. As an avid collector, producer and DJ, I have seen Reggae’s second face. It’s visage is a patchwork of homophobia, religious intolerance and gangsterism. Weird, considering the fact that Bob Marley, unarguably Reggae’s most famous musician, seemed the epitome of love, tolerance and anti-war. If you listen to Dub/Reggae tunes, you’ll find many a line on shooting, burning or striking the ‘batty boy’. You’ll find many songs insulting the Queen of England for her part in the Caribbean slave trade.

Our music is as complex as we are. The artists have opinions too. As Bob Marley himself put it, “A hungry man is an angry man.” So when service delivery is slow, violence and drug trade is high, what to do? You cut a Dubplate and run it at your next DJ session. Speak, through rhythm and tone, on the issues that you abhor the most. I, for one, believe in accountability. But just because some kid listened to Slipknot before going out to kill half of his classroom, does not mean we need to censor the artist. The music is the message. A message from those artists who know they can change lives with every line and note of a song. We need the voices of dissent and disobedience, so that we may hone our own ethics.

We must not bow to censors like the Film and Publication Board. We need to hear the voices from the other side of rich. We need to hear the drug-battered voice of Layne Staley telling us why “we die young.” We must keep our ears to the ground and hear the cautionary tales of our past and learn the shape of our future. We must not pretend that we haven’t been warned. The message is in the music, and too many artists are out there abusing it. Thus, we must be militant in our diligence to find the most truthful, constructive messages of our time. All that language is, is a translation of breath. Above our lingua lives truth, available no matter where we are from. The ability to invent and re-invent our universe is sometimes just a guitar chord away.

Consider this article a foretaste of my thoughts on this world that we live in. My intellectual locus is music, but what really is outside of music’s reach? Even the deaf love it. I leave thee with the words of The Haunted when I say, “Death lurks where life is cheap.”