Assez, Assez, ASSEZ!

In my profile, underneath "Favorite Music" is the phrase: "R&B before it died." I mean it partly in jest and partly not. In my opinion, R&B music, as I've come to know it, truly has died. With the exception of a few songs here and there ("Rude Boy," "Deuces," etc.), what constitutes today's R&B music has very little to do with the "rhythm and blues" sensibility that used to place it into a class by itself. For all intents and purposes, today's R&B is basically pop music sung by former R&B artists.

Music producers of today just don't seem to value the art of good instrumentation. They literally combine insipid riffs played from several synthesized instruments (bass #6, piano #22, etc.), throw in a basic drumbeat, and voila--a song has been produced! With such a lazy attitude towards the instrumentation, I won't even bother holding my breath for groundbreaking lyrics that inspire self-reflection and change. That pipe dream died somewhere between India Arie's "Video" and this nonsense.

Back in the late 90's Lauryn Hill told us "MC's ain't ready to take it to the Serengeti." Well, today's MC's seem even less ready than before. But to be honest, at the time that Lauryn opined this sentiment, I wasn't really ready to take it there either--at least, not in the sense of truly listening to her songs' Afrocentric themes and learning from them.

I wasn't ready to hear Lauryn speak about Menelik and the other African czars who kept it "civilized" in "Forgive Them Father." I literally couldn't hear her call to the "bredren" and "sistren", telling us to "come again" and elevate ourselves above the self-destructive, single-minded pursuit of "that thing." Likewise, I wasn't ready to take the journey with Speech to revisit the ghosts of our painful past to understand God's plan for us. I was among those who didn't know what Caron Wheeler meant when she told us to "follow good feeling through and let the superficial pass [us] by, living in the light." And I wasn't ready to chant with Les Nubians at the end of their song "Desolee," crying "Enough! Enough! Enough!" to all the people in developed nations who turn a blind eye to Africans' suffering.

Assez de faire semblant pour lui qui sait dit intelligent, ses geants sans sentiments. When Les Nubians first came onto the scene with "Makeda," I was ready for their French answer to the American-born R&B music genre. I was so ready that I spent a year learning French, just so that I could sing songs like "Sourire," "Princesses Nubiennes," "Bebela," and "Desolee" and learn the meaning of lyrics like the one heading this paragraph (which translates roughly to: "Enough pretense on the part of those who call themselves intelligent--giants without feelings").

I was heartened by Les Nubians' attempt to reach out to Americans in the African diaspora and share their stories from an Afro-French perspective. I appreciated their efforts to marry intricate beats and refined instrumentation with inspirational messages of Pan-Africanism, spirituality, and connection with their African roots. But while I was ready to appreciate all of this, I wasn't ready to really hear it. After translating the lyrics to "Desolee" along with "Demain," and comparing them to Les Nubians' only English-language track, "Sugar Cane," on their debut album, Princesses Nubiennes, I could recognize the connections among the different songs' tales of oppression, exploitation, and suffering in Sub-Saharan Africa, but I didn't take it seriously. I thought the subject matter was esoteric and something only people living in Africa (where Les Nubians were partly raised) or Pan-Africanists like Fugee and Soul II Soul alums would harp on. Basically, I was ignorant. I didn't realize that imperialism is alive and well today, even as we transition into 2011.

Embarrassingly, it took a mainstream publication like the New York Times to finally jolt me out of my (willfully?) ignorant stupor. In one of their recent articles, a reporter detailed how Malian farmers are being displaced by foreign investors whose only intentions are to till the land and produce food for their own countries. Raping and pillaging the Motherland is nothing new. I know this. I'm aware of the atrocities surrounding blood diamonds and other "conflict minerals," the rationale for fair trade, and the other casualties of developed countries' hegemonic pursuit of wealth and power. But I still couldn't help but be struck by this article, especially after reading the callous remarks of the Malian officials who said the foreign investors would actually make something useful and productive out of the arable land, despite the fact that most of the spoils would be exported out of the country. These officials had little to say about what would become of all the displaced rural inhabitants and their livelihoods.
I've heard of corrupt government officials in Africa who live high on the hog at the expense of their people, but something about the sentiments of the Malian officials in this article seemed to really affect me. After all this time, I finally get it. So along with the accounts of yesteryear detailing the corruption and oppression caused by Idi Amin and other African dictators, I now have this NYT article as a modern-day account to point to when I hear these lyrics in "Desolee" (translated):

Chaos organized by the law and its soldiers. Men and women condemned under oligarchic rule. They design their schemes and sinister plans, already lost before having the chance to effect positive change.

I wasn't ready to hear lyrics like these before, but I'm ready now. I'm ready to hear calls to arms like "Desolee," with its melodious lyrics harmonized over captivating instrumentation that commands your attention long enough for the words to sink in and resonate (sooner or later). I'm ready to groove AND learn what these crooning scholars have to say about the state of the world as they see it. But where are the Nubians, Lauryn's, and Speech's of today? Where are the songs that speak on today's stories of struggle and oppression? The refrain in "Desolee" ends with the following sobering truth: "Sorry to break it to you, but the powers that be know how substandard our living conditions are. They won't do anything about it, but they know that we're struggling and we'll always be struggling." Michael Jackson put it more simply by saying, "all I wanna say is that they don't really care about us." That was in 1995. Does anyone have anything to say in 2010?

In Lauryn Hill's song "Superstar," she challenged late-90's recording artists, saying "music is supposed to inspire, so how come we ain't gettin' no higher?" I wonder the same thing. Why aren't any of the mainstream acts trying to infuse any kind of wisdom, spirituality, or cultural pride into their music? It can't be that difficult. I'm not asking them to elevate themselves to the level of Lauryn who "sparred with stars and constellations, then came down for a little conversation." I just want something half-way inspiring. They can even be lazy about it and just slap a modern-day spin on the refrain from Sounds of Blackness' "Optimistic" (the one that goes "You can win as long as you keep your head to the sky." And, no, that rebellion-promoting "Whip My Hair" doesn't count either!)

As with my former, less enlightened state of mind back in the day, today's youth may not be ready to hear the intended messages in the lyrics of "conscious music," but you never know when and how those pearls of wisdom might blossom in the young listeners' minds and what kinds of calls to action they might one day inspire.

I'm so sick and tired of the vapid noise permeating the airwaves today--noise that doesn't elevate us, but debases us and makes us ignorant and soulless. As all of these thoughts run through my mind, the ending refrain of "Desolee" takes on a new meaning:

Assez, assez, assez de suffrance.
Assez, assez, assez de l'ignorance.
Assez, assez, assez de misere.
Assez de pouvoir.

Translated it means: Enough, enough, enough suffering. Enough, enough, enough, ignorance. Enough, enough, enough misery. Enough power.

Yes, to the people in power causing all the suffering and misery in the world and paying these "superstar" entertainers to make empty, meaningless music that distracts us and keep us ignorant of your organized chaos:

Enough, enough, ENOUGH!