From Broken Glass to Bugattis: Where Is The Urgency In Our Music Today?

-"If you will suck my soul, I will lick your funky emotions", Funkadelic 1970

-"Broken glass everywhere, people pissing on the stairs, you know they just don't care", Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five 1982 

-Uhh, I get cheese, whip sprees, big D’s, but it ain’t Bentley, it’s a Bugatti", J.R. Writer ft. Lil Wayne,    2013

As I've been researching the entity that is The Funk Movement Genre, so many thoughts have fired off in my mind.  When we look at how funk came into existence, we see that it came from blues, gospel, soul and jazz. Both the blues and jazz come from the people. "The people", being black folks, who were marginalized disenfranchised citizens getting by with the bare minimum of what the system had allowed.  Blues, jazz, funk and later hip hop were spawned out of necessity.  The genres were a form of free expression, a breaking of the metaphoric shackles that is the "American standard".  People who had nothing, created something out of that nothingness.  

Over time, due to trends and fads, the essential reasons for a movement's materialization begins to fade or become lost. The pop commercial aspect of the genre takes over and lessens the power behind it.

This has all leads me to the question of "where is the urgency in our music today?" Now that the last great innovation born out of the people, hip hop, has become an over saturated capitalistic beast, what is next? How do we as black people, express ourselves in an authentic way stripped of materialism. How can we get back to what comes from our soul?

I was born in 1978. My generation is the first to be fully integrated post Civil Rights Movement. We are pastiches of our great grandparents, grandparents and our parents who had to endure the shit of white folks in America. So, there is an understanding and rearing the we have from those generations past. We grew up listening to funk and jazz only to hear it re-emerge and reincarnated in hip hop.  The music was diverse in subject matter. Now it is the voice objectifying women or glorifying violence and materialism. The  origins of meaning in hip hop has radically shifted. It is now a tasmanian devil of lost energy.  

I pose the question again:  Where is the urgency in our music today?

How will the music morph into something exceptional that is not tied to capital gain? Where are the collective voices of the "blues" people? 

Funk became the irreverent representative of black people. It was counter cultural and could not be contained. Funk was bred in the late sixties having its hey day in the seventies. Within that time frame, the country was in great upheaval, turmoil. Soul music united the people, but funk catapulted action. Hip hop was active, it was not only innovative, but it was art. All music that black folks have created has been art. Where is our musical art of today? I'm not saying that musical content has to solely be based around politics or social issues. However, I am saying that creating a new genre, style and form of music which pushes boundaries is-in itself-a political statement.

So many atrocities have been occurring to the black community for centuries with no signs of ceasing in 2013. We have become anesthetized and complacent so much that our music does not carry sustenance anymore.  The music's originality carries a different meaning. The music of now degrades more than it solidifies. It is my belief that this is exactly how the white infrastructure wants it to be. We carry it out without thinking about community. We perpetuate it with pride. 

I don't mean to sound cliche, but the Sankofa  adage holds true: "Return and get it". The reason why I as a black woman, am returning to the analog of vinyl is because I am returning to music's past in order to bring about change now and for the future. I'm finding a rich history that was carried in spirit and movement hoping that we as a people will be sparked by music, in a fresh and invigorating way, again.