Caribbean Influence On African American Culture

The black community has endured a long history of oppression, especially in the Western world, and for generations it has been fighting back with their own countercultural movements, whether it be art, dance, fashion, or music. Popular music, that is, popular as folk, has been utilized as a tool with which the black community fights back. Much of dub – one of popular music’s most influential practices – that arose following Jamaica’s independence was largely influenced by British colonial practices (i.e. using reverb to represent that historical soundscape and the violence of colonialism, and to suggest its impact is still felt). Similarly, reggae – another Jamaican-originated genre – was the politicization of rocksteady, which effectively

influenced various human and civil rights movements, such as the Cuban Revolution and independence movements across the African continent. The politicization of music coming out of the black community did not cease there.

Jazz, blues, gospel, and African-American folk songs came about during the Civil Rights movement as a form of nonviolent protest. Moreover, as hip-hop began to materialize and evolve in the (largely black and Latinx populated) projects of the Bronx in the 1970s, the genre took upon itself a strong association with the black identity; largely assumed as the music of a people, naturally, its lyrics inherently reflected the beliefs and struggles of the people (i.e. artists like N.W.A. and Public Enemy spoke to class disparity in New York City and Los Angeles as a product of the Reagan

administration). Contemporarily, hip-hop and rap appear to be the genres that most prominently maintain this legacy of political black music; artists such as Common, Kendrick Lamar, and Beyoncé infuse their lyrics and multi-media musical presentations with allusions to the Civil Rights movement and issues that modernly face the black community. In the last few years especially, the music has largely focused on police brutality, the Black Lives Matter movement, and mass incarceration/the prison-industrial complex – black estrangement and alienation from the United States result in mixed feelings of nationalism. Whatever the issue faced – the fight for Civil Rights, the Ronald Reagan era, or the battle to make black lives matter – black musicians have effectively imbued their music with pointed political meaning.
The intersection of music and political activism in the 1960s was a testament to the power music has to inspire and congregate populations in the face of adversity.

The music of black liberation saw an amalgamation of genres; from Pete Seeger’s folky “We Shall Overcome” to John and Alice Coltrane’s jazzy yet insurgent “Reverend King,” the soundscape of desegregation fused the heaviness of African American gospel and slave songs with “jazz courage.” In the mid-early twentieth century, musicians like Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk used sonic dissonance to express the pain of black oppression, yet critics thinly veiled their racism with remarks like “the technique isn’t mainstream enough” – such artistic attempts to share the black experience fell on the deaf ears of white critics interpreting it as noise. Putting a new spin on noise as music, the new free jazz movement played a crucial role in expressing the sentiments of black America. The idea of free jazz was popularized by African-American saxophonist Ornette Coleman in 1960, and involved playing instruments without tonality, a set harmonic structure, or even a beat, allowing the artist to play and create freely. Having access to a kind of freedom at that time was incredibly valuable to black people since true freedom was being withheld from them in their everyday lives. Living in segregation and with the scars of not-so-long-ago slavery, having freedom from European standards of music and freedom to explore their

African roots prepared black people for a mindset to pursue socio-political freedom. The Coltranes’ 1968 “Reverend King,” written in honour of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., exhibited the "shrieking, screaming, and wildness" that music journalist Geoff Dyer called characteristic of John and Alice’s joint career. However, there was purpose behind the Coltranes’ sonic madness: the atonal overblowing in “Reverend King” was John’s intentional and political wielding of sound. It sounded like a scream, and it was meant to represent a scream – the scream of frustration from the supressed and abused black community, living in a country that kidnapped and enslaved their ancestors then decided they were disposable, undesirable, and disregarded their value as human beings. “The established jazz people called John Coltrane anti-jazz and hated the fact that the musicians were experimental,” explained black political activist John Sinclair, but truly, the “established jazz people” were largely white men who detested the fact that the genre was being utilized as a political statement. Free jazz was a disruptive movement, one that used bold sounds that spoke to the anger and urgency of the undergoing racial rebellion, simultaneously calling attention to the black experience and disavowing its prejudiced framework.
When rap first appeared in the late 1970s, music and culture critics mistakenly predicted it would not last, but rap music has grown and reshaped the landscape of North American pop culture. It is difficult to identify the exact origins of rap – some argue it came from the “toast and boast” tradition of Jamaican roots reggae, some say it evolved from the “spitting dozens” banter between slaves in America – but the African connection is clear; taking cue from their ancestors, just as Africans adapted the language of their colonizers to fit the rules and formal structure of the language they carried with them throughout their enslavement, rappers have adapted English to their own conventions and cultural style. One of the earliest and arguably most influential rap groups was Public Enemy, comprised of the passionate Chuck D, the comical Flavor Flav, and the technological DJ Terminator X, whose lyrical style was “the standard by which all political rap should be judged.” The group was active in speaking out against the moral and economic decay of inner-city Los Angeles with songs like “Muse Sick,” “Shut Em Down,” and “Miuzi Weighs a Ton”, using rap music and the public space to promote a version of racial politics washed with a desire for a neo-nationalism – an America that was truly the land of the free for people of every skin colour. When they released “Fight the Power” in 1989, though perhaps initially apolitical, it became an anthem for the kind of resistance that rap embraced. Major themes that the politically-charged rap of Public Enemy, N.W.A., and Ice-T addressed were the social and economic disintegration of black urban life, the combination of joblessness and poverty under the Reagan-Bush administration, the growing visibility of the crack economy and other illicit forms of economic activity, and the intensification of racist police repression/the general erosion of notions of justice, law, and order. The generation that came of age under the Reagan-Bush administration were products of structural changes that crippled the economy in pointedly black and Latinx communities; while Los Angeles, as a whole, experienced economic growth in the 1980s, communities like Watts and Compton faced a deepening of poverty: economic displacement, factory closure, suburbanization, and expenditure cuts to parks, recreation, and affordable housing. To keep the economy afloat, municipal, regional, and even national governments turned their attention to the criminalization, surveillance, and incarceration of black males in a phenomenon known as the prison-industrial complex. Ice-T touches on such content in “You Shoulda Killed Me Last Year” by suggesting that prison is a modern form of slavery, thusly characterizing the subgenre of gansta rap that philosopher Michel Foucault calls the “counter-discourse of prisoners.”