Make America Clap on 2 and 4 Again
Manufactures & ESSAYS
Clapping On Two and Four
By Kalamu ya Salaam
African American approach to performance has many aspects, some of which, such as improvisation and emotional intensity, are frequently cited. This essay will address two seminal, albeit often overlooked, characteristics of public performance in the Black cultural context. The starting time aspect is the use of the music equally a language and the 2nd is the function of performance every bit a means of achieving social stability and cohesion.
New Orleans jazz musician Danny Barker performed at the 1998 Louisiana Prairie Folklife Festival. Photo: Maida Owens.
A Black, or more precisely, African-heritage, arroyo to public operation necessarily includes music. Even with the visual arts, masks and costumes dance, i.east. they are made to motility rhythmically. Indeed, Black music is ofttimes characterized as rhythm-driven.
I believe this rhythm emphasis is both contextual and inherent. Contextual in that Black music came of age contemporaneously with modern industrial developments in America. The recording industry; electricity (plus electronic amplification and alteration); radio; cars, trains and planes; all of these were born and developed during the aforementioned epoch. This industrializing and speeding up of daily life produced a major change in the psyche and emotional desires of Americans.
Audio Role player
Eh là bas performed by Billie and DeDe Pierce. From the album Gulf Coast Dejection. ® and © 1971 and 2000 past Arhoolie Records, # CD488. Used by Permission.
The last of the pre-industrial (and simultaneously, the first of the industrial) music forms was "ragtime"—a piano music that through the use of "piano rolls" (a manner to mechanically reproduce the literal "sound" of the music without the musician having to be present) ushered in the industrial era of music making. In many, many obvious ways ragtime bridges music functioning as it was traditionally done for centuries with the literally new noise of 20th century sounds. Although ragtime sounds stilted and "mechanical" to those of us weaned on modern music, at the time of its inception and development ragtime was a wild, bouncy, and seemingly explosive music.
Jazz performers in Preservation Hall, New Orleans, La. Photograph: Courtesy of Louisiana Office of Tourism.
With its pronounced employment of syncopation, ragtime mirrored the new ways a-coming and suggested a completely new way to make music. Syncopation (and emphasis on the weak beats juxtaposed against a de-emphasis of the strong beats, particularly in the bass line) is ragtime's well-nigh easily identifiable characteristic.
Ragtime peaked in the decades of the 1880s and 1890s, and was quickly replaced by a music called jazz as the most popular expression of Black music specifically and American music in general. In fact, past the 1920s, jazz was so pop that that decade became known equally the jazz age. Jazz as both a music form and an approach to playing pre-existing music forms, introduced non just rhythm innovations, just also harmonic innovations, chiefly through the use of what is oft called "the blue-note." Jazz is famously an affiliation of many ingredients; however, jazz is chiefly a mixture of blues and ragtime devices commingled with a multitude of melodic sources (folk songs from various ethnic sources including English, German, Scottish on the Euro-side and field hollers, chants, reels, arhoolies, line songs, band shouts, and other Negro strains—I specifically identify these as "Negro" because these forms are not simply African retentions, simply more than precisely are African American extensions).
Jazz at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. Photograph: Courtesy of Louisiana Role of Tourism.
Jazz, blues, and their sacred cousin, gospel music, all have a rhythm-device in common: the back-beat. Indeed, the dorsum-beat, a heavy accent on two and 4, is a authentication of African American music and remains dominant as a rhythmic device into the 21st century. An interesting note most the back-trounce with respect to gospel music is the flipping of rhythmic emphasis. In the so-popular flit form, the emphasis was usually ONE-two-three, I-two-three. Just in gospel, when iii-four time is used, as it often is, the practictioners usually handclapping on two and three, thus getting a 1-Two-3, one-Two-THREE rhythm. The dorsum-beat.
Audio Player
Let'southward Go Become 'Em performed by Bo Dollis, Monk Boudreaux and the ReBirth Contumely Ring. Written by Miller-Dollis-Boudreaux. Happy Valley Music, BMI. From the anthology The Mardi Gras Indians Super Sunday Showdown. ® and © 1992 by Rounder Records, # CD 2113. Used by Permission.
None of the other popular musics of the African diaspora (whether from the Caribbean, Central America, or South America) employs a heavy back-trounce unless the particular form in question, such as salsa, reggae, or soca, is a form that was significantly influenced by Black music from America. This absence of the back-beat is distinctive especially given that most African diaspora music heavily uses drums, or quasi-pulsate instruments (steel pans for example). This is a curious evolution that is fabricated even more curious by the fact that for the almost office the drums of the diaspora remained paw-drums and it was in the Usa that the mechanical drum, or the pulsate kit, commonly called the trap pulsate or traps, was adult. So the place where the drum had the least continuity in terms of usage and the direct retention of African poly-rhythms is the place where the back-beat was emphasized and the drum kit was developed!
And then and so the cultural context of industrialization and the specificities of Blackness musical development within the Usa are the general cultural context that sits atop the inherent African aesthetics of music. 1 item aspect of the African aesthetic in music is the use of music to attain trance, or a state of altered consciousness usually induced with the aid of trip the light fantastic. This quality, which goes by numerous names including "getting the spirit," "spacing out," and "being possessed" is a desired upshot and non an accidental by-product of Black musical production. In other words, the music is designed to modify the consciousness of the audience. Moreover, the audience is never seen as a voyeur, who silently looks on, but as a participant, whose physical interaction with the musicians is necessary in club for the music to attain its purpose of elevating, or transforming, both audience and musician.
From this perspective it is easy to empathize Blackness music equally a social force. I propose we take this understanding a step further. Start, permit us look at the music every bit language and second as a social stabilizer.
The majority of African Americans are descended from peoples of West and Cardinal Africa, from peoples whose spoken language was oft tonal and for whom singing accompanied most every aspect of daily life—particularly work and ritual activity. The American insistence that the Negro speak English and the American prohibition confronting the utilise of African languages would seem to mitigate the retention of tonality as a part of language, but again, similar to the emphasis of the back-beat in a culture where the pulsate was outlawed, tonality is asserted every bit a prominent characteristic of Black music. Specifically, instrumentalists adult techniques to make their horns sound similar they were talking, singing, or laughing while simultaneously singers adult techniques to make their voices audio like instruments. In essence, that which was suppressed reappears every bit a dominant feature.
Moreover, in terms of representing the attitudes and psychological land of its makers, Black music carries an emotional breadth and depth rarely found in written literature, whether that literature be text or composed music.
Black music is a language of the lived feel, a fashion to communicate to the world and with each other, how it feels to be so Black (and blue). What is of import to realize is that the very way and structure, the "how" the language sounds is an inseparable part of the content, or meaning, of the language. Or, to quote a folk saying: it own't what y'all say, it's the way that y'all say it. This emphasis on process is not just an emphasis on stylization, just is rather a clear prioritizing of the concrete lived experienced. In this context, the whole self is celebrated, non just ideas, just body and soul, ideas, and emotions.
But beyond, this emotional wealth, in that location is the greater truth, Blackness forms of making music are not an finish in themselves, but a means toward the end of achieving social cohesion. Under the influence of the music, all the participants are first brought to a land of unity via the rhythm—or equally they say in church building, if you can't sing, at to the lowest degree pat your foot and keep fourth dimension. While some may minimize or ignore this aspect, every trunk literally moving (clapping, pes-patting, etc.) on the ane is a sine qua not.
To listen to music without moving is not to be involved in the music. Fifty-fifty the most avant garde of free jazz generally invoked a physical response if no more than swaying to the underlying pulse of the music. I suggest that this aspect of collective motility, the individual getting in tune with the group, is a significant characteristic; and, of grade, the use of poly-rhythms and poly-phonics allows the individual to make a unique contribution to the collective, thereby achieving both unity and individuality. Indeed, Blackness music is the well-nigh democratic American artform in that it successfully stresses both the collective and the individual at the same time.
From a psychological standpoint the music offers i the opportunity to identify oneself as a part of a larger social group and simultaneously to distinguish oneself as a particular individual within that group. Thus, Black music is the perfect embodiment of American social values almost often idea of in political (democracy) or economic (free market) terms, only values which also accept aesthetic corollaries.
The embodiment of autonomous ethics forth with technological progressiveness—Blackness music has always been at the forefront of using and creating technological innovation in terms of "how" to make music, whether one wants to talk about instrumental techniques and innovative approaches to playing an instrument, or talk nigh the use of machines (from the levers and pulleys of the trap drum kit, to the computers and midi-based equipment of rap and pop music product)—is precisely what has made Black performance in music the almost popular and almost influential operation style worldwide.
Why do so many people like Black music? Because it is hip! Why is Blackness music and so hip? Because it simultaneously draws on the about ancient of traditions while utilizing the latest technological advances available, and all while emphasizing both social cohesion too equally private development-which, not surprisingly, is basically a working definition of hipness.
Source: https://www.louisianafolklife.org/LT/Articles_Essays/clap_on_2_4.html
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