Monday, November 19, 2012

Music and its Roots in Voodoo

If we were to trace aback to the aboriginal roots of the Blues, Gospel, R&B, Jazz and Rock'n'Roll in America, it would be about 1619 if the aboriginal twenty Negroes were awash into bullwork from a address accustomed in Virginia. Thus began one of the ugliest eras of our history - and a agonizing acquaintance for the aboriginal African-Americans. To accumulate their articulate traditions animate and lift their alcohol in the face of this immense suffering, they angry to the music that had been an basic allotment of their accustomed lives in Africa - and which was, itself, steeped in bewitched ritual and voodoo.

In West Africa, the "professional" music-makers had been accepted as the Griol. They accompanying the affiliated tales and served as the keepers of the tribes' belief and history. Their action was abundant like that of the Medicine Men of the Native Americans. And like the Shamans of our own continent, their art was associated with abracadabra and healing.

Because the disciplinarian had brought annihilation with them from their old world, they were answerable to draw on their own anamnesis to re-create their music, and to advance accustomed items to ability new instruments. The banjo, for example, was modeled afterwards a West African alembic guitar. The white men, with their accoutrements and whips, had the power, so the disciplinarian had to aperture their acrimony and annoyance in their music. Their songs begin homes in churches, juke joints, city squares, and amidst bastille gangs.

With the change of the Basin Blues, a complete aggressive mainly by adversity and despair, the musicians begin a agreeable blueprint to mirror the allure implications that had consistently lived aural the music itself. Consider Robert Johnson, who recorded such songs as "Me and the Devil Blues" and "Hellhound on my Trail." Johnson, who will consistently abide an bewilderment amidst music scholars, was himself afflicted by earlier songs such as Skip James's "Devil Got My Woman". (Remember that one from Ghost World?)

Along with the songs went the classical basin dejection myth: a midnight affair with the Devil at an alone crossroads, affairs your body for agreeable greatness. If the white men of the time who kept these humans in shackles admirable God, is it any admiration that an artisan like Johnson would accept acquainted added "sympathy for the Devil"?

Which brings us to rock'n'roll, that blasphemous complete that owed so abundant to the blues. To my knowledge, Jim Morrison was the aboriginal artist to call rock'n'roll as a ritual with the admirers arena the allotment of the association and the accompanist the Shaman (or "erotic politician"). Morrison generally referred to a Doors concert as a séance, a advancing calm for the purpose of ablution demons and adopting alcohol with the ability of music. This is absolutely what the aboriginal atramentous musicians in America were attempting to do. It could be argued that they - and Morrison - succeeded.

Who abroad in rock's pantheon has believed in music as a affectionate of incantatory magic? The account is legion, but I'll accommodate a sketch. There's Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page and his allure with the archimage Aleister Crowley. A admired aerialist and abecedarian in the abstruse of abundance is Glenn Danzig. His forays into allure agitated with his additional bandage Samhain and such songs as "Halloween", with its burden of "metamorphosis...lycanthropy". Addition song, advantaged "The Shift", was even added explicit, anecdotic in detail the changes one undergoes whilst transforming into a werewolf. It's a acceptable first-person narrative, at that.

Black Sabbath has a song on their aboriginal album, "N.I.B", which recounts a analytical tale: Lucifer falling in adulation with a bitter woman. Addition admired of abundance is an aboriginal Iron Maiden song alleged "Prodigal Son" which is a Faust-like story. The narrator is admonition his adulation Lamia, cogent her that he's bamboozled about too continued with mysticism and abracadabra and now he fears for his soul.

Music does not, of advance - nor should it - consistently reflect the darker base of man's nature. I anticipate that it DOES to the admeasurement that association tries to bottle an bogus brilliant image. This is what the disciplinarian rebelled against, as they were getting portrayed in pictures as dancing blithely to banjo music in the barn whilst the absoluteness of their lives was abundant added appalling. And this is how kids nowadays insubordinate if they apprehend that what our association teaches them does not adapt them for life.

There has to be addition answer, a way to admission added affection and inspiration, and music has consistently provided us with one avenue to get there.

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