![]() ![]() Of course, it's not always quite that simple, so let's look at more examples: Case study 2: Sounds of Blackness – Optimistic ![]() The rise of the chord sequence It might seem rather obvious to suggest that a rising chord sequence or melody is going to be more optimistic, but that doesn't mean it's not true. Only God knew that Brian Wilson was channelling UK kids' TV from the future to write his best songs. Or perhaps Goldfrapp got it from the masters of wordless interludes. Case study 1b: Beach Boys – God Only Knows Although the genius who composed this had already cemented its glassy-eyed optimistic credentials with the triumphant rise through the first five chords of C major (the happiest of all keys) in the intro. Case study 1a: Jim'll Fix It ThemeĪlmost certainly where the idea came from. ![]() An unhinged falling then rising theremin leads us through a bouncy major-key passage that sighs each time into a more wistful minor chord before those Jim'll Fix It "Ba Ba Ba"s rise back up to the euphoric major passage. However, it's the wordless passage when the drums kick in at 1:20 that interests us here. “We’ve been fighting for this for years.With implications of cult brainwashing in the lyrics, Happiness isn't as simple as the title might suggest. While 2015 will be remembered as a pivotal year in Black radical politics, “This ain’t nothin’ new,” my mom once told me. ![]() Today, many of us will come together singing “We Shall Overcome Someday” with a sinking feeling that someday isn’t coming soon enough. In an imagined conversation between Lamar and 2Pac, the groove grinds to a halt, becoming a distant memory as Lamar reminds us, "In my opinion, only hope that we kinda have left is music and vibrations, lotta people don't understand how important it is." Complex, twisted, and unrelenting from the first track to the last, distrust and depression go hand-in-hand, as the music swerves in and out of its own frenzied funk. However, the most in-your-face discourse comes from Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. While the rallying cry for today’s movement comes in the form of a hashtag, we can identify a powerfully-sustained response from the creative community, including D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, Rhiannon Giddens’s “Cry No More,” and Janelle Monae’s “Hell You Talmbout.” Black bodies were on the brink of extinction, and it is this primal fear that provides the fuel for the #BlackLivesMatter movement. When Bobby Seale and Huey Newton established the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, they called for freedom and power, addressing the most basic human instinct, survival. In the words of Stokley Carmichael, the time had come for “no more long prayers, no more Freedom songs, no more dreams.” It was time to “go for power.” This was low-level warfare raging on American soil, and in was response, a new era of the movement was beginning to take shape. One year later, protests and violence erupted in the West Side of Chicago, followed by riots in major cities across the country. 14,000 National Guardsmen descended upon the scene, and over the course of several days, 34 individuals were killed, with the cost in damage coming to about $35 million. Late in the summer of 1965, a riot broke out in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)" With its simple, yet poignant refrain, and a melody that slowly rises over the third statement of the title phrase, the song quickly became a symbol of hope for a new society, governed by its founding principle of equality for all. At the founding convention of the Student for Non-Violence Coordinating Committee in 1960, members joined together in singing, “We Shall Overcome,” and it was at that moment that the freedom song became officially linked with the civil rights struggle. In 1945, during a labor strike of the Negro Food and Tobacco Union Workers, Zilphia Horton, then music director at the Highlander Folk Center, learned the hymn-turned-protest song as “I’ll Overcome Someday.” As the story is told, she then taught it to Pete Seeger, who replaced “I” with “We.” It was this revised version of the song that Seeger shared with the Center’s new music director, Guy Carawan, who introduced it to student civil rights activists in the 1950s. ![]()
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