how to save the world

Pride Vancouver Festival image from Daily Hive attributed to Public Disco/Facebook

This past week was Pride Week in Vancouver. It’s a great parade and festival, and a celebration of the growing and hard-fought freedom of non-straight (LGBTQ+) folks to be open and unafraid about their sexual/romantic preferences, 50 years after Canada finally began to decriminalize them. It’s great that this has been happening here (sadly, it’s not the case in many other countries) and it’s wonderful that there are now resources to help those who have faced oppression based on sexual orientation to achieve acceptance instead of opprobrium from others, especially their families, friends, communities, and legal authorities. Their fight is, of course, still far from over.

And hurray for the end of third person singular gendered pronouns, that the LGBTQ+ community has been largely instrumental in achieving! Even Oxford now accepts the “singular ‘they'”. Ridiculous that we should have to know a person’s gender before we can properly refer to them in speech or writing.

One of the things they have accomplished is to begin to raise awareness of the dangers of labelling people — which inevitably means inclusion for some and exclusion for the rest. Paradoxically, perhaps, LGBTQ+ people have done this by embracing the labels themselves, and disarming the stigma of them by celebrating them and showing the fear some have of them to be utterly unwarranted.

For those in other groups, the challenge of overcoming personal and collective stigma continues to be enormous. While those coping with physical disabilities are getting more amenities to help them in their homes and communities, the much higher cost of accommodating their “differences” can tax budgets and cause some resentments, and prevent a lot of worthwhile changes that could make their lives better from happening at all.

For those dealing with, for example, addictions, chronic poverty, mental illness and chronic disease, the attitude of most communities has not noticeably improved at all: the stigma remains fierce, programs to support sufferers remain absurdly underfunded, and an enormous amount of misplaced blame, self-blame and denial often makes the situation even worse. These are long-term, intractable problems that generations of effort have largely failed to alleviate.

Part of the challenge for those oppressed by, and those trying to deal with, these problems, are the labels themselves. Few like the label of “disabled”, and even fewer ever want to be called “an addict”, “poor”, “mentally ill”, or “chronically ill”. The labels make their situation sound hopeless, and carry the suggestion that their inability to overcome them is due at least in part to some personal weakness or character flaw (of course, that used to be said, by some, of homosexuality as well).

Lakoff’s arguments notwithstanding, trying to relabel a condition in order to achieve more respect and action for its sufferers is a tricky business. While it is fairer and more respectful to use the term “person with a disability” it is a mouthful, more likely to be inappropriately abbreviated than not.

Some programs for people suffering from addictions actually encourage enrolees to self-label (“My name is X and I am an addict”) and self-blame as a means of accepting primary responsibility for their illness is offered as a means of “curing” them, which is an egregious throwback to old religious dogma, and which, not surprisingly, usually fails. There is, partly as a result of a rush to blame the victim, still a stigma associated even with terms like “diabetic” (the implication is that someone with this label probably doesn’t eat properly). Meanwhile, a person suffering from mental illness, chronic physical illness, or addiction may live in constant terror of being “outed” to their employer or insurer, adding to the anxieties and shame they are trying to cope with.

It does no harm to change to a fairer and less blame-y label — though such labels can be hard to come up with and often don’t “stick” well. “Person with an addiction” or “person suffering from (chronic disease)” are better, but they’re still clunky and conjure up suffering and misery, which most people don’t want to think about. And they conjure up the realization that the only way (unlike the freedom of expression of sexual orientation) the sufferer will ever move from being stigmatized to celebrated is if they are “cured”. I suspect most of those suffering from addiction, poverty, mental illness or chronic disease do not expect a cure in their lifetime.

So if one can’t ameliorate and shift the discussion and responsibility for these social crises by relabeling them more fairly, what might work better?

Two things, I think. First, one can recognize, challenge, and work to undermine, the perceived legitimacy of all labels of collective identity as the abstract, generalizing, oversimplified fictions they are (however convenient and galvanizing they may be in the moment). At their worst (as in “make our country great again”; “those people should go back to where they came from”; “some of my best friends are group x”) they are divisive, code words that reflect and promote hatred, violence, war, theft, abuse, genocide, discrimination and segregation.

Even at their best (“what we all need to do to solve this problem is…”) they are throw-away excuses for inaction, or wishful thinking that denies the reality of how change actually happens.

Pausing before every use of a collective pronoun or label provides an opportunity to stop and fiercely challenge the validity of our assumptions, judgements, beliefs and perceptions about who “we” are, and are not — about who our labels actually refer to, and who they include, and exclude.

Acting on this can be as simple as removing the labels on public washrooms and remodelling them to allow the privacy of each user. Or it can be as exhausting as highlighting all the collective nouns in news stories and contemplating the judgements, myths and hatreds they imply and perpetuate.

Thinking about the generalizations implicit in every collective label and plural pronoun, not only as they arise in one’s own thoughts and communications, but in all our personal encounters and our consumption of media, can be enlightening. Even if one can’t stop using them (it’s probably impossible to do so), one can be aware of just how enormously the generalizations inherent in our language enable, and even encourage, judgement, discrimination, anger, polarization, fear, shame, and finally violence and oppression.

The next headline you read about the “opioid overdose crisis among street addicts” may strike you somewhat differently if you do so.

Secondly, one can fight to eliminate inequality of power, of every kind, by calling it out as the unnatural and destructive force that it is, and then making it a source of embarrassment to those who don’t cede it voluntarily (and it mostly won’t be ceded voluntarily). That means working to strip the respectability and prestige of being ultra-rich, and working to end the outrage of corporate “personhood”). It means fighting to restore historical, high rates of taxation on very high incomes (90% is not too high, and it does not discourage the rich from working), and to reinstate and expand wealth taxes (especially inheritance taxes). And it means treating wealthy tax cheats as criminals, not as clever entrepreneurs.

It means fighting to end classism of all kinds, right down to “business class” travel, and pointing out to those who exploit the benefits of their class gleefully or ignorantly that it always comes at the cost of deprivation to everyone else. Do “business class only” and “for our customers’ use only” toilets remind you of anything from earlier in human history?

It means refusing to acknowledge and respect the “rights” and privileges that come specifically from power (which means just about all “rights”, and most privileges). It means recognizing the self-identified “philanthropist” for what that person is — someone who has stolen wealth from everyone else (or whose parents have stolen it and passed it down) and who now wants fawning recognition, fame and celebration for returning its dividends to the powerless — who otherwise have to use “you fund me” campaigns, the latest form of public begging, to pay for their vitally-needed surgery.

Inequality of power and wealth of every kind is obscene and monstrously destructive, and every act legitimizing it (including almost every financial transaction) enables it to continue.

Battling the inequality of power and wealth is probably even more difficult than challenging the labels we use in our thoughts and communications. It’s hard, if you’ve grown up in our culture, not to esteem those who have wealth and power, not to assume it’s deserved, not to be envious of it. And in our culture, inaction inevitably leads to more and more inequality — with all its commensurate costs.

As with our collective labels, one can start by being aware — of power and wealth inequality, and the misery its continuance inflicts on the powerless. Of power abuse and the inappropriate adulation of the rich and powerful. Of the understandable rage those without power feel every time it is exercised indifferently and unconsciously by those who have it.

Collective discrimination, segregation and hate-mongering could not, I believe, survive the realization of the inherent illegitimacy of collective labels and of inequality of power and wealth. Sadly, that realization will likely not come before this ghastly industrial culture collapses under the weight of its ruinous economic and ecological practices, and in so doing makes labels and inequality the dreadful stuff of history. I’d like to think that, starting over, our human successors will avoid making the same mistakes.

What if you could take the best parts of a good song and amplify, loop, remix and riff off them? Would you end up with a better song? And whose song would it be then?

This is an issue that became more prominent a few decades ago when musicians began ‘sampling’ others’ music and incorporating it into their own compositions. Since then it’s become quite bewildering: You have artists creating mash-ups of many popular songs by adjusting the pitch and tempo to match and then blending parts of each into a ‘new’ composition. You have artists syncing and blending many versions of a song by performers all over the world into a single performance. You have DJs, who started just creating mixtapes blending together collections of popular songs, but then added their own overlays on top, or looped parts of some songs and added them to the end of the original song as a kind of extension and homage, to create “remixes”.

Now, on Soundcloud and other music archives, you can have combinations of the above, to the point the ‘original’ music is almost unrecognizable (and sometimes the original musicians are only obliquely credited or not credited at all). At what point does “inspired by” end off and “ripped off from” begin?

As a music lover, I’ll leave that to the lawyers, since I think the new digital technology that has made all this possible is amazing, perhaps even transformative — arguably the most important advance in music since the synthesizer and the electric guitar.

This is playing out in different ways in different cultures and genres of music, but one of the areas in which I think it’s advanced the furthest is in a genre that I adore: Haitian Kompa music, which purportedly grew out of 19th century Merengue music and which has striking rhythmic similarities to music all over the world, from Zouk (throughout the francophone Antilles and French and Portuguese speaking countries in Africa, notably Cabo Verde and Angola), to Soukous (in much of Central Africa), and Lambada (in Brasil) — lots of musical cross-pollination happening everywhere these days. Dance styles that have evolved with this genre are variously known as Gouyad (Haiti), Kizomba (in Portuguese-speaking Africa), and Brasilian Zouk. The names for the music and for the dance moves are often used interchangeably, so the instrumental parts of Haitian music (sometimes called the hook or the groove) are often referred to as both the Kompa and the Gouyad.

Similarly to the way many musical styles have evolved throughout these countries, Kompa often features a sung section, often a lyrical ballad, followed by an instrumental, allowing the musicians to strut their stuff. When there’s a large band (ten or more musicians is not an unheard-of size), or where new technology allows a smaller band to play over prerecorded material, the compositions can get surprisingly complex, both rhythmically and in terms of bass lines, counterpoint, harmonies and riffs. That’s probably why I find it so interesting, though I confess I was hooked on Kompa/Zouk music ten years ago when I first discovered Cabo-Zouk (sometimes sung in the lovely Senegalese Wolof language) and Ghetto Zouk, which puts its sister genre Rap to shame.

Over the last decade the genre has just exploded, and longer instrumental riffs have opened the door for remixes that often start with just an abbreviated part of the original song just before the instrumental begins, and then layer on additional parts, on top of, and extending after, the instrumental part. Some of the best Kompa remixers will craft loops based on the main instrumental parts of the song (rhythm, base line, melody and harmony instruments) and then add their own improvisations on top, sometimes in the spur of the moment. It would seem remixers generate most of their audiences from live performances rather than studio recordings, though Soundcloud has lots of examples of both.

So, to give you a taste: One of the most accomplished (IMO) contemporary Haitian Kompa groups is Harmonik, and their songs feature rich instrumental backing riffs and extended, brilliant instrumental sections. They’ve had many international hits, and one of them three years ago was called “Cheri Benyen’m” (which might be loosely translated from the Haitian Creole as Baby, Bathe Me in Your Love). Here’s the official video; it’s a nice, innocuous 3:45 love song with characteristic Kompa rhythm and some clever instrumental grooves.

Now see what happens when a duo of classically-trained French Canadian musicians, Jude Sévère (formerly of the Kompa band Zenglen) and Eiffely Bruno, collectively known as Freakeyz, go to work on this Harmonik groove. Check out this live studio session (the link should take you to the 45:40 mark where their remix of the song begins) and you’ll hear, first, a verse sung by Harmonik, with Freakeyz playing around over top, and then, as the Harmonik instrumental part starts at 47:50, Freakeyz lay on their loops of the instrumental parts, and start to jam, live, over top.

And they go on for another 26 minutes! It’s fun and engaging to watch to the end if you want to see very competent, slightly intoxicated improvisers show their stuff. But if you want to see what happens when they really get into the groove, skip forward to here (1:07:50) where they “decide to try something different” on the fly (including swapping instruments), and then, for the final 6 minutes of their remix, they really soar. (Just to show off their talent a bit at the end, at 1:14:00 Jude sings, and Eif plays, a short improvised love song to Jude’s sweetie, and Jude offers a plea to aspiring young musicians to work hard at their craft).

Harmonik (who apparently don’t mind the remixes) have had a lot of their tunes and instrumental hooks remixed: Here’s another Freakeyz remix of Harmonik’s smash hit Illégal. Here’s a remix by Ronald BS of Harmonik’s hit Incroyable, and a remix by BODO of Harmonik’s hit Mwen Bouke.

Two other great remixes in the same vein: Gello Keyzz & SonSon do an almost unrecognizable spinoff of the Ella Mai smash Boo’d Up, and also do an inspired build on Milca’s hit Joue Tululute. Meanwhile skilled Parisian remixer AlexCkj combines with Ralph_MMG and CamKeyz to produce his own original Kompa instrumental Gouyad Addict.

There’s a composer living in Calgary who goes by the name Momento Mizik (Mizik is Haitian Creole for Music), who sells his instrumental Kompa compositions to other artists. Here’s his original instrumental Summer Love and here’s a song called Vou è Mizik La arranged and sung by Ngelz using it.

Another remixer, Florida’s Bensky, is also now writing and producing his own songs, ‘featuring’ known Kompa recording artists. And in them, mixing Kompa with Reggae rhythms!

In all these works, you’ll recognize the same infectious Kompa rhythm (though often blended with other rhythms) with its relatively slow 76-86 bpm pace (Soca music by comparison is usually 100-115 bpm, and club music usually ranges from 120-160 bpm).

I think there’s something magic happening here. Listen to the music of hard-working composers in small, often-impoverished countries with rich musical traditions (Haiti’s Zouk/Kompa, Trinidad’s Soca, Georgia’s folk music). Find what is so universally compelling in each, and amplify it. Trinidad’s Soca music is the basis for the astonishing arrangements and performances of the international Panorama Steel Pan competitions. Georgian film music steeped in the country’s folk traditions is re-crafted into amazing jazz compositions.

And now multi-instrumentalists from all over the world, using music technologies that hardly existed two decades ago, are taking the intoxicating rhythms of one of the poorest countries in the world, that have already influenced and been influenced by the musical traditions of so many other countries, and crafting them into stunning, improvisational compositions that rank, in my opinion, with some of the best new music in the world.

This is the stuff of genius.

Who knows what other discoveries, influences, amplifications, mixes and remixes are waiting to transform the moribund and over-commercialized, over-commoditized world of music (popular and “classical”), take it back from the hacks, the mediocre, bland and derivative writers, and the overpaid “stars”, and fill it, once again, with wonder.