Cool Stuff! no 2 (Black America & South America)

So it’s time for another round of Cool Stuff. The rules are the same as last time—think of three things about the past few cultures that you’d like to pursue, and go pursue them on the web. Then come back to your blog and post the information and your thoughts on it for your classmates to read/watch/listen to. The cultures at play for this round are South/Latin American and African-American music (especially the Blues). This round of Cool Stuff is due by 11:59 pm on Tuesday, January 21.

I’ve purposely waited until after I’ve gone through some your Cool Stuff 1 blogs to post this prompt, because I wanted to check out how you’re doing and head off any problems before we went any further. For the most part, your Cool Stuff 1 blogs have been awesome! I love getting to learn more about so many things. There are a couple of aspects of the assignment that I’d like to reinforce, though:

1. Do post your items to be as accessible as possible. That means embedding videos and pictures rather than linking to them  and making sure that all your links to other websites work. I don’t know why, but human nature is such that even following a link to a different page in order to watch a video is just too much for some folks sometimes. (And by “some folks sometimes” I mean me when I’m on my 25th blog entry of my grading session…)
2. Do remember that you need three different lines of inquiry, and that each one needs, at a minimum, a “hefty paragraph” of explanation. More is always better.

To get you started, here are a couple Cool Things beyond our classroom that I’ve found interesting.

Thing 1: As we approach MLK day, I remember spending  a good amount of my MLK Day a couple of years ago driving a pack of middle schoolers around Spartanburg. At one point after I’d gotten everyone back home, I was listening to WNCW on the radio. (For those of you that might not be aware of WNCW, 88.7, it’s an independent, public radio station based halfway up the mountains at Isothermal Community College, and it’s sort of halfway between an NPR station and a College station.) And the song that came on was one I hadn’t heard before, Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” recorded in 1970.

It was really provocative, obviously being played especially for MLK Day, and obviously rooted in the Blues. So I wandered around trying find information about it. To the Internet! And I found an article that explains all of the background to the song. The history of the song is really striking, in that it’s associated with the Black Panther movement of the 60s and early 70s, which is pretty much the grandparent movement to today’s Black Lives Matter movement. The other aspect of the song that I find really fascinating is that, while it made perfect sense at the time, it turned out to be rather short-sighted, because Gil Scott-Heron had no idea that smart phones would be invented and that every aspect of our lives would be recorded. The Revolution is totally going to be televised, or at least tweeted.

Thing 2: You might remember that after we watched Under African Skies I mentioned that Paul Simon’s subsequent album was Rhythm of the Saints (released in 1990). He recorded much of it in South America with South American musicians, mostly those from Brazil. The first song from the album, “Obvious Child,” was  conceived of by Paul Simon after hearing an Afro-Brazilian drum group, Olodum, that specialized in a heavy drumming style suitable for the samba. Paul Simon wrote the lyrics of the song to match the rhythms of these drummers and then recorded the song and subsequent video with them. Their music is sort of analogous to “Me Gusta la Leche,” an Afro-Ecuadorian sanjuan we heard in class, in that it has obvious rhythmic ties to Africa. Also, it’s just a good excuse for me to foist even more of my love of Paul Simon’s music on another generation of Converse students.