Contrary to popular belief, some of the most heated debates between revolutionaries are about music. People with the supposedly unlikely dream of changing the whole world love talking about music. Perhaps this is because when you’re listening to music, the whole world seems to be summed up for you in an earful of melody and rhythm.
During the 1920s, musical artists close to or in the Communist Party USA were debating the most effective music to accompany the militant strikes, shut-downs, and factory occupations that were happening as a result of their organizing efforts. According to the book Folk Music and The American Left by Richard Reuss, composers like Charles Seeger (Pete Seeger’s father) were arguing the position that folk music—although popular—was largely apolitical and was not a suitable vessel for revolutionary messaging. It was considered apolitical at the time. They argued that the style most suited to revolution was a more symphonic approach, reminiscent of the Romantic Era music that bore the Internationale. After all, this was the music of the European left, where revolutions were happening. The folk music side of the debate was a logical one—folk music was the music that the people were listening to. This is where they needed to be. Composers like Charles Seeger were eventually won over and became an advocate and producer of revolutionary folk music.
This same debate was happening in the 1990s among folks looking for a way to connect hip-hop music with social movements. The argument was that a certain style of hip-hop—the hip-hop that most people listened to, the hip-hop with more of a blues or funk aesthetic—was base and ignorant, and that the more jazz-influenced aesthetic lent itself to a certain consciousness. I never agreed with this argument, as many of the artists who fell into the conscious hip-hop category talked about the same things gangsta rap did, but with a different style and with less substance about the trials and tribulations of life. Furthermore, folks like Ice Cube were making some of the most politically revolutionary music of the early 1990s, but were called “gangsta” simply due to their funk/blues aesthetic. Later, the group Dead Prez would prove the conscious crowd wrong by making the song “(It’s Bigger Than) Hip-Hop,” which combined Southern-style crunk aesthetic with lyrics about “getting the po-pos off the block.” The song was played all over the country—on radio, in clubs, in Delta 88s and coffee shops.
I’ve heard much talk from radicals about how we must create a new revolutionary culture, as if the problem with the culture that people are consuming is not the culture, but the style. I’ve been to countless meetings in which people were consumed with how to create drum circles in certain neighborhoods as a service to the community, while overlooking the fact that ten to twenty people gathered every day by the car with the loudest system and danced or rapped with the music. This schism existed in the 1960s and ‘70s as well, of course, with some believing that music wasn’t really revolutionary unless folks were dressed in dashikis and playing congas.
The gist of the argument has to do with what people see as the primary need in the community. Do people need a cultural change—meaning, do they need to change their behavior—or do they need to be part of a movement that makes material changes in their standard of living and relationship to the wealth they create? If you, as I do, see the latter as the answer, then you understand that the culture that exists is the one we need to harness. The aesthetic is fine. It’s the content that needs changing. Yes, there are revolutions and rebellions happening around the world, and we can be inspired by that—but we need to identify with ourselves, as we are now, as powerful vessels of change. Cultural change is guided by material change.
The Black Panther Party was also of the mind that material change was what was needed. The Black Panther Party put forward a serious class analysis that didn’t waste time with the idea that changing the culture was the key. So, it follows logically, that when they decided to have a band, it would be a funk band. The Lumpen took the music that black folks in the United States were listening to at the time and changed the lyrics to make revolutionary agitprop grooves. The Lumpen’s music, like the Panthers themselves, pointed to the idea that there is no need to call on the us we could be, the us that we are just needs the right map and the right tools. Rickey Vincent just put a very important part of the map in your hand.
—Boots Riley, Oakland, July 2013