Environmentalism and Black Expression

Posted October 27 in Afrikan Centered Theatre & Culture, Comments 0

By Shepsu Aakhu

The environmental movement has taken a firm grip on the music, film, and theatre industries. If Americans recycled newspapers and aluminum cans the way the industry recycles samples, beats, remakes, sequels, and revivals, the world’s energy problems would cease to exist. What drives this phenomenon? The quest for marketability, but I suspect you already knew that. What is the cost of this phenomenon? That is a far more interesting question.

American Music Industry

Let’s start with music. Hip Hop / R&B will serve as able examples largely because their transgressions are so egregious. Tune your radio to any Black / Urban Contemporary / Rap / Dusty / Top Forty / R&B station. I know this may seem like a diverse sample, but it is essentially the same music. Listen to the station of your choice for ten minutes. How many songs contain a sample from a hit song that was recorded 5 to 25 years ago? How many of them recycle the lyrics, in whole or in part, from someone else’s hit song? How many of them ARE someone else’s hit, with rap lyrics laid on top? How many contain no original elements (music, lyrics or arrangement) except the name of the recording artist (and I use the term “artist” extremely loosely)? How many sing nowhere near the key in which the song was written? The last question does not so much pertain to my argument here as much as it just annoys the f-k out of me: what is the effect of this practice?

The industry is selling you material that you previously purchased. Usually, you don’t even like the remake. But that doesn’t stop you from bobbin’ your head to the song because you love the P-Funk sample, not because you like Ja Rule, Jay-Z, J-Lo (insert insipid music mogul here). We are conditioned to buy an inferior knock off. This is akin to buying a Gucci handbag for $600 only to discover that it is a Kmart special with a designer label. And yet the damage seems minimal. Who is it hurting, right? We know that the music is recycled, don’t we? We can still shake our ass at the club, can’t we? It’s party music not revolution. Like a revolution, let’s see what’s gonna come back around and bite us in the ass. Where is the creativity? The originality? The expression that is unique to this generation? Where are our novel ideas in this soup of environmental mediocrity?

There is a generation plus that is in danger of having no music that reflects its perspectives, its ideas, concerns, passions (that is unless getting paid can be considered a passion). But the damage is even more significant. Remember that off the cuff comment that I made about singing on key? Can a lay person even tell the difference anymore? Has our collective ear been deadened to the point that we can’t discern good singing from the mediocre? Then there are those who have no idea that a song has a key. Why is JaRule allowed to sing at all? Other than the gorilla artists, those who work the circuit for next to nothing in the name of ideas and expression, who is nurturing us?

American Film Industry

The prime directives of American film:

1. If it’s a hit, make it again, and again, and again. If it was a cartoon, sell it to them again as live action.
2. If it was hit T.V. show, bring it back as a feature film (can you say “The Dukes of fu—-ng Hazzard”?).
3. If the first film made a dime, make three sequels.
4. If someone else’s the film was profitable, let’s make one just like it.
5. [and my personal favorite] We’ve run out of sequels so lets do three prequels.

Does Hollywood even deserve to be thought of as a vehicle for artistic expression when it refers to its own product as a franchise? Spinning out bland, uninspired, assembly line, drivel like McDonalds and Taco f—king Bell? I won’t even bother to go deeper into such an obvious force of creative destruction.

American Theatre

Does American theatre recycle? Without a doubt. In the profit sector (read Broadway and Broadway tours) the result mirrors the film industry. Many production companies in theatre have the film company as their parent company. This is why we get The Lion King followed by The Lion King the Musical. The same can be said for music/theatre, recycling the music of Billy Joel, Elton John, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and Tim Rice. Elton is unique. He gets to triple dip with the soundtrack for the film, the musical, and the musical featuring only his compositions. Then of course there is Mel Brooks and The Producers. He has the dubious distinction of having a film (The Producers) made into a Broadway musical, and then made yet again into a film musical. The agony!

Does non-profit theatre behave any differently than the profit houses? Tough question, brutal answer: not often enough for my taste. Non-profit has a tendency to hedge, that is to say to try and have it both ways. We want to be expressive, but we also want butts in seats. Our solution? Recycle! After all, it’s easier to sell a known commodity like A Soldiers Play, A Raisin in the Sun, The Colored Museum, Fences, For Colored Girls, etc. And that’s why these plays are done dozens and dozens of times per year across the country. The thinking goes something like this: IF we produce three Colored Museums, we can do one Nobody Ever Heard of This. Many companies don’t even bother with the one Nobody Ever Heard of This figuring that it’s better to produce four or five Colored Museums and stay fiscally solvent. Thus theatre’s environmental movement is also in full swing.

Now things get really interesting. Most younger theatre companies (under twenty years old) begin to only produce older material in hopes of garnering their share of the ticket buying public. All of a sudden theatre looks a lot like music. I’m getting Jay-Z in my P-Funk. How can this be a good thing? It is important to note that I do believe there is a place on Black stages for Black plays, regardless of when they were originally produced. But when we almost exclusively recycle, what are we losing? Where are the voices of contemporary Black America? Who is chronicling the voices and perspectives of this generation in this time and place? Have we like popular music abandoned that in pursuit of marketability?

To make matters worse, white theaters have discovered the New Black play as a marketing tool. At first glance, this may appear to be useful. It implies that these otherwise neglected works will find increased stage time and therefore acceptability in a broader context. So what’s wrong with that? Let’s look a little deeper. White theatre companies are seeking to diversify their audiences in the face of dwindling gate receipts from their ageing traditional audience. Foundations are enlisted to aid in this new initiative that will prolong the life of these white institutions. Again, no real damage, right?

White theaters which develop Black works or Black expression typically leave an indelible imprint upon the work. It all boils down to this: a white theatre typically serves a mostly white middle to upper-class audience, the white company says to the Black writer, I need you to make this change and that change to accommodate our audience. During the process of development, the changes to the new play mount. The writer often feels compelled to accommodate the theatre requests, believing (often rightfully so) that such changes are necessary to secure a production. In the end, your Blackness has been sifted through a white filter. An original work of Black expression has been skewed to serve an external viewpoint. We are now in the business of explaining and decoding our Blackness for white America. We as artists have engaged in the ultimate mind fuck, namely: we have put the white experience at the center of our creative process. How can this be a good thing?

All of that to say this: We must MAKE our own art! We must OWN our ideas! We must CREATE new and original work. We must develop and produce ART that serves our needs both as artists and as a community. In an ecological context, environmentalism is a productive force in conservation. With artistic expression, particularly Black artistic expression, environmentalism erodes our sense of self, our creativity, and our ability to be expressive. If we do not endeavor to create a vibrant and relevant voice for this generation, grounded in the here and now, we surrender our collective expression to the commercial marketplace, and perhaps even more destructive, we free it to serve the agenda of others.