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No era brought more fun and frivolity into music than Rhythm & Blues back in the 1950s and early 60s. If you want to feel good, if you want to escape the misery conscious that often pervades day-to-day life then sing: “Take out the papers and the trash. Or you don't get no spendin' cash. If you don't scrub that kitchen floor. You ain't gonna rock and roll no more,” from “Yakety yak” from the The Very Best of the Coasters CD.
It helps you infuse joy and innocence into every day work life. There is a kind of romp ‘n play catchiness in the lyrics but even more so in the music behind the lyrics. Rhythm turns the blues into the playful escapism of R&B. But the infusion of gospel made spiritual transcendence the dominant theme, until Motown came along to give R&B a huge dose of urban realism. Urban realism gradually picked up the flavor of social protest in Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On.
As R&B transitioned to soul, music became more aware that escapism has a price; and, finally, we arrived at hip hop, which seem to say that there is no way to keep it real without facing into the horrors of a life steeped in drugs, booty-ho-thug-violence, or family and community destruction.
It is hard to find humorous or transcendent music with the kinds of infectious beats and brilliant rhyme schemes that give hip hop its power. Perhaps the hardest job in music, and in contemporary life, is to combine high political and economic consciousness of injustice with high spiritual consciousness that there is a place in each of us that cannot be hurt, harmed or endangered.
In music no one seems to have tried harder to combine the two than KRS-ONE on the CD Spiritual Minded.
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