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The irresistible appeal of Black individuality - where has all of that gone?

The very people who blazed our path to self-expression and pioneered a resolutely distinct and individual voice have too often succumbed to mind-numbing saneness and been seduced by simply repeating what we hear, what somebody else said or thought and not digging deep to learn what we think or what we feel, or what we believe

Now it is true that the genius of African culture is surely its repetition, but the key to such repetition was that new elements were added each round. Every round goes higher and higher. Something fresh popped off the page or jumped from a rhythym that had been recycled through the imagination of a writer or a musician. Each new installation or the imprint of our unquenchable thirst to say something of our own, in our own way, in our own voice as best we could

The trends of the times be damned. Thank God we've still got musicians and thinkers whose obsession with excellence and whose hunger for greatness remind us that we should all be unsatisfied with mimicking the popular, rather than mining the fertile veins of creativity that God placed deep inside each of us.

(Michael Eric Dyson).



Joshua, TCC