“Like Licking Razor Blades, Taste The Pain…”
Written by: Slangston Hughes
“All of this music tastes the same. Like licking razor blades, taste the pain…”
--13 of Nazareth
So, according to Lauryn Hill, “music is supposed to inspire”, but in this day and age of New Boyz who be jerking, Lady’s that go Gaga in the night and auto tune ballads that sound like robots having a prepubescent emotional episode, inspiration in the realm of mainstream music is often hard to find. And even though Indie and underground artists are able to often carve out a following a lot quicker and easier now due to file sharing and the overall boom that technology has provided the independent artist, when talking to the average person most of their music selections remain dictated by what they see on the box, and few people are willing to think, let alone actually search outside of that box for something original.
Have consumers of music became like the wolf who licks at the blade until we our oblivious to the taste of our own blood and therefore continue licking until the taste of pain transfers into normalcy? Sooner or later the blood will expire and so will the wolf. Will what we know as music ultimately die out and completely give way to a soulless, lifeless, watered down shell of itself based off industry efforts to label and market an image and a product over quality and substance?
Have consumers of music became like the wolf who licks at the blade until we our oblivious to the taste of our own blood and therefore continue licking until the taste of pain transfers into normalcy? Sooner or later the blood will expire and so will the wolf…
Now, let me dare to oh so boldly take you just a little deeper… What if I told you that the dumbing down of popular music was no different than the dumbing down of culture and society in general, but just an overall effort to keep the sheeple asleep and content to remain living within the matrix (because when you have a formula or recipe things usually come out tasting about the same)?
In the late 80’s and early 90’s when a lot of Hip-Hop music with very revolutionary themes and rather controversial subject matter was being released the CIA took notice at the effect it had on the rise of confidence and self-worth in the Black lower to middle class youth who listened to it, particularly those in between the ages of 16 and 23: a trend that they had seen before and did not what to repeat itself in results. See, the last time you had an influx of young, confident, informed, and inspired African-Americans in this country taking note of their situation and attempting to change it it produced things like the Civil Rights Movement, The Black Panthers, and The Black Arts Movement. Their response then was to flood the movie screens with blacksplotation films and, later, in an even larger and more devastating effort, the communities with crack cocaine. And if you review history almost all revolutions or periods of intense change in a society are sparked and carried out by the younger generation at the time.
The last time you had an influx of young, confident, informed, and inspired African-Americans in this country taking note of their situation and attempting to change it it produced things like the Civil Rights Movement, The Black Panthers, and The Black Arts Movement. Their response then was to flood the movie screens with blacksplotation films and, later, in an even larger and more devastating effort, the communities with crack cocaine…
So, in the early 90’s the government counterintelligence factions did the same thing as a few decades prior by placing A&Rs in positions at record labels whose purpose was to flood the mainstream music market with as much gangsta rap etc. as possible to focus the youths’ minds on a glamorized view of the negative and eliminate balance in the marketplace in terms of content and subject matter. I mean, the last thing they want you to do is start thinking and asking questions about your current circumstances. And the policy is the same for all music “genres” and popular culture across the board: don’t let the people on the bottom become enlightened and aware of what’s really going on around them… keep the masses as ignorant of the matrix that they’re in and happy by feeding them a meaningless diet with zero cultural nutrition, especially when it comes to music…
For you see, music is sound and sound is vibration, while vibration dictates the movement of energy frequencies and your soul is energy, so energy vibrates on a certain frequency. Slow down your mental and they in turn slow down the speed of your soul’s vibrational frequency, literally dumbing you down to a mentally and spiritually stagnant state preventing the individual from becoming aware of their true surrounding and true self. Therefore, in the words of Flavor Flav, you become “blind. You’re blind to the facts.” Call it conspiracy theory if you want, but I challenge you: do the research. Prove me wrong. However, in the end, it is the truth that shall undoubtedly set you free!
