Awungilobolele. Udokotela Shange Namajaha. 1986. Shanachie.

  Rhythmic intensity, coupled  with rural blues, gives truth to the illusion that poverty is a mountainous stillness; it’s an adjunct of political will, and it moves with the snail’s pace, dim-wittedness of a Texas politician plotting his next gerrymandered district. The dense concentration of human will impounded in the plague cloud of poverty generates so much energy that, inevitably, sparks fly from its vast array of aggregate cultures; the ghettos, barrios, trailer parks, favelas, the South African townships. You can hear that mysterious power come to life in the brilliant guitar riff that opens Awungilobolele, the lead track from 1985’s great Earthworks compilation record, The Indestructible Beat of Soweto. The alarming, arresting quality of that riff, especially as it transitions into the groove that becomes the song’s central motif, binds you at once to the unifying majesty of great pop art; the belief that the human soul is a jukebox and, if yours is properly tuned to receive the world’s incoming signals, you will survive the blights of poverty and loneliness that cycle like bad weather throughout a lifetime. How can your paltry anxieties and stress even begin to cohere when beauty like this emerges from apartheid-era Johannesburg? Yet fear and all of its damaging agents persist; rock and roll isn’t an escape from reality, but, for many of us, its preferred entry point. As we inch deeper and deeper into the impending apocalypse culture imagined for us by a minority of avaricious holders of all wealth, it’s possible that we’re losing the will to sanely parse our emotions in the concerted effort to reclaim our humanity, with only a fraction of the creative élan and brio of artists once imprisoned by economic and social injustice. The great impediment is American cynicism, that overload of dishonesty and bias we often mistake for confident certainty. It’s our most pernicious, metastasized national trait, the one that ruins intelligence, reducing it to a sputtering, lubricant starved engine of self-interest. The dehumanized jukebox of the Party machine. From the 1986 Shanachie compilation LP The Indestructible Beat of Soweto.

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