What are you looking for?

What are you looking for?

            When it comes to earning one’s soapbox, there are many different factors which come into play.  To begin with, the speaker must have an appeal to the crowd which they are speaking to.  While focusing on musicians Brenda Fassie and Miriam Makeba, it is interesting to examine why one became much popularized in Western culture, and the other did not.  It also becomes much more apparent how difficult it must be to thrive as a musician, and find the balance between “keeping it real” and “getting the deal”.

            To begin with, music fans respectively enjoy something that sounds good.  As a major fan of music, specifically rhythm and blues, funk, and hip-hop, I love almost anything upbeat, something that gets me moving.  In fact, I sometimes find myself sacrificing my concern over lyrical quality if the melody of beat sounds right.  I even find myself feeling a bit silly because I like a song that may be considered “too poppy” by some critics.  Along with that, I could argue again that there are two parts to a song, the beat and the lyrics, so as long as someone likes one or the other the artists must be doing their jobs. 

            However, in terms of lyrical content and quality, there is a limit to how much I can sacrifice, no matter how good the beat is.  For me, this would happen when the message is displaying something that is extremely uncalled for, something that I was offended by.  I am not going to even be able to enjoy the beat if the lyrics are something that I can’t stomach.  If the message is something that I don’t agree with, I simply would find it my social responsibility to display that by not supporting it.  Being really adamant about it, I may even go as far as to go out of my way to combat the message, and artist by protesting their advance.

             When examining the careers of Fassie and Makeba, I believe that one must contrast their styles to understand the differences in their connection with Western culture.  Because Makeba seemed to find more support in the west when compared to Fassie, one would probably imagine that Makeba related to her western audience much better than Fassie.  This is not a knock against Fassie, but just the fact that certain people found Makeba’s music more appealing.  I would also probably assume that the content of Fassie’s music did not go over as good with Western culture as did Makeba’s, Fassie coming across to me as more of a protesting, problematic voice than that of Makeba’s.  While Fassie’s music might have more substance, that may not be something that some crowds want to hear, and would rather dance and groove to something that they don’t have to think so critically about. 

            I have often pondered the concept of balance in regard to a musician’s career.  Does the musician simply want to make some people dance and have a good time, or do they want to create a message, and get their hands a little dirty.  While they might be doing something more meaningful, they are also inevitably going to lose some popularity, and also support.  Do you want to have a lasting impact on the world, or just take it easy and make everyone happy?  I guess it just depends on where you want to draw the line, and also how much you believe in what you’re doing.