N o t e s
O f
A
N a t i v e
M a n
S u i t e

O t a c í l i o M e l g a ç o

dedicated to James Baldwin

[duration 47:42] all rights reserved

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The artist Otacílio Melgaço has two official curators in the virtual world. A curator (from Latin: ´curare´, meaning ´to take care´) is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, keeper of a cultural heritage institution (e.g., gallery, museum, library or, as the present case: sound archive) is a content specialist charged with an institution's collections and, highlighting the context in force here, involved with the interpretation of personal (heritage) material. Both, Mr. Paz and Mr. Campbell, are, therefore, reviewers of the Melgacian works. To learn more about their missions, tasks, assignments and responsibilities by means of valuable informations regarding the compositional process, the performative rhizomes and other special features, just click the following link: otaciliomelgaco.wixsite.com/preamblebypsp
(O.M.Team; P r e l u d e)

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"A Suite.

An ultimate anti-racist sonic saga.

Otacílio Melgaço embraces the Blues.

[Blues is a genre and musical form originated by African Americans in the Deep South of the United States around the end of the 19th century. The genre developed from roots in African musical traditions, African-American work songs, spirituals, and folk music. Blues incorporated spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants, and rhymed simple narrative ballads. The blues form, ubiquitous in jazz, rhythm and blues and rock and roll, is characterized by the call-and-response pattern, the blues scale and specific chord progressions, of which the twelve-bar blues is the most common. Blue notes (or ´worried notes´), usually thirds or fifths flattened in pitch, are also an essential part of the sound. Blues shuffles or walking bass reinforce the trance-like rhythm and form a repetitive effect known as the groove.

Early blues frequently took the form of a loose narrative, often relating the troubles experienced in African-American society. Many elements, such as the call-and-response format and the use of blue notes, can be traced back to the music of Africa. The origins of the blues are also closely related to the religious music of the Afro-American community, the spirituals. The first appearance of the blues is often dated to after the ending of slavery and, later, the development of juke joints. It is associated with the newly acquired freedom of the former slaves. Chroniclers began to report about blues music at the dawn of the 20th century. The first publication of blues sheet music was in 1908. Blues has since evolved from unaccompanied vocal music and oral traditions of slaves into a wide variety of styles and subgenres. Blues subgenres include country blues, such as Delta blues and Piedmont blues, as well as urban blues styles such as Chicago blues and West Coast blues. World War II marked the transition from acoustic to electric blues and the progressive opening of blues music to a wider audience, especially white listeners.]

Otacílio embraces the Blues but melgacianly.

Dedicated to one of the men who most reflected on racism. Dedicated to one of the men who most had his brilliant effort for the awareness of so many people around the world about how Afro-descendants were ´castrated´ in truculently and ubiquitously prejudiced societies: Mr. Baldwin. That also bequeathed us sparks of what the future could be, it must be. In effect, ´there is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.´

And now, ´Notes of a Native Man´. Practically a Triptych. [The title and subtitles allude directly to James' works. Meticulous ´keys´ are found in the microscopic changes, I suspect.]

P a r t O n e: Another Land / No One Knows My Name >> Genesis. Melgaço recreates the African roots of Black People - nature forces, rich in tradition and legacy. Of which we´re all scions. He resorts to a jungle environment, and the powerful presence of percussive layers. I have the impression that Otacílio creates heterodox counterpoint sets between the drums. Everything is vivacity, strength and enchanted kineticism. Frantic flutes and electronic interventions underscore this. A passage of anamnesis, there are quotes to previous works of O.M. in view of the fact that he, from time to time, does not give up on alchemizing the past even as an allusion to how we are (or should be) always rebuilding ourselves as beings and cultural beings. Gradually, however, the pace slows down. Both disturbing noises and audible undulating perceptions simultaneously (as a trance) suggest the debilitating deconstruction of such modus vivendi, culminating in what would consequently be the exhausting voyage on (now) slave ships. A process of implacable subdual and the trafficking to countries like the USA, where the honoree was born (it could be Brazil, where Melgaço was born). The ominous culmination probably symbolizes the arrival to the bitter destiny;

P a r t T w o: The Substantiation of Things Not Seen / Just Over My Head (S-t-r-a-n-g-eF-r-u-i-t) >> The conditions of penury, discrimination, violence for such people who were treated as soulless beings, below the condition of humans. Throughout this section, in the background we hear phantasmagoric bluesy voices: a simulacrum of suffering and death which were accumulating chronologically and spatially. Such tortured people (marketed as beasts, or worse, as inanimate creatures) were already spectral but still alive! Rarely had an artist been able to capture this. O.M. did it. Shortly thereafter, one of the most typical instruments of the Blues arises, the harmonica. It becomes a kind of litany.

Two words are repeated twenty one times (as Otacílio already reported in an interview, ´in analogy to twenty-one Hesperian centuries: therefore, stating the past, situating the present and warning the future´): ´Strange Fruit´. An extended figure of speech linking a tree’s fruit with lynching victims.

Black men hanged in arbors ...

The name of a poem written by teacher Abel Meeropol and published in 1937. It protested American racism, particularly the stringing up of African Americans. Such had reached a peak in the South at the turn of the century, but continued there and in other regions of the United States. According to the Tuskegee Institute, 1,953 Americans were murdered thus, about three quarters of them black.

Approaching the final minutes (besides a dense oscillatory tension), a camouflaged organ emerges, perhaps metaphorically signaling the elevation of souls who have paid such a high price for the torturous existence of their bodies. However, the ghostly voices in the depth never cease to sound: are endless, eternal. Echoes of a lesson we should never forget;

P a r t T h r e e: The Fire Now! / Go Proclaim it on the Mountain >> We have reached a new scenery: the abolition of this which is one of the more hideous misconceptions that mankind already perpetrated, the slavery.

Verily, much more than that. Melgaço makes use of the free jazz (denomination that has rarely been so well applied) to bring to the fore the fighting and liberation not only of the captives (in the last decades of the nineteenth century) but of their descendants for the reason that the racism itself is not extinct after the abrogation. The Serpent's Egg never came to be destroyed. Despite the anti-discriminatory legality today, we have knowledge of how much racialism, extrapolating the ´officialism´, still persists or in
an explicit ...

(check out how a white and a black man get very different treatments from many cops in the USA and around the world - including, with extreme shame, Brazil or investigate how much there´s of quantitative presence of the black ethnic in the media in general and corrobore the meager representation that Afro-descendants have)

... or veiled manner

(check out the contrasts that exist whenever a white and a black man compete for the same job or when they try to rent the same dwelling).

Musically, another impactful anamnesis, another challenging assemblage. Combative metalic densities based on trumpets, saxophones, trombones ... are supported by the striking rhythmicity of impetuous drums. A intense frictional ambience! Including here, for a long and long time, the insurgencies, affirmative actions and hard struggle - in all ambits - for the conquest of just entitlements. A thorny path that´s still being pursued till this day/age and, unfortunately, it´s not known when will fully reach its deserved goal.

This could be the coda of the sound Piece. A deed that has not finished but at least already has the Afro-descendants as voices heard in the historical proscenium. Withdrawn from invisibility (that ached in the flesh, ensanguined raw), with the right and duty to be heard.

But subsequent to the necessary and undelayable clash; after the statement that the times of subjugation should be behind (although much still remains to be conquered), another typical vehicle of the Blues wins turn: the acoustic slide guitar. From that rite of passage and by the aura that emerges as an epiphany: Otacílio perchance declares himself optimistic. At least a hopeful realist. The guitar sounds like a mystical instrument, almost of an oriental character. One of the authenticities of Melgaço, always syntactically reinventing timbristic contexts. Hence we´ll arrive at a modern version of the bluey style (through the peculiar optics of O.M.: between surreal and sidereal), added wah-wah double bass and drums. As an airing bluish stage.

We must delve a little deeper into this question: we´re facing a projection of the composer and multi-instrumentalist. Would it be the exhibition of a commendable desire that will only become reality (as it has happened with some diseases) when actually vanquished any vestige of racism on the face of the earth? Pure utopia? As in Steve Lambert's statement: ´Utopia translates to not place. Utopia is not a destination, but a direction' and, do not be deceived, we are talking about palpable directions. Could it someday be that way? Realism and hope. Probably the realistic silhouette says No, yet the hopeful one also deserves a visage. It´s no coincidence that, in the last few bars of the Suite, the string instrument resounds quasi solo, definitively instituting a transcendent, metaphysical perspective. Which does not deviate from concretion, but makes it less prickly.

[Notice the acuity of O.M.: the name of the work looks like a crown of thorns on the head of the figure of Paul Klee that appears in the cover of the album. Nevertheless (the title of the original painting is Black Prince) it can also be a crown notwithstanding made of golden ornaments, resplendent arabesques; attribute of native royalty, why not?]

That's because there´s the collateral crescendo of subtle winds instruments (as in ancient times, made of animal horns) and, apotheostically, children playing. I think Melgaço's message is explicit: they are no longer black or white, yellow or red; are simply human beings. Yes, here is the directive message: if we crave that, even in the far future, forthcoming generations no longer have - allow me the metaphor - ´the racism in the DNA´ (and, regrettably, there are innumerable mechanisms to have it always grafted - at any time of life and history -); ... if we crave that forthcoming generations no longer have ´the racism in the DNA´, we must reinforce our view that such triumph depends on each of us and now. View and especially attitude. Just as in the culminating statement of James Baldwin: ´I´m not a nigger, I'm a man.´ This is it! Apart from apartheids. Simply human beings. And together.

[An ideal interlude to reiterate that raceS (hypothetically configured, among other topics, by skin color) do not exist. Biologically, there´s only one: the human (race). Science gives us full support to affirm this. Any attempt to make feasible the racism (in the theoretical field or empirical, functional) is a factional abstraction or a criminal practice to take advantage of, subjugate, enslave or annihilate someone who is different - physically, culturally, etc - from those who are such nefarious apologists.]

Last but not least, I emphasize the vocalic presence of the Man
(hu m a n kind) in all triadic Melgacian creation. From African dialects to acute, touching, definitive poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar and James Weldon Johnson. We started with male voices (and older), then female (and a little less elderly), until the young and finally the kids. Otacílio did not allow each vox, at any time, to be gagged or muted. And all of them reaching as apex the beginning of life, not the reverse. Here the ´gargantuan detail´ that inserts the glorious nuance in this stupendous sonic engendre. Native. Nativity.

Allow me a play on words, Ladies and Gentlemen. George Gershwin made from the Blues a Rhapsody. Richards & Jagger, according to themselves (in ´Midnight Rambler´), made from the Blues an Opera. Miles Davis made the Blues less blue; greener. Elvis Costello made an almost Blues. Otacílio Melgaço was far beyond a Suite. Far beyond the Black and Blue(s). ´Notes of a Native Man´ is a Recosmogony." (Pablo S. Paz; Argentinean musicologist)

"James Arthur Baldwin (1924 – 1987) was an American novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic. His essays, as collected in Notes of a Native Son (1955), explore palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-20th-century America. Some Baldwin essays are book-length, for instance The Fire Next Time (1963), No Name in the Street (1972), and The Devil Finds Work (1976). An unfinished manuscript, Remember This House, was expanded upon and adapted for cinema as the Academy Award-nominated documentary film I Am Not Your Negro. Baldwin's novels and plays fictionalize fundamental personal questions and dilemmas amid complex social and psychological pressures thwarting the equitable integration of, among others, the black people, while depicting some internalized obstacles to such individuals' quests for acceptance.

´The questions which one asks oneself begin, at least, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others´, uttered James Arthur Baldwin.

´Notes of a Native Man Suite´ is full of questions." (Caio Campbell; Anglo-Brazilian semiologist and musician)

&

I - Disillusioned by American prejudice against blacks, James Baldwin left the United States at the age of 24 and settled in Paris, France. He wanted to distance himself from American prejudice and see himself and his writing outside an African-American context. Baldwin did not want to be read as "merely a Negro; or, even, merely a Negro writer". He also hoped to come to terms with his sexual ambivalence and escape the hopelessness that many young African-American men like himself succumbed to in New York.

In Paris, Baldwin was soon involved in the cultural radicalism of the Left Bank. He started to publish his work in literary anthologies, notably Zero, which was edited by his friend Themistocles Hoetis and which had already published essays by Richard Wright.

He lived in France for most of his later life. He would also spend some time in Switzerland and Turkey. During his life and after it, Baldwin was seen not only as an influential African-American writer but also as an influential exile writer, particularly because of his numerous experiences outside the United States and the impact of these experiences on Baldwin's life and his writing.

Baldwin returned to the United States in the summer of 1957 while the Civil Rights Act of that year was being debated in Congress. He had been powerfully moved by the image of a young girl braving a mob in an attempt to desegregate schools in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Partisan Review editor Philip Rahv had suggested he report on what was happening in the American south. Baldwin was nervous about the trip but he made it, interviewing people in Charlotte (where he met Martin Luther King), and Montgomery, Alabama. The result was two essays, one published in Harper's magazine ("The Hard Kind of Courage"), the other in Partisan Review ("Nobody Knows My Name"). Subsequent Baldwin articles on the movement appeared in Mademoiselle, Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker, where in 1962 he published the essay that he called "Down at the Cross" and the New Yorker called "Letter from a Region of My Mind". Along with a shorter essay from The Progressive, the essay became The Fire Next Time.

While he wrote about the movement, Baldwin aligned himself with the ideals of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1963 he conducted a lecture tour of the South for CORE, traveling to locations like Durham and Greensboro, North Carolina; and New Orleans, Louisiana. During the tour, he lectured to students, white liberals, and anyone else listening about his racial ideology, an ideological position between the "muscular approach" of Malcolm X and the nonviolent program of Martin Luther King, Jr. Baldwin expressed the hope that Socialism would take root in the United States.

By the spring of 1963, Baldwin had become so much a spokesman for the Civil Rights Movement that for its May 17 issue on the turmoil in Birmingham, Alabama, Time magazine put James Baldwin on the cover. "There is not another writer," said Time, "who expresses with such poignancy and abrasiveness the dark realities of the racial ferment in North and South." In a cable Baldwin sent to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy during the crisis, Baldwin blamed the violence in Birmingham on the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, Mississippi Senator James Eastland, and President Kennedy for failing to use "the great prestige of his office as the moral forum which it can be." Attorney General Kennedy invited Baldwin to meet with him over breakfast, and that meeting was followed up with a second, when Kennedy met with Baldwin and others Baldwin had invited to Kennedy's Manhattan apartment (see Baldwin–Kennedy meeting). This meeting is discussed in Howard Simon's 1999 play, James Baldwin: A Soul on Fire. The delegation included Kenneth B. Clark, a psychologist who had played a key role in the Brown v. Board of Education decision; actor Harry Belafonte, singer Lena Horne, writer Lorraine Hansberry, and activists from civil rights organizations. Although most of the attendees of this meeting left feeling "devastated," the meeting was an important one in voicing the concerns of the civil rights movement and it provided exposure of the civil rights issue not just as a political issue but also as a moral issue.

James Baldwin’s FBI file contains 1,884 pages of documents, collected from 1960 until the early 1970s. During that era of illegal surveillance of American writers, the FBI accumulated 276 pages on Richard Wright, 110 pages on Truman Capote, and just nine pages on Henry Miller.

Baldwin also made a prominent appearance at the Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C. on August 28, 1963, with Belafonte and long-time friends Sidney Poitier and Marlon Brando. The civil rights movement was hostile to homosexuals. The only known gay men in the movement were James Baldwin and Bayard Rustin. Rustin and King were very close, as Rustin received credit for the success of the March on Washington. Many were bothered by Rustin's sexual orientation. King himself spoke on the topic of sexual orientation in a school editorial column during his college years, and in reply to a letter during the 1950s, where he treated it as a mental illness which an individual could overcome. The pressure later resulted in King distancing himself from both men. At the time, Baldwin was neither in the closet nor open to the public about his sexual orientation. Later on, Baldwin was conspicuously uninvited to speak at the end of the March on Washington.

After a bomb exploded in a Birmingham church three weeks after the March on Washington, Baldwin called for a nationwide campaign of civil disobedience in response to this "terrifying crisis." He traveled to Selma, Alabama, where SNCC had organized a voter registration drive; he watched mothers with babies and elderly men and women standing in long lines for hours, as armed deputies and state troopers stood by—or intervened to smash a reporter's camera or use cattle prods on SNCC workers. After his day of watching, he spoke in a crowded church, blaming Washington—"the good white people on the hill." Returning to Washington, he told a New York Post reporter the federal government could protect Negroes—it could send federal troops into the South. He blamed the Kennedys for not acting. In March 1965, Baldwin joined marchers who walked 50 miles from Selma, Alabama, to the capitol in Montgomery under the protection of federal troops.

Nonetheless, he rejected the label "civil rights activist", or that he had participated in a civil rights movement, instead agreeing with Malcolm X's assertion that if one is a citizen, one should not have to fight for one's civil rights. In a 1964 interview with Robert Penn Warren for the book Who Speaks for the Negro?, Baldwin refuted the idea that the civil rights movement was an outright revolution, instead calling it "a very peculiar revolution because it has to...have its aims the establishment of a union, and a...radical shift in the American mores, the American way of life...not only as it applies to the Negro obviously, but as it applies to every citizen of the country." In a 1979 speech at UC Berkeley, he called it, instead, "the latest slave rebellion."

In 1968, Baldwin signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War;

II - Baldwin settled in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in the south of France in 1970, in an old Provençal house beneath the ramparts of the famous village. His house was always open to his friends, who frequently visited him while on trips to the French Riviera. American painter Beauford Delaney made Baldwin's house in Saint-Paul-de-Vence his second home, often setting up his easel in the garden. Delaney painted several colourful portraits of Baldwin. Actors Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier were also regular house guests.

Many of Baldwin's musician friends dropped in during the Nice and Juan-les-Pins Jazz Festivals: Nina Simone, Josephine Baker (whose sister lived in Nice), Miles Davis, and Ray Charles, for whom he wrote several songs. In his autobiography, Miles Davis wrote:

"I'd read his books and I liked and respected what he had to say. When I got to know him better, Jimmy and I opened up to each other. We became great friends. Every time I was in the South of France, in Antibes, I would spend a day or two at his villa in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. We'd get comfy in that beautiful, big house and he would tell us all sorts of stories...He was a great man."

Baldwin learned to speak French fluently and developed friendships with French actor Yves Montand and French writer Marguerite Yourcenar, who translated Baldwin's play The Amen Corner;

III - Music/spoken word recordings by J.B.:

A Lover's Question (CD, Les Disques Du Crépuscule – TWI 928-2, 1990);

IV - Abel Meeropol set his poem to music and, with his wife and the singer Laura Duncan, performed it as a protest song in New York City venues in the late 1930s, including Madison Square Garden. "Strange Fruit", most famously by Billie Holiday, who first sang and recorded it in 1939. The song continues to be covered by numerous artists, including Nina Simone, Cocteau Twins and Annie Lennox and has inspired novels, other poems, and other creative works. In 1978, Holiday's version of the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. It was also included in the list of Songs of the Century, by the Recording Industry of America and the National Endowment for the Arts. Lyricist E. Y. Harburg referred to the song as a "historical document." It was also dubbed, "a declaration of war... the beginning of the civil rights movement" by record producer Ahmet Ertegun;

V - Pablo S. Paz´s Note:

"´It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.´ (James A. Baldwin)

Obviously, contemporaneously, much of what I have argued previously (reports of martyrdom and torment throughout history) has changed.

But exactly how and how much?

Are there any people who feel even now the reflexes of racism and every day? As for that, I have no doubts. This is irrefutable: Yes, day in day out.

For poorer social classes of the population, less learned, less enlightened, less aware of their rights and devices to refute and legally prosecute any discriminatory act against them ...

(let's face it, even if that happens, Justice itself tends to deal quite differently a black man without resources, restricted to the atrophied conditions that the State offers and another citizen - white or even black too or ... but -, opulent, with the best contracted and well-paid lawyers. It´s important to always remember that all social, economic, political, cultural, racial ... problematics are imbricated),

... and so on; this seems to me incontestable, regrettably. Addressing one of the sources of this, as Mr. Baldwin once declared: ´Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black.´ And then a conjecture of mine: we´re talking, at bottom, of a purposive process of (as a matter of fact) ´diseducation´ as (by those who hold the reins of the status quo) a form of control/predominance, with (surreptitiously) a race-related nature too. Not only, but also.

There are, usually anonymous or known topically, average layers of intellectuals, liberal professionals, etc.: prosperous. Yet I believe that, if we are not alienated or too naive, still for them some trace of racism exists and not only in sporadic situations. It´s easy to prove this when a black man (whether an attorney or a doctor or ...) driving a car of a higher value is (immediately) treated as a suspect by the road police.

[In my point of view, and following the focus of what I say, racism does not end when there´s an economic-social ascension. But it's disguised or at most omitted, tolerated. So it does not become extinct, just hypocritically - or by some spurious convenience - changes shape.]

And by the way, what about Afro-descendants who are no longer subjected to this? Persons who, when in childhood or adolescence, were still victims of discrimination, notwithstanding with fame/fortune/power, had this page turned from its biographies. Plus, they will probably keep this enviable situation to their children and grandchildren ...

I think of a number of (influential, prestigiously, materially) privileged while quite punctual ones like some sportsmen (who are catapulted to billionaires stars of the mainstream media), actors (idem) or presenters of television programs (ibidem).

[We have reached the neuralgic point: the question of a person behaving as an example. Certainly good examples are not discerned by skin color. Despite one or other criticism that may be liable, grosso modo, from Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr.; from Mother Teresa of Calcutta to Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela; from (a striking fish out of water, nay, an admirable stranger in the nest, or better yet, the one flew over the cuckoo's nest) Jorge Mario Bergoglio to Desmond Mpilo Tutu ... (remaining only in the ´altruistic harvest´ because many names, from various placing, would make up a long list. Verily, not as long as we would like, currently). Albeit we consider a people that have suffered from slavery and still today with racism, we can not close our eyes to the truth that it´s a very peculiar and special secular context.]

Sportsmen, actors, presenters of television programs ...

The key of my note: what are the examples given by these celebrities (which should serve as some constructive parameter, at least in respect of a humanist position) to most who are still, for the reason we know well, segregated (directly or subtly)?

Due to our conjuncture here, I will be very specific: What about the musicians?

Since we´re in a sonorous state of affairs: I want to focus on the media champions. Pimped musicians such as, for instance (of course, I'm not referring to serious fellas like Afrika Bambaataa, Public Enemy or Kendrick Lamar), certain rappers/hip hoppers that, posing (caricaturedly) as revolted, intimidators, belligerents (glorifying their country, in the eyes of the rest of the world, as a pathetic and morbid Bang Bang Land) while enjoy a life of kings (each being, in appropriate connotations, a new rich or, if you prefer: parvenu, cocktail, mushroom, upstart, vulgarian), they propagate the pitiful image of misogynists, mafious ...; becoming dictators of an ultra-alienating ostentation. If women: I think, just to begin with, in countless names linked to the current - commonly - disposable R&B.

[And here I pay tribute to true masters that helped to consecrate the bona fide Rhythm and Blues such as Al Green, Aretha Franklin, Fats Domino, Gloria Gaynor, James Brown, Little Richard, Marvin Gaye, Patti LaBelle, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, The Supremes. Yes, there would be contemporary personalities to mention but, honestly, few; and I leave it as a challenge for you to identify them as needles in the haystack.

As for the remaining (vast majority), nowadays (unlike those I just, with honor, brought to light), there´s no difference between many marionettes who are called ´stars´ and a brand of soap, toothpaste or, more appropriately, toilet paper/roll/tissue; (perhaps) dunny paper, loo/bog roll, bum wad, 4 inch, TP. You choose the term, dear Netizens. There are for all tastes, at least for those who, at present, confuse art and eschatology.]

Resuming the thread of the skein: if women (and I keep thinking, just to begin with, in countless names linked to the actual - ordinarily - expendable R&B plus most of the pop scene in general), there are many (I write without any moralistic tone) who exploit sexuality to the fullest extent (going far beyond vulgarity; thus pulverizing a reprehensible relation between success - at any price - and objectification of the body). Who, behind a supposed ´empowerment´ (which surely earns them millions of dollars), become mere futile puppets of a masculinized cultural industry. They should learn what empowerment really is with magnificent women (who never depended on a wholesale and hollow sex appeal - therefore of the idolatry of the body and of the ego and of a luxuriously inane being and of the convenient herding - but of their intelligence, sensibility, legitimacy, authentic attitude) like Angela Davis and Toni Morrison. But that would not be very lucrative for them, we understand. For their lives of self-loving megastars (at the same time, smart dolls adulated and sustained by the armies of followers - the system was made to work in this way, everything as planned -). Not be very lucrative for their colossal bank accounts as well.

Thus, it´s not about these high life in a bubble that I speak. It's not about these (I do not generalize, ergo) specific ridiculous VIPs in sweet´n´cloying limelight (who miss the great opportunity to really contribute to the many unrighteous scenarios, exposed in my explanation, being changed - as should. On the contrary, they end up contributing to the perpetuation of all this deplorable panorama, while leading a golden existence from the top of its ivory towers). Not covered by a lobotomized and superficialist fame and by a segregating and hedonistic fortune, I talk about the immense majority; anonymous majority still subject to discrimination
e-v-e-r-y
s-i-n-g-l-e
d-a-y.

My criticism is straightforward: instead of determined Afro-descendants putting themselves as specimen to be observed (and the massive visibility they possess could be precious to this); an example of sense of collectivism, integrity, dignity, lucidity, engagement (not mere personal marketing), generosity (not ´crumbs thrown at animals´), intellectual background (not acephalous body-building), pride (which is quite different from an aggressive and nababesque vanity) etc.; what happens? Based on what I quoted in the paragraph above (a narcissistic microcosm): such men prefer to stimulate the idea that triumph is synonymous with making lots of money (the more the better, without limits - including ethics), having expensive cars, wearing famous designer clothes, own (like trophies) and manipulate (like sex toys) as many women as possible ... Such women, also beyond much of what was said above, prefer to stimulate the idea that triumph is to pretend to be a dominatrix, provided their breasts and buttocks are always within the eyes (and in pockets and wallets) of men (and other women), betting on an indiscriminately consumerist conduct, nurturing a life of foetid egomaniac kitsch glamor, and so on. As if this were the updated face of power and success. And of course, all of them having the maximum of publicity, exhibitionism and sensationalism. Much of the media complex is well fed with birdseeds at the hands of this whole showbiz system. Do not they realize that these stereotypes only reinforce the prejudiced view of black man as a threatening delinquent and black woman as a sex machine? In the end, the ´armed stallions´ and the ´pulpy dominatrices´: are (without and with puns) all manipulating all. An impeccable vicious circle. Nourished by flocks of followers/fans. Voluntary servitude, a contemporary version of? [Read ´Discours de la servitude volontaire´ by Étienne de La Boétie] Flocks that deserve our pity or rebuke, I can not say. In fact, deserve to be awakened.

I get really sad when remember how many struggled for racial emancipation so that some (nowadays), usually powerful and successful (in their materialistic concept; spokesmen of a world that has the disposability as a premise), would turn out to be this mediocre type of beacon. It´s discouraging to know that many children and teenagers will grow up having these dodgy personæ as totems.

Luckily, there are more paradigms. Like me, many still prefer to stay loyal to Mr. Baldwin (and others as admirable as). To all that they symbolize; that they have always defended, erected and supported.
Paradigms which have no expiration date. They are not fads or a lair of profiteers.

I revisit something I've already cited: much of this current problem comes from failures in the educational process. ´It is very nearly impossible ... to become an educated person in a country (...) distrustful of the independent mind. The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.´ To become cognizant of this is an important step ahead. And we can not lose the enthusiasm too. ´Fires can't be made with dead embers, nor can enthusiasm be stirred by spiritless men. Enthusiasm in our daily work lightens effort and turns even labor into pleasant tasks.´

James Arthur Baldwin also declared: ´I want to be an honest man and a good writer.´ Pronounced so simply but everything is said by means of such few words (to a good understander). Whether you are yellow, red, black, white - or blue - (no matter, all of the same human race), here is a great example, a true pharos to be followed yesterday, today and
e-v-e-r."

...for purposes of pragmatism and clear exegesis,
quotes have Wikipedia as a source...

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Between two parentheses...
(Atonalism, Twelve-Tone, Serialism, Musique Concrète... Acousmatic. Eletroacoustic. Magnetic Tape. Expressionism, New Objectivity, Hyperrealism, Abstractionism, Neoclassicism, Neobarbarism, Futurism, Mythic Method. Electronic...Computer Music, Spectral, Polystylism, Neoromanticism, Minimalism and Post-Minimalism...are addressed by Melgaço. Paradoxically New Simplicity and New Complexity also.
Art Rock, Free Jazz, Ethnic Dialects, Street Sounds are occasional syntax elements.
All the possibilities mentioned above and others that were not mentioned are the usual accoutrements of the composer/instrumentalist to establish his ´babelic´ glossary. We can prove this in a short passage of a single composition up along the entirety of a conceptual phonograph album. All distributed over a career and idiosyncratic records. Have we a universe before us and I propose to see it through a telescope, not a microscope.
I propose not handle very specialized topics here. Otherwise would be, with the exception of musicians and scholars, all hostages of a hermetic jargon. Because more important is to present Otacílio Melgaço to the general public and not to a segment of specialists. Faction of experts not need presentations, depart for the enjoyment beforehand. For this reason there is no niche here for intellectual onanism and encrypted musical terminology. The reason for these parentheses is to establish such elucidation. The non-adoption of technicalities leads to more panoramic, amplifier reviews. Are You always welcome. Those who do not dominate contemporary music and are introduced to the world of ubiquitous O.M. [autodidact and independent artist who, being more specific, does not belong to schools or doctrines; artist who makes Music and that´s enough; music devoid of labels or stylistic, chronological, historical paradigms or trends] and Those who belong to the métier and turn to enjoy propositions they know and also delving into advanced Melgacian sound cosmogonies...
I conclude poetically. ´Certeza/Certainty´ by Octavio Paz. ´Si es real la luz blanca De esta lámpara, real La mano que escribe, ¿son reales
Los ojos que miran lo escrito? De una palabra a la otra Lo que digo se desvanece. Yo sé que estoy vivo Entre dos paréntesis.´ If it is real the white light from this lamp, real the writing hand, are they real, the eyes looking at what I write? From one word to the other what I say vanishes. I know that I am alive between two parentheses.
We´re all more and more a-l-i-v-e now.)
- P.S.P.