I don’t listen to the radio anymore.  As a matter of fact, I haven’t listened to the radio in years.  I regard music television just as I do radio.  As far as mainstream music is concerned, I’ve been out of the loop for quite some time and there isn’t any music out now good enough for me to acknowledge.  At the current moment, in my humble opinion, black music is weak.  Yes I said it, weak.

I say that it’s weak because the passion is gone.  On rare occassions when I do turn the radio on,  I’m bored to tears or even downright disgusted with what I hear.  In every major city the Hip Hop and R&B stations play nothing but the most watered down, fluff, and pointless music that one could ever imagine hearing..  And whenever I turn to BET I see stereotypical images and hear rappers only rapping about how much money they have, drug dealing, pimping, etc.

And of course, the most humiliating thing about the rap video is the use of black women as mere props.  Half naked and put in compromising positions, these images portrayed in many rap videos make us as a people appear unintelligent and void of meaningful passion.

R&B is no better.  I’m tired of hearing sappy cliche songs about sex that leave nothing to the imagination.  Worst of all, there aren’t many young black R&B singers who sing from the gut.  Grown men whining in a feather-light falsetto just doesn’t move me.  Once again, I’m referring to mainstream music.  What happened to the originality?  What happened to creativity?  More and more of our black artists are accepting gimmicks and pop culture’s standards of excellence to help them sell their records.  I guess being yourself and creating a piece of work that will still be relevant after next week isn’t the “in” thing to do.

I listen to a lot of old soul music from the sixties and seventies.  Artists like Marvin Gaye, The Four Tops, The Chi-Lites, The Dramatics, The Dells, and many more.  I listen to this music not only because it’s wonderful but because I relate to it more than the garbage that’s out now.

What happened to the days when men could sing about love and not sound like sissies?  There was something about the pain in David Ruffin’s voice that I feel even now when I listen to old Temptations songs.  Now, I don’t speak of this pain; this hard, gut wrenching sound in the artist’s voice, to glorify the struggles in their life that produced that tone.  But in the painful voice; the moaning, groaning, yelling, etc, is evidence of the artist’s sincerity concerning the matter at hand.

Many of today’s mainstream black artists are mere products of a music industry that operates like a factory.  Labels sign an artist not based on talent but on how cute or marketable their appearance is.  They then assign this rapper/singer a gimmick and throw them out to the public to get us to put our stamp of approval on a puppet; some substanceless artist who probably didn’t even write the song that he’s singing.

I’d love to see black artists begin to seek a true fan base rather then making pop music to reach a fair-weather pop culture crowd that will only celebrate them until the next fifteen minute wonder comes out.

All of today’s black music isn’t lacking in passion and substance.  There are plenty of artists whose music still hold fast to the character and integrity that have made African American music the pinnacle of American music for the past century.  But these underground artists don’t get the airplay or endorsements that the sellouts do.  The fate of our music then, lies in the hands of the consumer.