R.I.P George Michael and through the year, Prince, Phife Dawg, Maurice white and David Bowie. Sure, there were many others who passed on this year, but none shaped my consciousness as much as those 5.
Let's start with Bowie. Slightly before my time so my introduction as a tail end disco kid, first wave hiphopper and junior funkateer was through one song, 'Fame'.
Fame makes a man take things over.Fame lets him loose, hard to swallow / Fame puts you there where things are hollow (fame) / Fame, it's not your brain, it's just the flame…
Before that, i didn't know white guys could be funky or that it was OK to be as weird as you wanna be. So i embraced my weirdness and chased fame for a while, but found out pretty early in the piece i wasn't cut out for it...too damn shy :)
Speaking of weird and funk, which is hard not to, there was the mystical inspired Earth Wind and Fire headed by Maurice White. A big ass black band with a horn section to die for, costumes for Africa and some of the coolest album art and posters...EVER!
Their elemental ancestral iconongraphy was my first introduction to a non christian philosophy/religion. From there i ventured out on my own, spiritually and musically...
Then dearly beloved, came Prince. As prodigious and precocious a talent as anyone and probably never again. He grabbed the funk and moulded it to fit his own out there personality, which was as weird as it gets...love symbol and slave anyone ?...Oh FUCK YES!!!
Sign o the times : PRINCE 1987
In my mind, Sign o the Times, the video of the concert, was his pinnacle both in composition and performance, perfectly encaptured in glorious video for all posterity!
The shortest distance between 2 points isn't a straight line when it comes to music.
And so it is that people's instinctive travels and the paths of rhythm cross, especially when you're questing with the tribe crossed with Norman Cook...
Q and Phife, as the main dawgs for A Tribe called Quest, were always on their own tip, spearheading an age of rap enlightenment that countered the darkness of reality rap festering in the ghettoes of niggaville USA.
"Keep shit hotter than a sauna / Or better yet, the hormones on your Christian daughter / Hey, I tried to warn her"
heh..nah not really...
One thing that I know for sure, Bad boys stick together, never sad boys...
As a teen i remember strutting up and down the main street of Milton, Sth Otago, ghettoblaster on the shoulder, proudly inflicting the badboy rap of WHAM! to any and all in a town whose staple diet of music consisted solely of psychedelic guitar rock and country ballads.
George Michael didn't change that, but he profoundly changed me! His impeccable dress sense still inspires me.
It was no coincidence he named himself after an archangel and dragon slayer, because he looked and sounded like an angel who struggled with a fire breathing dragon symbolizing the devil. He sung a hell of a lot about them, angels in lyrics with the devil in the music.
If ever there were a tortured musical artist with a messianic complex who sacrificed his guilt to share the pain of others and truly believed that as spiritual beings, we are practising the same religion, it was George...
All my heroes are angels, and we can all be heroes, if only for one day, knowing that another day, the angels will come for us...
CHOOSE LIFE!!!
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