Noelle Hanrahan: You know, that’s why free form radio, or radio that we get to program, is so important. Because there’s a way in which we don’t have that music at our fingertips now, like we’re not allowed to access the kinds of songs that will propel us, not as much as we should. But because we have access to free form radio, I know I can tune in. I know I can hear that stuff on the edges, on the margins, not on the mainstream. But we gotta push it back into the mainstream so it fuels all of us.
Mumia Abu-Jamal: As you know, as a reporter you meet everybody. And you know, in my pre-prison days, I met a lot of people from all walks of life, and I was always sensitive to, like, cultural artists, musicians, and Black liberation figures and stuff like that. I mean, you know, I met Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer, one of the great reggae players; all of them of their period. The Pointer Sisters, Steel Pulse, a reggae band from England. You know, I met people like that, but when I received in the mail, while I was on death row at Greene, a dissertation about the Lumpen, the Black Panther Party musical group, and about James Brown, and then with it, a book about funk music written by Ricky Vincent, it blew me away. I mean it was fantastic writing, of course, but what I learned about James Brown transformed my thinking about James Brown. And even though I concluded that he was, like, one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century, right? Think about this, without James Brown we wouldn’t have Afrobeat, right? An African student came to a James Brown concert when he visited America, and it blew his mind. His name was Fela and he became the heart of that movement, the Afrobeat movement in Nigeria. And it was all because of James Brown and the funk that he brought.
While Ricky was writing about James Brown, it really gave me a feeling that JB was a musical revolutionary, right? And he exercised that power in the following way. When Martin Luther King was assassinated, over a hundred American cities shot up into flames of anguish, despair, anger and rage at what happened to Martin Luther King. Two cities did not burn that night. One was Oakland, California, because young Panthers went around and told people that a riot is not a revolution, and that revolutions had to be organized and to come to the Panther office the next day, but don’t go out into the streets because they would be hurt or killed by the cops. So there was no riot in Oakland.
The second place there was no riot was Boston, Massachusetts, because the city fathers, the city leaders, wisely scheduled a James Brown concert. And people were like, “Riot or James Brown? James Brown or riot? Riot or James Brown?” [Chuckles] And they chose James Brown. And they came out to the concert and he gave a speech to the people, you know. But it was like the power of his music. At that time, James Brown could not put out a record that would not soar to number one on the R&B Chart. He couldn’t do it. Every record he released sailed to the top of the R&B charts because his stuff was that funky. And because of his cultural power and presence, people went to his concert rather than into the streets, and Boston was cool on April 4, 1968.
Creative people and lovers of culture create content because their expression, their artistic creations, arise in the realm of the heart, not in the pocket. They come from a place of wanting to share and wanting to create and wanting to, like, give pleasure to people, you know, in their darkest hours of existence. And music does that, you know. Think about all the souls that have been lifted by powerful music, right? There’s never been a movement in America worth a damn that did not have music behind it or under it. There would not have been the Civil Rights Movement that we all remember if not for what DuBois called “sorrow songs,” Negro spirituals that were transformed in those movements, and became something else – became freedom songs. right? And so, music is a form of power, cultural power, James Brown, JB, knew it, and Fela learned it, and you know, going to a James Brown concert was one hell of an experience. Going to a Bob Marley concert or a Peter Tosh concert was one hell of an experience. You shared a taste, a glimpse, of new life.
Radio began, not as a mainstream project, but a marginal project, because, you know, in the old days – I’m old enough to remember the real old days [laughs] AM radio was where everything was happening, right? That’s where news was happening, that’s where even Black radio, like WHAT, began. And I remember when FM emerged as a kind of experimental radio, where you could hear almost everything because they wanted people to tune in. I remember growing up and hearing Malcolm X on FM stations up and down the dial. DJ’s in college, and in these small FM stations, would purchase or receive a copy of his speeches on an album. And they would put it on air. And you could hear Malcolm X preaching to the masses over FM stations; hitting whole neighborhoods, whole cities, you know, with his insights and his wisdom. Imagine that now? And you can’t! [Laughs]. You can’t, you know, because the State kinda wised up and said, “Unh! Unh! We can’t have that,” you know.
But you heard people, this impulse toward freedom, in the heartbeat of communities. And radio, in the old days, was at the heart of that movement, you know, and it had to be what? Music, like radio, had to be corporatized, right; weakened, washed out, made simplistic instead of complex. And, you know, they beat you in the head with a beat, but the message is, you know, degenerative, right? And that’s all about the quest for making money from this art form, you know. Radio at its best is liberatory. Music at its very best is liberatory. People come out feeling freer than they were when they went in. That makes music worthwhile. In the old days it made radio a powerful source of liberating energy.
These commentaries are recorded by Prison Radio.
