Blessings flows.
no less than the start of the end of Babylon Tower ( the big mix up).Will anybody read it ?
One Blessed Love Everytime.

Marc.


During the last hundred years, and under many disguises - rag, jazz, rock, funk, soul, pop, reggae, disco, dance, rap, trance, techno, house or hip-hop - black music and dance has ruled over charts and discotheques.
Absorbed by every culture, it has made a world music possible. Church, Turkish, American Indian or Classical music have been translated or grafted onto rock, house or trance.
Black rhythms are now the universal currency of music.

Poor cotton picker :

Present-day black music was first produced by American Negro slaves, about two hundred years ago.

Since then, their music has spread throughout the world, with hundreds of millions of Europeans, Americans and Asians dancing like Africans to the rhythms of black music.

There had already been a time when all of mankind only knew black rhythms. For the hundreds of thousands of years that all of mankind lived in Africa . Music and dancing had been simple. Thumping the earth with hands and feet, hitting stones together and marking rhythm with a stick of wood. Music began as drumming .

Writing with letters was invented by the Semites. Printing, computers and, soon, artificial intelligence, were invented by Europeans.
After they had invented thinking, walking and speaking, Africans proceeded to invent singing, music and dancing.

Heartbreakers

Through technology and an increased collective consciousness, the world is fast becoming a single village, and mankind a single tribe.

The last time we were a single tribe was in Africa.
The spread of black music as mankind unites in only too natural.
Its rhythms are the only music united mankind knows .

We, humans, need that music.
When we were embryos, the only music we heard was the African beat of the heart of our mother.
And we were an embryonic mankind, we also heard, for hundreds of thousands of years, the beat of African drums.

With black rythms spreading all over the world, all of mankind is hearing the drumming of the heart beat again.
The entire world is becoming Africa. We are back to the womb .
Another delivery is due.

Free Music

Nobody really knows where the word Blues comes from.
It bears the color of melancholy.
Blues refers to the color blue, and, in colloquial language, to feel blue is to be sad. Those who first played the blues were slaves, expected to feel blue..
Blacks had arrived naked to the New World. They were as black as the nightmare they had to go through. Their masters had wiped their family, their clothing, their language, their food, their religion and their skills. Treated as objects, they were worked to death.
Only their melodies survived. And it, no doubt, expressed their pain and alienation .

The presence of the color blue in this context is curious. In what sense is blues a blue music? Wouldn’t black be a more appropriate color for sadness and melancholy ?
Blue is sadness tinged with hope. The sadness of someone who misses someone else and cannot wait to meet again.
Black is the sadness of mourning, of permanent loss .
The Negroes sang the blues. They missed everything they had left and hoped for better days.

Color blind

Colors are not objective perceptions.
A bee does not see flowers with our colors. Even humans are not too sure about the color of certain things. A large number of humans suffer from some degree of color blindness, confusing, for instance, red and green.
Language is also color-blind. In North African Arabic, KHL is black. In Hebrew, this same root means blue.
With the same word, one understands black and the other blue. They must have looked at something confusing, simultaneously black and blue.

This confusion exists also between white, black and blue.
The French blanc (white, but the n is not pronounced) is written like the English black but pronounced like blue.
Arabic, Hebrew, English or French park blue, white and black under the same sounds.

An obvious everyday experience induces this confusion of color : the alternation between day and night .
At dawn and at dusk, all shades of blue turn into all shades of black and white. There are hours, before sunrise and after sunset, when it is impossible to say whether the sky is blue or black. Clouds, when they are present, add white to the confusion.

Cotton again


Blues was invented by people who were as black as the night. Music was day time in their darkness.

The black slaves who endured the worst aspect of slavery were field workers, the famed cotton pickers of so many pieces of blues. Under the blue sky, with clouds that looked like the cotton they picked, they worked from sunset to sunrise, experiencing with their own tired bodies the blue black alternation of dawn and dusk.
Day time blue or white were bad news and hard work. They invented their own blue : songs from Africa which they sang as they picked cotton or sugar cane.
Singing made slaves more effective. Masters were happy.

The invention of blues by black slaves reflects a tragic experience of day-time blue.

Music slaves

In the morning, blue follows black. We rise from bed, full of hopes.
At night, black follows blue. We go to bed in fear.

When the blacks collectively invented the blues, at the end of the 19th century, it was the beginning of a new dawn for mankind. The black music we now hear everywhere is as blue as the dawn it announces.

A century ago, Negro slavery was abolished. Since then, blueness has spread and amplified, with many more slaves being freed : wives from their husbands, children from their parents, pupils from their teachers.

Tell old Pharaoh

The blueness and dawn I have just described began in fact a long time ago. Mankind is going through a dawn that began a million year ago in Africa. And the blue of that dawn is reinforced, every time a slavery is abolished .

Negroes were not the first collectively uprooted and enslaved people. In recorded history, they were preceded by the Hebrews.
Four hundred years, the sons of Jacob had been slaves in Ancient Egypt . They were the first to successfully escape collective slavery.

They had gone down to Egypt as a ball of seventy souls. Just like a fertilized egg, they had come searching for a nest in the African womb.
They came as seventy cells and left as a newborn people.

Four hundred years, too, the Negroes were enslaved in a modern Egypt called America .

Hebrews and Negroes had a common experience.
They were both enslaved in a delta. The delta of Mississipi and the delta of the Nile. Two placentas for two people in full growth.

Music was their common comfort. Drums and banjos for the black. Drums and tambourines for the Hebrews.

At the time the Hebrews were in Egypt, Memphis and then Taniss were the royal capitals .
For Negroes, Memphis, Tennessee was the capital from which blues spread to the world.
The spread of black music all over the world marks the Exodus of a people, the Negroes.

Bob Marley’s Exodus

MaRLeY means in hebrew “I am Bitter”.No surprise then for his band to be the Wailers.Bitterness is strongly associated with the Exodus.During the jewish traditionnal celebration of the Exodus, Passover, whoever hasn’t said “ bitter ” hasn’t celebrated properly.

Exodus is a reggae album released by Bob Marley and the Wailers. It was and still is a huge international hit. In 1998, Time magazine named Exodus the best music album of the 20th century.
The Rastafarian way of life started in Jamaica around the turn of the 20th century with a strong emphasis on an “Africanized” Old Testament. The Rastafarians identify themselves with the ancient Israelites and their story of oppression, Diaspora, and redemption

Bob Marley was the world’s most renown Rastafarian, made popular through reggae music; a legendary singer/songwriter, with his group the Wailers he was the first man from a third world country to penetrate international markets; he was and still is incredibly influential in the political and spiritual struggles of his time and continues to be associated with the fight for freedom in many countries


Four centuries of slavery is a genetic duration.
The Bible mentions it for the Hebrews, an obviously incorrect historical fact .
This duration became historic several times: American blacks, Eastern Slavs and Western whites.

Eastern Blues

Since the early Middle Ages, Slavic countries had been the natural European reservoir for slave shopping. In those days, one just needed to raid a village in Hungary or Ukraine in order to pick up the goods.

The word Slav tells this story.
Some relate it to slave, an origin which reflects the sad past of these people. Others relate it to slovo, a Russian root meaning speech.
Slavs are those who share the same speech.

These countries have ceased to act as slave reservoirs. But they have known slavery longer than anyone else in Europe. It lasted four centuries. From the Tsars who had enslaved their bodies to Communism who had enslaved their speech.
When Communist Russia was at the height of its power, the West was called the free world. The East were the Slavic and enslaved world. Although their bodies had been liberated, they could not speak freely their ideas. This ambiguous freedom is reflected in the double origin of Slav : a mixture of slave and slovo (word).

In 1990, with the collapse of Slav communist regimes, another Exodus took place, ending four hundred years of slavery.
To the sounds of music, old and new.

Rock, obviously, was a major force of protest under the communist regimes. But a long time before, during their period of darkness, the Slavs had also developed their own blues.
Like the blues, Slavic music is melancholic in character, comforting those who sang and those who listened. A fact underlined by the resemblance between music and muzhik, i.e., the name of peasant slaves in Tsarist Russia.

We have seen three major cultures enslaved for four centuries : Jews, Blacks and Slavs . Their Exodus was each time a stronger blue for a mankind living in pitch black.
Music accompanied their Exodus.
The drums of Myriam, the sister of Moses.
The drums of the blacks of Africa.
The fiddles of Eastern Europe.

A fourth people knew four centuries of slavery.
The young Europeans and Americans that made Rock’s success.

Carpenter blues

Blacks are otherwise known as Negroes, i.e., the Latin root for black.
In the slang of slave traders, they had come to be called « coke », i.e., burnt coal. Across the Ocean, they had been transported as heaps of coal.

This human coal dominates music nowadays. We, humans, are sensitive to that music for the simple reason that singing, anyway, produces coal.

Human lungs contain a tree, called the bronchial tree. We have seen how it looks and functions like plant trees.

This human tree is made of bronchiae, an exact sound cousin of branches. We breathe and fill these branches with air, for the sake of the oxygen it contains.
Oxygen is liberated by plants, trees in particular.
It blows off green trees to reach our lungs. Oxygen is wood turned into air. A wood that fills the bronchiae of our respiratory tree.

When we speak or sing, this wooden air passes between the vocal cords. There, it is cut into pieces of different sizes, called sounds or words.
The vocal cords function like two knives that cut the air that passes between them. They sculpt bronchial air into beautiful wood pieces, all the more beautiful if they come from the voice of a singer.

Our throat is a carpenter’s workshop.
A field expressed in many languages.
German, for instance, uses the same sound, SaGe, for sawing wood and speaking. To speak is to saw pieces of wood with the vocal cords.
In English, human voices are said to have a timbre. You might as well say timber, i.e., cut wood.
In Hebrew, NGR means carpenter, whereas GRN means throat . In Hebrew again, the root ZMR means both to sing and to prune branches from a tree.
Singing is just that : pruning branches from the air of the bronchial tree.
Burning brain

Pieces of cut wood leave the mouth of the speaker, headed for those who listen. They penetrate their ears, and there, stoke the fires of our brain.

The brain is a furnace : it accounts for a fiftieth of our total body weight but consumes a fourth of its energy. The brain burns.
In that furnace, and with the help of the hammer and the anvil bones of our ears, we forge our own ideas.
Our brain forges everything in fact : the images we see, the music we hear, the velvet we touch. Or is the image we have of reality a forgery of our brain ?

Humans fell trees to make paper. They also cut wood when they speak. Hebrew « ‘ets » means both wood and giving advice. To give a piece of advice, is to give wood for thought .
Irrelevant words and conversations are bubbles that blow off our ears. Interesting ideas are pure wood. They are eagerly burnt. Good music is also good wood and is entirely turned into coal by our brains .

NeGRo singing is black music, it was burnt down to coal by whoever sang and listened to it.

Blues emerged from its Southern anonymity at the beginning of the last century. Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, a true cotton-picker, took it North. There, it married the experience of poor white migrants with the protesting words of Woody Guthrie.
It then absorbed the biblical experience of Bob Dylan, the distinction of the Beatles and the cultivated primitivity of the Rolling Stones.

Dylan and the others

Bob Dylan stands where all the roads of blues meet.
He sings black music.
He is Jewish.
His parents were migrants from Slavic countries.
He was young and came from the working class.

Six enslaved people in his background helped him wrote protest songs .

His original name is Robert Zimmerman.
Zimmerman means carpenter, so that his real name is Robert, the Carpenter . Which is really what all singers are.

One singer influenced Dylan more than any other.
Woody Guthrie had himself taken up the battle of new slaves America had created, the exploited migrants and workers.

Guthrie is an old English root which means « throat ». The teacher of Bob Dylan, i.e., Robert the Carpenter, was called Woody Throat.

With Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie, our vocal cords found a way to inform us on how they work. With discs and radio, the wood cut from the lungs of singers could spread everywhere.

The greatest bonfire

By the late sixties, Rock concerts had become a major way of protesting against a society which was not fun.
The myth of Woodstock took place in 1969, near Bethel, New York. It was named Woodstock as a tribute to Bob Dylan, the Carpenter .
He lived then in a similarly named nearby village.

Woodstock marks the end of another four centuries of slavery.
For four centuries, since the arrival of the first Puritans on the coast of America, emotions had been enslaved. They exploded in Woodstock.
Woodstock means a pile of wood.
Taking over from Bob the Carpenter, this festival was a change of paradigm.
At the time of Woodstock , a whole generation of Americans made their Exodus from the slavery of their Puritan culture, a society of war, prejudice and hierarchy.

Before Berlin, Woodstock had been a breach in the Wall.
Teacher’s power, conjugal helplessness, parental abuse and the military’s right over life and death began their progressive collapse.

For three days, hundreds of thousands of youth burnt together the wood of the best Rock music ever. Logs and timber from the blues of black slaves and from those prophets of Israel who first cried against slavery .

Woodstock was a true dawn from a social nightmare. Blue appearing from black. It opened with a black singer and closed with a black singer, with the name of the first, R. Haven, reminding all that heaven was filling with a new dawn.
A dawn that generation chose to adopt as a uniform : the blue-jeans. Of LeVi’S fame .

The Beatlemania

As an individual, Dylan towers with achievements.
One band towers over all others : the Beatles.
They began by making good Rock. They ended up with protest singing.
They were pioneers in world music. Their freely mixed country, folk, rock, blues and classical music.

They chose a strange name, a meaningless word according to dictionaries, but not according to meaning fields.
Having made millions out of Blues, they surely recognized their debt towards those who invented it, when they included the letters BLueS in those of BeaTLeS. And by adding a T to BLueS, they knew they were in for BaTtLeS.

The Beatles mark another dawn for another enslaved people.
For a whole collectivity, they are another piece of blue appearing after a nightmare.

With other significant bands, they came from the Northern city of Liverpool.

England was the first industrialized country in the Western world.
Its aggressive colonial and economic policies had produced immense wealth for the very few. At the same time, it created a whole new class of slaves. English peasants left en masse the countryside to become industrial workers. Industrial slaves would be more correct.

In Manchester and Liverpool, white people were enslaved in coal mines or in steel mills.
As humans, they may have been whites, but as slaves, they were blacks, black from the coal and the coke.
The color blue was there too. These slaves were called blue-collar workers and had to wear a blouse.

This slavery had begun four centuries before, under the reign of Elizabeth I, when England established itself as the first capitalist country .

The sons of these miners and steel workers grew in Liverpool, the blackest and saddest city on earth. The skies were blackened by smoke, and were, at best, dark gray from low, heavy clouds.
Except for the music they played, they rarely saw any blue.

The world success of Liverpool bands marks another Exodus.
This music gave a touch of freedom and fame, directly or by delegation. But more than anything, for the boys and girls of Liverpool, that music shocked the masters in London. The battle of the beatles.

And in the end, the stiff danced and freed themselves a bit, too.

Liverpool again

Blues is considered a melancholic music. It was born in a time of slavery, when people felt blue.
The word melancholy is rich. Melan comes from the Greek for black and choly from the Greek for bile. The Ancients believed that sadness corresponded to the accumulation of black bile.

Liverpool is the Memphis, Tennessee of Europe. It was the address of European blues. Depressingly black, Liverpool had to feel blue and invent a blues.
Liverpool can be read liver pool. And the pool that characterizes the liver is that made by bile. In Liverpool, with its black people and streets, this bile was black, i.e., melan-cholic.


Rock and Stone

Bob Dylan and the Beatles had produced a sophisticated version of the blues of the Negroes.
The Rolling Stones represent the other pole : a return to the roots of primitive music. A music danced on stage, with suggestive sexual motions never seen with Dylan and the Beatles , but constant with the Rolling Stones.
Primitivity was cultured and amplified. Rhythms were simpler. A lot of bass, of heart sounds.
The Stones are whites singing back to Africa, back to the music of the hunters. They went back to the African Stone Age, when tools were crudely carved out of stones.
Their Rock claimed kinship with the music of that time. Rock means stone. And the greatest of all Rock bands, the Stones, led this return to Stone age music.
The Stone Age is echoed in the Age of the Stones.
Their key singer, Mick Jagger, embodies this return. The way he danced, the large, negroid lips he sported, and his name belong to Stone Age times.
Mick Jagger means «Mick, the Hunter ».
And everybody got stoned in those days, and rolled like a stone.

Where to ?

Universal Music appears everywhere in the world.
Everywhere, this music is colored in black African tones.


The astounding success of black music is not meaningless.
It continues a process begun millions of years ago, when Man was first comforted from hard labor by the use of art.
It has accompanied every Exodus since then.


After the magic of the sixties and the seventies, music is now confronted to a major crisis of identity. The latest descendants of the blues: disco, rap, techno, house, trance have become ever less melodious.

It is difficult to appreciate how much further this process of simplification can go.

The world is giving birth to a new human.
African drumming, i.e., heart beat, accompany this pregnancy and delivery .

Although the genuine origin of the word that means “she possesses many things” is Ugandan, Nyahbingi musical accompaniment consists of a heartbeat rhythm, played in 4/4 time on a trinity of drums.

Nyahbingi Drumming & Rhythms has come down to the Rastaman as a concept and theology. Therefore, it is through prayer, music and biblical reasonings that the Rastaman chants bingi, calling on the forces of nature to destroy the powers of wickedness.

Nyahbingi Drumming & Rhythms can be considered the true origin of reggae music.Reggae music is unique among descendant of blues. It has never been a Mainstream music or a fashion music but it seems the most universal as it’s devellopement is continuing on all continents.