Saturday, October 19, 2013

You Are Super Bad




I found myself home alone after a run on a mid Saturday morning.  I’ve usually got the headphones on but took the opportunity to put the iPod into a speaker and fill the whole place with music.  A song came on my running playlist that always brings a smile:  “James Brown, Ride On” which commemorates James Brown’s visit to Nigeria in 1970.  A smile because aside from being infectiously funky, it is so disarmingly courteous, as if P. G. Wodehouse and Angela Davis sat down in collaboration. 

“Happy welcome to the soul king
Welcome brothers to Nigeria 
We Nigerians, we are proud of you 
Happy welcome to the JBs
Soul Brother Number One, ride on
Right on people you are super bad 
Right on brothers, right on sisters
Mr. Dynamite is in town 
Yeah yeah yeah yeah, we are proud of you
Happy welcome to the soul king
Soul Brother Number One, ride on
Right on JBs, you are super bad “

I’d be loath and certainly wrong, to attribute the civility of the gesture to the legacy of British imperialism, which ended ten years prior.  But to my American ears “Happy Welcome”, “We are proud of you” all seems rather descent and Etonian amidst all the super badness.  Anachronistic and fragile as well, as if this sort of unbridled optimism would never be possible, in the time shortly thereafter. 

I couldn’t recall who it was that recorded the song though.  In the end I had to thumb trough the playlist till I came up with Orlando Julius.  Right.  But before hand, searching on line, the lyrics had brought me nothing.  But, as always happens, I found something else instead.  There was a rather interesting blog that juxtaposed Fela Kuti and James Brown discussing who got what from whom.  There was an amusing aside by Bootsy Collins, the JB’s base player at the time concerning his impressions during the visit and a rather less flattering, exasperated, story in a linked article in the Guardian about Paul McCartney’s engagement with Fela there in Lagos two years later.  http://afrofunkforum.blogspot.com/2006/04/felajames-brown-connection.html 



My wife and others have pressed me about precisely what on earth any of these musical asides, Nigerian Afrobeat, North Indian sarod ragas, and the like, have to do with China.  Dustybrine is the confluence of continental soil and oceanic salt set here in an emerging China.  In this city I have met a student from Mali, so happy to discuss Bamako with someone who’d been there.  My younger daughter is now taught Bharata Natyam, the remarkable South Indian dance form, with some 60 different eye movements alone, by Chinese teachers who studied in Karnataka.   If anything can redeem this metropolis with its laundry list of compromises it is the swirling centrality it has to Chinese civilization and increasingly to the world.  

How does a non-Western, continental civilization assert equality with dignity?  Can it be navigated peacefully?  China will likely force these questions sooner, more fully than West African or Indian civilization will, if only because of its burgeoning economic might.  China, the West, and all of us, should consult the great harbingers of civilizational confluence for guidance and inspiration; the Yoruban rhythms that change American music, so that it can return in the form of James Brown to change forever the music in Nigeria which once again inspires the music of America and the world, as Bootsy Collins and Paul McCartney confirm.  The wisdom of the Bhagavad-Gita that travels to Massachusetts and inspires Henry David Thoreau who crystalizes something in the mind of Mahatma Gandhi so that he can inspire Martin Luther King Junior and then Barak Obama. 

And naturally I pause for a moment and consider what a similar example might be from Chinese soil, traveling to the United States, in as much as the previous two volleys lead back and forth between my land and another civilization.  What hails from China, flowers in the United States and returns to China to inspire anew? I’m coming up short.  Certainly this has more to do with the limits of my imagination than the limits of Chinese soft power. 

I don’t know if it's a sad testimony or something rather more proud, but one of the most obviously influential forms of Chinese soft power in the United States has been culinary.  And certainly American palates have been forever changed by Chinese cuisine.  But has American fusion cuisine or Chinese American fast food, then managed to return and once again influence Chinese palates, anew?  Fireworks returning as TNT?  Confucian meritocratic ideas changing U.S. universities that then influence Chinese higher education?  Thin stuff.  I’m not thinking of an obvious and sturdy example. (If you have one, please enter it in the comments section, below.)  Though I’m looking for something that returns to inspire rather than死灰复燃[1] as an annoyance.

One could take Buddhism’s march coming from Indian civilization, flowering uniquely during Song China as Chan Buddhism that is shaped further in Japan into the Zen tradition, traces of which become popularized in the West.  But that is largely unidirectional.  I’m sure we could find a few folks in the Buddha’s hometown in Nepal who’ve read “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” and say we’ve closed the circle, but it isn’t quite the same.   



I haven’t had much chance yet to write about the Koreas and Japan in this blog, but we will.  Yesterday I wrote about the promising trend wherein former Red Guard are suddenly, publicly beginning to account for and ask for forgiveness for their actions.  Chinese civil society may have grown sufficiently complex and layered that people feel the need and then find ways to atone publicly.  This, regardless of whether or not the Party has called for such public consideration.  A China that can have that dialogue domestically will one day be ready to have reconciliation with Japan.   

Perhaps we will live to see a “Happy Welcome” to China of a Japanese artistic expression that had its origins in China in the first place.  This is a North Asian vision, worth imagining.  And perhaps a Chinese Fela Kuti and a Japanese Bootsy Collins will sit down and dig one another in mutual appreciation and the world will be the better for it. 

And the general sentiment across the brine on the East Asian Sea will be:
“Right on people, you are super bad”







[1] sǐhuīfùrán:  lit. ashes burn once more (idiom); fig. sb lost returns to have influence / something malevolent returns to haunt one

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