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This page: The Empowering Effects of Napster; A Moment, a Sound, and a Revelation
The Empowering Effects of Napster
'When black musicians get ahold of their own destiny on the instruments that are making the music, the sound is gonna change radically.'
The debate over digital downloads rages on. How do you feel about it?
Like Chuck D [of Public Enemy]. He's somebody that I really like a lot. Chuck D basically says that the problem [for the artist] is getting people who the industry doesn't believe are in your demographic to hear your music. So with Napster, it gets out there, and they can interact with it, through it, around it, for it, about it.
Do you take the music industry at their word when they say they're going to lose money as a result of the proliferation of this technology?
It's the same story that they said when blank cassette tapes were being made available. They reacted the same way. It's like anything else: Someone has had control forever, and now because of a new language or a new technology, that control can no longer exist. Ultimately, the Napster situation is not gonna set the way it is now, where everybody can continue to download all these different things.
So you'd be happy to have all of your stuff on there, thinking that the exposure will encourage others to go out and buy one of your albums?
This is already happening. During the almost 40 years that I've been in -- and because of the fact that I took the road to the people as opposed to the record company -- there's been a situation where people that listen to my music have had to either make copies of what vinyl existed or make bootleg copies of shows. That has allowed me to have what the record company has perceived as a "cult" following, or a core audience. But they have not serviced this audience or gone out to find out what its demographic is.
In the past, you've talked about how music consistently adapts itself to new cultures. Could you give an example?
It's sort of like growing up in Cuba and listening to Afro-Cuban music, and then having an opportunity to go to Kinshasa or someplace in the Congo, and hear the same songs at their original place. There's more to fingerpicking than just "My Creole Bell," or whatever song you're listening to. That's a style that has adapted itself to its environment in America. Notice that drumming and more African sounds did not really start to come into American music until the late '50s and into the '60s. Whereas, if you go to the Caribbean, Central and South America, the African sound has been there since those people have been removed from Africa and blended in to those countries -- they've actually made the blending. The United States has not made the blending.
Does this adaptation apply to electronic music, like rap?
Music is adapted to language. And periodically, somebody comes along and bumps it up, or drops it out or does something different. And it makes everybody listen to it. For a long time, the beat might have been big when you came in the studio, but when they went to mix that, they'd mix the beat down. So when the rappers got a hold of the knobs, suddenly the drums -- which had been drowned out or shut down for centuries -- got louder. Something that was said years ago was that when black musicians get ahold of their own destiny on the instruments that are making the music, the sound is gonna change radically. And that was absolutely correct.
You should be a professor, Taj.
No man, I don't need to be a professor. How much do teachers get paid in this country? C'mon. [laughs]
A Moment, a Sound, and a Revelation
'It was a sound that I thought I was hearing in my head. It's like, you speak to somebody and they turn around and say, 'Wait a minute. I know you.''
If you listen closely to Taj Mahal's music, one undeniable component is a consistently smooth, fluid fingerpicking guitar style. It wasn't a sound that came naturally. Years ago, Mahal -- even then fascinated with the evolution of various forms of roots music -- attended a production called Ballet African, where he listened intently as an African musician played a stringed instrument called a kora.
It was that sound he'd later remember. It wasn't long before Mahal realized that he had found a prime connection between a popular American guitar style (very much in evidence on recordings by Mississippi John Hurt, among others) and African music of centuries past. The kora, sometimes described as a harp or lute, is played with the thumb and the forefinger on each hand. There are about a dozen strings on each side of the instrument (depending on what country you're in), aligned vertically, and they allow for a variety of layers, textures, and cascading sounds.
"It was a sound that I thought I was hearing in my head," Mahal remembers. "It's like, you speak to somebody and they turn around and say, 'Wait a minute. I know you. You're blah, blah, blah.' And you're like, 'Yeah, but where do I know you from?' It's that kind of energy, only dealing with it on a cultural level."
Centuries ago, Mahal realized, African slaves who survived the devastation of Middle Passage brought with them skills they'd learned on the kora and applied them to the guitar. Factor in their subsequent exposure to other styles and sounds of America, and you suddenly have a blueprint -- albeit a distant one -- for the foundation of blues and eventually rock 'n' roll.
"This was a verification -- in the flesh -- of why I didn't settle for some kind of mechanical picking sound in my guitar playing," Mahal says. "It was based upon the fact that there was more to learn to make that sound have more power."
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