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A Conversation with Taj Mahal (continued)
PM: I love your new record, Hanapepe Dream. It really swings hard. It's a killer band. And you're in fantastic voice.
TM: Oh, well, I'm having fun doing stuff. And those are a bunch of great guys to play with. And it's an adventure, going into that whole scene out there. It isn't like I went in and found the ukulele player, and then I found the guitar player. I just got involved with a group of people who play music and are extremely musical in a way that I recognize, and we have a lot of things in common. There are certain kinds of island mentality that these guys have that we share, certain things we have in common. We share an interest in the blues in a direct manner, also the blues as a spice, the blues as a format, ragtime, jazz, boogie-woogie, Spanish music, Portuguese music, all of it. It all falls together, in another kind of cosmic stew that includes the whole South Sea, and Polynesian, Melanesian thing, the Melanesian Polynesian point of view, or paradigm.
PM: It really defies the little boxes that everybody else is so busy drawing up all the time.
TM: Yeah, but they can draw up all the little boxes they want. It's because of that little box mentality that people like Napster and Nutella and Kaaza, and Grokster and all those people did what they did, because everybody just was not ready to move to the next level. I'm sure that at one time when somebody said that one day you're going to be walking out of here with a piece of vinyl that will have six or seven records on one side and seven or eight on the other side, people went like, "Ah, you're crazy. The only way you can make it is with beeswax and out of this kind of acetate that breaks. This is it."
PM: Right.
TM: I mean, hey, like the president of--I forget which network, CBS, or one of these big networks, he has a thing that he keeps across from his desk that he looks at, and I think it's from somewhere around 1927. It's a piece in the newspaper that says, "New television tube invented, no practical use can be found for it." And that's what they were thinking at that time. Nobody could think of any practical use for this thing, so... Well, they invented one. Well, yeah, that's what you thought then, now what do you think? It just takes people time to really get a hold of ideas. And sure, you can get to them on the quick head, but they're not going to remember tomorrow what you did today. So we're trying to get some stuff that sticks in there and stays a lot longer.
PM: Got it. I lack the history, what's the story behind the song "King Edward's Throne"?
TM: King Edward--well, Edward was the heir to the throne, and he became King of England, but he fell in love with a Philadelphia socialite who was divorced. And by the rules of the crown, or the rules of the church, a prince could not marry a woman who'd been, I guess, "violated" by another man.
PM: Indeed.
TM: Oh, my God, being married and divorced might be the worst thing to happen? But anyway, hey, they got their rules, whatever. I can certainly sneer at them if I want to, but... Nonetheless, it was so popular that he quit being the King in order to be with her. So that's why it was "love, love alone, caused King Edward to leave his throne."
See, Caribbean people have the kind of musical culture that took topics of the day like that and made little ditties out of them. Like at carnaval every year, if something happens politically, I mean, everybody knows it's going to be fodder for carnaval, because you can't do the same thing every year. You never can do what you did last year the next year. It comes up new every year. This is another thing: Americans, they're the only people I know who can live right next to an elephant, and until somebody says, "Wow, look at that elephant," they don't notice. They're saying, "Oh, I never saw it before. I never heard of it."
PM: I never hoid of it.
TM: Yeah, "I never hoid of it," that's the real way you do it. [laughs] "Hey--hey you, I never hoida dis." But the point is that you have the islands, and you have all these people down to Mexico, Central and South America, where the style of the music is a commentary style. And you didn't say something offensive in front of people, but you had to come up with a sly way to be able to talk about it in front of the crown or whoever was in power. And they would get it, but they wouldn't be incensed by it, I mean they wouldn't be thrown off. So those kinds of things people talked about, making these great calypso tunes, "The terror was soft before, but now he's prepared for war," you know? And there's just all of this incredible poetry and double, and even triple and quadruple entendre. This stuff is unbelievable.
And periodically, it comes in here--Belafonte brought quite a bit in. Other artists have brought the feeling in. But I think probably because Americans go down and vacation there, and don't go down and live there, they don't really carry that back with them. They may bring back something to remind them of the trip. But when you live there all the time, you make your music down there. You make music this way, and sunshine and the sea, you're working in this, you work in that. But "King Edward's Throne" is like for me down in there. Because Hawaii connected big time with the Caribbean. I think this is one of the things that they were looking for in identity beyond recoiling from the mainland--or "the continent" as they call it these days. They were able to be themselves, and then also, through the music, connect with these people halfway around the globe.
PM: I wonder if it could be said that some of that commentary music mentality exists in hip-hop, exists in rap. I'll tell you, it's too hard to find now, but it may be there.
TM: Oh, yeah. Well, right now, I mean, there's basically--like the young guy says--like it used to be in the old days. What was the name of his band? It was from up in San Francisco. I think they were called Dialect? And the guy said, essentially, when he was growing up, the bands that were doing the big stuff were like Chuck D and Public Enemy, and Rakim and them cats, Eric B. & Rakim. And then KRS-One was up front in terms of the conscious level of what was going on.
But once there was the M.C. Hammer phenomenon, he just basically handed the baton over to the suits--whether he likes it or not, that's what he did, I mean, by mismanaging their stuff. The suits knew they wanted to get into it because it was a lot of money. But that's my take on it. I mean, Hammer was safe enough for them to come in through him, so they did. And then everybody started diluting the whole rap, and then it wasn't hardcore like it was before. So you got less of a commentary type of thing than it used to be.
But, see, in the deep Caribbean or that whole Caribbean basin, and as with lots of Afro based cultures down there, there is that trickster, that sly person who can just come through and turn this stuff around on you. That's something that's a part of the culture. continue
