The mystery between fantasy, reality, and the decadence music has brought

There’s always been a relation between sex and music, but a new generation and new generations of technology have pushed the connection to the limits, triggering assaults, rapes and homicides all over the place and detonating a national barrage of criticism and controversy. The most dramatic cases are known to almost all teenagers and 20’somethings, and are a matter of court record, but the most seductive and most damaging results can be seen in the mis-education of millions of males and the creation of a climate of violence and intimidation that threatens millions of women in around the world. In Africa, it’s the same. There are even charges, some of them unfortunately true, that some mothers and fathers have virtually pushed their young daughters into the arms of “stars” for financial reasons or, worse, for the privilege of basking in the reflected glow of the good life. All of this has raised explosive questions about the increasingly close connection between sex and music. My mentor always tells that the music we dance to these days is not music. He says in their days “people used to sing about love, losing and finding it again, but now music seems to have gone into a destructive motif. Sexual ecstasy is taking the place of happiness, and this is taking away from the feeling of music and the mores and customs of the community. It’s become self-destructive.” Things have gotten so bad that some superstars are taking it all off and frolicking in porno films. One of the biggest porno hits of all time is an 80-minute video by Treach of the rap duo Naughty by Nature, who said he made the film for his female fans. “[I] did it,” he said, “for the women who may have fantasies about being with me.” Some of the new musical icons, like Treach, say, correctly, that pop music has always been a first or second cousin of sex. But the hits from past decades were kinder and gentler and left something to the imagination. All the same, one ought to remember, at least for perspective, that Duke Ellington’s elegant “Warm Valley” has nothing to do with geography. The key word here and the important difference between the old and new music is elegant. Ellington (“Satin Doll”), Coltrane (“Soul Eyes”), Miles (“Kind of Blue”) said in thousands of compositions that the connection between sex and music is allusive and that both require art, empathy and the grace of a great three-point shooter. Hard-core music, by contrast, is explicit (“Shake ya a--”) and almost juvenile in its frenzy to write dirty words on the shiny fences of CDs. Another and perhaps even more important difference is that the new music can’t be escaped or denied because it’s repeated all day long and all night long on TV, websites and elsewhere. How did we get to this point and how do we stop the anti-music music from playing? The answers are complex and involve a lot of villains, including producers and directors. But all or almost all of the answers are rooted in two major facts of the evolving dialogue between the new generation and the new generations of technology. The first fact is a new generation of youth, raised in an electronic fantasy world worsened by a dangerous real world of drugs, poverty, low-income family disintegration and peer-pressure. In appraising this generation, we must remember that it has created a big market for music and some of them are pioneer musicians in the industry in East Africa and the western world. Let it be said also that the problem is not a whole generation or a whole musical genre; the problem is a minority of the generation and the genre, a minority who inherited extreme needs (broken families, broken dreams, broken esteem) from history and who are calling history to account in extreme,hard-core words and images. The second fact is the overwhelming impact of new generations of technology, TV, MTV, DVD, Internet and cell phones that saturate and overwhelm the mind and body, creating a constant climate of stimulation, seduction (sexual, political and economic), and rape masquerading as seduction. What makes this so destructive socially, musically and sexually is that the electronic blanket of the hard-core world is based on some dangerous illusions that demean and diminish both males and females. The first is that males exist to be serviced sexually and otherwise by women whether, black, white, yellow, and green. People who count such things say there are references to oral sex in the short CD that come out of studios.. It is only one step from this fantasy to the idea that females are sexual objects who were created to service males. A companion idea, based perhaps on images of the artists’ overwhelmed mothers, some on drugs, says that women are no damn good and that fathers and males, including probably the composers, are worse. The third is that power is not in the $30 million salary or the $10 million house but what is in the pants; and that no matter how much money or power a dude has, he’s nobody if he’s not bad in the bed all the time, everywhere and with every fine brunette or blonde, or combination thereof, he meets. Under girding all this, coloring and informing all this, is the fourth fantasy idea that life is cheap and fast and that a real man has to prove all the time that his (car, house, etc.) is bigger and that a real man must be prepared to do anything, to die even, to keep from losing face. Although, I can’t blame men alone. Women have to take blame for this too. Their music is first becoming explicit. Take the song “Sexuality” by Rihanna for example, “I want your... sexuality, I see you, What you wanna do? Let’s break the rules, Sex-ua-lity, You wanna go down, Drive all through my town, Till I make that sound, Ohh Sex-ua-lity. Now, women have also joined in race to degrade themselves. The basic problem here and elsewhere is that some hard-core men and women have been taught by society, by the images they’ve seen and the mothers and fathers they’ve known, to hate themselves and who therefore repeatedly invite self-destruction in suicidal or near suicidal acts. The inevitable results, how could it be otherwise? is that millions of stars and fans in the music world and the athletic world are experiencing extreme difficulty in telling the difference between fantasy and reality We see this most poignantly in the lives of multimillionaire stars who believe the fantasy they sing and who act out these fantasies in the real world, usually with disastrous results. We see it also in the millions of fans who buy the CDs and download music videos and fantasies and try to do to women what the stars and the stars’ videos and CDs say they do to the women. This has led to a number of girls as sex objects and it is making them targets for people who are not mature enough to distinguish between fantasy and reality. The problem is magnified when the recording artist himself can’t tell the difference between the two and tries to live his video life even after the cameras stop rolling. At an age of 35yrs, they are still fighting in bars leaving their wives with kinds at home. This, according my research around Uganda Christian University, has led to a national wave of young women being hustled and manipulated by unscrupulous stars and predators posing as stars. In some cases, teens have been tricked into sex with older ‘celebrities’ by empty promises of fame, fortune and record deals. But it is not all a one-way street. Some teens, blinded by the fantasy life that celebrities live, seek out older celebrities for sex and materialistic rewards and are even encouraged by their own friends and at times by some family members. Materialism seems to be replacing values. It’s all about, what can I have to show and to impress my friends. But what can the generation today do to eradicate immoral music. According to the research I conducted, people suggest that leaders should take a stand against the institutions and men and women who are singing and dancing us to destruction. Secondly, and most importantly, they add, we’ve got to ask entertainment executives to turn down the heat on the musical images they’re beaming to today’s children. This is not an argument against free speech; this is not an argument against the right of responsible adults to listen to anything they want to listen to and to look at anything they want to look at, this is an argument against the legal wrong of crying fire in a crowded theater of children. It is an argument against adults taking advantage of immature children and adults by exploiting frailties and needs created in large part by the broken images and streets and institutions forced on them by history and imported culture. We, as the future generation must re-evaluate our own responses and our own responsibility in helping to fight the negativity that surrounds us, our young siblings and future children. Above all else, they say, we’ve got to stop glorifying and praising stars whose persona and mansions and bling-bling are based on music that enslaves and mystifies and destroys. Thirdly, as so many students interviewed for this article said, women should take a stand and say they are tired of being abused and referred to as Ho’s, sluts, bitches....etc We also need a new understanding in the media, in the entertainment industry, in our churches, schools and organizations that popular songs are as important as human rights and that a society that pays to corrupt its young and to defame its women and mothers will soon discover that it has no human rights to defend and no songs to sing jeav202@yahoo.com