My loved one, who hails from that land, thought it was Moroccan music playing when he walked in during the middle of the Max Roach song named, appropriately, All Africa. Class, please take your YouTube player to the 4:00 mark of the clip below. And play to the end.
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If you’ve done that, then play this video next from the beginning. I’m told that the name of this rhythm from Marrakech is, straightforwardly enough, Dakka Marrokchia.
Pretty eerie parallel. Wonder if Roach was as unaware of the connection as I. Somehow I doubt it. Extra credit: play the first clip from the beginning and be stirred by the voice of Abbey Lincoln, whose spirit so reccently crossed to the other side.
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Two more parallels for the grab bag.
Now and then I’ll discover a blues lyric–for one of my generation the discovery is backwards, not forwards–that parallels almost exactly, dang near word for word, a hip hop lyric. Maybe more on that in the future, but something to start with:
“I don’t care what your mama said. I don’t care what your father said. As long as you love me.” –from “Shake it Baby,” by John Lee Hooker
“Don’t want to meet your mama. Just want to make you come-a. Don’t want to meet your daddy. Just want you in my caddy.” –from “Hey Ya,” by Outkast
Lastly:
“Two nations of the same original stock, with language and customs differing but little, mutually hated each other.” –from “Attitudes of the Iberian Peninsula,” by Carter G. Woodson
He’s talking about Spain and Portugal during the Age of Exploration, but it seemed to me that it could just have easily have been written about Israel-Palestine. Here I should at least give a nod to that eye-roll worthy article that appeared in the BBC earlier this month, where it was implied, with suspicious motives, that Arabic and Hebrew–both Semetic, both written right to left, and with such overlap in vocabulary and pronunciation that they easily sound the same to a lazy or untrained ear–actually require different parts of the brain. Hebrew being aligned, of course, with the rational, “left-brained” West. Suuure.
Rhythm is immortal, folks.
