What follows is a poem—inspired in part by the grainy yet graceful video above—and a short program for the Academy dashed off by Charles Keil. He’s our great American advocate of participatory peoples’ musics and dance cultures. For decades now, Keil has been committed to various forms of music education aimed at restoring…
that sense of a “bopi” [i.e., playground] where kids are autonomous and unsupervised and can mimic their elders in drumming and singing and dancing and not be interfered with. That to me is a little Eden that classless societies help to create for their children and that we don’t have. It’s just disappeared. We don’t have a clue to how that could work anymore. Keeping that lone flame alive is, to me, crucial.
I like to check with Charlie when I come across thinkers who cultivate not just “the self,” but “social living.” (To lift Rastas’ revision of the term socialism.) I got in touch with him when I was reading Michelet last month since that historian seemed to be one of the progenitors of what Keil calls “Participation Theory.” Keil responded: “Levy-Bruhl invented Participation Theory in France way back around WW One in his early books and got crucified a few times for it. Owen Barfield in UK another PT guy and criticized by many for being too christian or too romantic too idealist.” I’m just now reminded I forgot to tell Charlie his 12/8 heuristic worked with Michelet. Wha’ppen? 12/8 refers to those shuffle rhythms and 3 into 2 grooves that get parties started in Kingston or New Orleans or Kinshasa. Charlie once mentioned he tried pages 8 or 12 in a new book to see if an author was a groovy thinker. Michelet aced that test. In the Chicago U press edition of “History of the French Revolution,” Michelet lays down his challenge to the great man theory of history, on behalf of “the people,” on page 12.
Onward to Keil’s pome (a shot at “meme reconstruction and redirection”), which he conceived as an add-on to the top seven definitions of electric boogaloo at the online Urban Dictionary.
DEFINITION 8
want you to think of da electric boogaloo as da tru eclectic-bugalu
as demonstrated by sam’s poppin pete, creeping sidney, puppet boozer, robot dane, scarecrow scalley, skeeter rabbit, assorted kith & kin from fresno oakland LA &
the whole humo ludens collaborans team
on soul train 1980 dancing to Up In Here by BarKays all of it coming out of 60s survival music-dance styles bottom-up
3 old men with canes can lead you to
American Type Dancers of mid 20th Century who embodied
hopes for a revived diversity of species and cultures
ghost dance religions based on local peace economies
brass band scenes and parades competing for dancers
all of us with drumsongs and feet on the ground
xxx
An Optimistic Postscript
What follows was sparked by reading a compelling treatment of Franz Boas’ struggles against racism. I think it was from watching Papa Franz put American anthropology together in a small room at Columbia that Maggie Mead was able to make her famous statement about a few people working together always being the factor that makes a huge difference in history.
What we need at every American University could be very simple and very small to start, basically a Boasian one room operation. If Boas could keep the famous four fields of anthropology–genetics, linguistics, archaeology, and socio-cultural–going in one room, we can devote one room to three operations: a groovology lab, a teacher training course, and a Participation-Theory group. A groovology lab for the scientific measurement and description of grooving is even easier to establish, all it takes is a computer and ever more precise and convenient ways of segmenting the mediated digital continuum.* A teacher training course or courses can be done at any time, every semester, or every summer, sending out teachers with ever better and more diversified skills, resources and credentials. And the Participation Theory group could be two or three people with interdisciplinary and intercultural interests in Performance and/or Play and/or Poetics, anyone interested in basing theoretical work on the Praxes studied in the Groovology Lab and transmitted in the Teacher Training Courses. Please remember that Boas had Nora Zeal Hurston measuring heads in Harlem long after the scientific credibility of such operations was in question. Similarly, in the nature/nurture debates and civilization vs. speciation debates of any foreseeable future, we will need databases and interpretations and arguments that will stand up to every possible mode of inspection. So this one room operation needs theory, laboratory, practical applications to be part of every university’s future.
*The “lab” needs a paragraph or two on etics and emics. And a stress on feedback from musicians and dancers as to which grooves are the grooviest.