I had the pleasure yesterday of appeaing on Sharon Kay's program "What's The 411" broadcast from historic Fisk University in Nashville, TN.  As expected we discussed Songs in the Key of My Life, but we also had a broader conversation about the state of the music industry, particularly in terms of its persistent trafficking of derogatory images and lyrics toward African Americans.  "Where's the Love in the lyrics today?" seemed to be the question of the day--a question that admittedly I'm not the best person to answer.  I do have a reply and greatly welcomed the opportunity to explore this question, but it seems as if my reply varies by the day.  Yesterday, my answer was basically "have y'all heard Keyshia Cole's "Shoulda Let You Go?"  Cole's latest single off her new album, Just Like You, brings her a step closer to Mary J. Blige's throne as the queen of Hip Hop R&B.  Not that Cole will supplant, or even aspires to supplant Blige, better yet, these juxtapositions between Blige and other women artists have become fairly tired and probably do more to uninform readers and listeners than anything else. 

Still, Cole's "Shoulda Let You Go," and her new look appears modeled after the maturing public personas previously established by Mary J. Blige and Faith Evans, and Aretha Franklin and Diana Ross before them.  Sooner or later, Fantasia will hopefully join Cole for good in this cohort.  "Shoulda Let You Go," passionately relays the story of a love gone wrong.  Cole's resolve to move on from this relationship that had become tragically stagnant and bitterly painful is powerfully conveyed in lyrics such as:

            I tried real hard time and time again but I
            Didn't know my love wouldn't grow, I shoulda just let it go
            But I, stayed around thinkin you would learn to love

Arguably, the most moving lines in the song are delivered by the Amina, the new chanteuse appearing with Cole:

            And now I'm gone, plus I'd rather be alone
            We both grown, lower your tone over the phone, aaight
            I shoulda known, damn I shoulda known

Amina's verse punctuates the end of this pain inducing love affair. 

"Shoulda Let You Go" reveals love in the form that we loath to imagine, ending, incomplete, bitter, painful.  It highlights the love experiences we hate, the experiences that drive us to tears, prayers, or "craying," as I once heard someone say.  Fittingly the song and this album arrive in the fall a time when fleeting summertime romances are coming to an end. 

There was another element to Ms. Kay's question.  She was not just asking about the "love" as in the emotional quality, but "love" as in the spirit that fuels what Cornel West might call the "prophetic imagination."  In this spirit the quest for the love in the lyrics is a search for situations beyond those are all too familiar, even in they are painful, and situations that push the listener beyond a recapitulation of tired cliches.  In her attempt to show her audience that she is just like them Cole finds herself resorting to language and tropes that are at times empty or stories that have already been told.  We get the term "in the zone," and know about the litany of trifling men who have permeated R&B, but seriously, what does moving on and letting this one go really mean for Cole? 

   To explore this question we might have to move toward another artist who also released a new album this week, Meshell Ndegeocello.  Ndegeocello whose name rarely, if ever comes up in conversations about Blige, is actually a contemporary of the queen.  Her first album Plantation Lullabies was released a year before Blige's What's the 411, and in her own right has been in the vanguard of chronicling Black women's experiences through music.  Unlike Blige and the coterie of ingenues she's inspired, Ndegeocello's evolution as an artist does not have any coinciding makeovers that can be charted on her album covers.  One must listen to Ndegeocello's music and invest the energy in going on the journeys that her recordings are likely to take us, Be it from the plantation to the spaceship, Ndegeocello's recordings, like the best of Blige's, reveal the give light to the places that African Americans and African American women can go, not just where they have been.  Her latest album, The World Has Made Me the Man of my Dreams, is no different.  Allmusic.com writer Thon Jurek offers the most thorough review of the album to date,

Jurek offers the following assessment of "Soul Spaceship," one of the songs from The World Has Made Me the Man of My Dreams: "Soul Spaceship" is the place where Sly Stone, Amp Fiddler and Millie Jackson  meet in a big bass sci-fi wonderland presided over by Rick James and Teena Marie!"  This "sci-fi wonderland" has been inhabited in one form or another by other Black artists such as Jimi Hendrix and Grace Jones, and is a site that Black artists have always pioneered for themselves in order to escape the constraints of an otherwise conservative music industry.

Cole and Ndegeceollo's new offerings offer something for both the heartbroken and the heartstrong, those in search of the familiar and those ready to leap toward new horizons, and for those who love the lyrics, and for whom the lyric is love.   

It was expected that gas fare would eat up the majority of the budget for a cross-country road trip.  What was not expected was the amount of money that Melofaith and I ended up spending on Bottled Water.  Practically every time that we stopped for gas we also re-stocked on water.  We continued this practice until we decided to get a multi-pack during a grocery store trip in Albuquerque. 

The most trying thing about this habit was that it was completely unnecessary.   We had packed three re-usable water bottles, most of our drives were three hours long or shorter, and all the friends we stayed with had water purifiers in their homes, so we could have merely refilled our water bottles before departing from each stop--but we did not.  In fact, we passive-consciously did practically everything imaginable to avoid using free water. 

 In a society where practically everyone drinks tap water at restaurants (or tap water with a slice of lemon for the cultured amongst us) it's mind boggling to consider the lengths that we go to in order to avoid drinking the water readily available to us at home or in hotels.  How many of us have chugged the water provided with a room service meal or in the hotel restaurant, then went out to buy a bottled water to take to the hotel gym?  If you really think about it, after a while it makes very little sense. 

Although, it does make a lot of cents, billions of dollars even for the multi-national companies milking our lust for bottled water. As bottled water becomes more popular the prices continue going up without any real opposition from the general public.  In fact, while there's been mass public outcry over the rapidly rising cost of gas--and snide remarks about people paying $5 for a cup of coffee, most Americans do not even give a second thought to shilling out a $2 or more for a liter of water.  Instead, you'll hear the exact opposite about how tap water is unpure, or that bottled water is "better."  There are some of us who even have our "favorite" bottled waters that we pledge allegiance to like ice cream flavors or denim brands.  

Bottled water companies have gotten us to believe, or rather, we have allowed ourselves to believe bottled water is "better" and "tastes different," that we have completely overlooked the fact that once water becomes a full-fledged commodity, there's no going back.

This point is provocatively explored in director Shalini Kantaya's film A Drop of Life, "[which] is the story of two women, a village teacher in rural India and an African American corporate executive, whose disparate lives intersect when they are both confronted with lack of access to clean drinking water."

For those who were alerted to the water crisis occuring in this world by Jay Z's partnership with MTV last year, you like most people who have been following this issue know that this is an issue that has been raging for two decades.  Indeed, one recalls Nigerian musician Fela Kuti's prophetic 1974 recording "Water No Get Enemy," a song that was updated by and more explicitly touched on the issue of the commodification of water by rapper Mos Def  for the track "New World Water" off his 1999 album Black on Both Sides. The issue was raised again by journalist Jon R. Luoma in a 2002 article written for Mother Jones. Luoma's article is punctuated by this closing quote from Clair Muller, Chair of the Atlanta City Council's utility committee "Water is the worst thing to privatize," she says. "It's what we need to live. I think that's key to the whole debate -- are we going to lose control over functions that are essential to life?"

Muller's quote hits at the central point in this debate, once water is privatized, what's next?  A Drof of Life film offers one possible answer to this question.  A Drop of Life  highlights a community in which people are forced to retrieve water through a privatized well that community members need an ATM card to use.  Water in this community is comparable to the mass transit systems in most major US cities where people put money on a farcard in order to retrieve their water, just as you would pay a fare on the Bay area's BART.  

As with most issues water privatization is a more pressing concern in "developing countries" whose municipal governments are perpetually at the mercy of multi-national companies. A Drop of Life is partly set in India, but the subject has already been rehearsed in South Africa, Hungary and Colombia amongst others. 

As the film suggests, the United States is not exempt from this debate.  Cities such as New Orleans and Atlanta have had to seriously review their water systems in the last ten years, thereby joining New York and San Francisco, two of the cities who were at the fore in addressing clean water issues in the 1980s. 

What films like A Drop of Life and experiences like my misfinanced roadtrip reveals is that we all must give serious thought to what's going on with our water.  The commodification and branding of water is only the best interest of a minority and the more powerful or seductive this group's logic becomes, the more expensive and inaccessible our water becomes.  

Ferentz Lafargue 

The fall 2007 schedule is virtually complete and I've begun posting dates on the site.  I've also redesigned the site in time for fall and will look to tweak with the layout some more and maybe add some new features. 

I'm two days away from Oakland and exactly two weeks away from my first event this fall, a reading at the New School on October 3rd.  Do check out the fall readings and appearances and look out for me in your town over the coming months.  

Be well,

FL