The root of the matter

"I heard something in those singers' voices that said there was more to life than what my old man was doing and the life that I was living. And they held out a promise, and it was a promise that every man has a right to live his life with some decency and dignity. And it's a promise that gets broken every day, in the most violent way."

- Bruce Springsteen

When I read these lines in Bruce's biography, which I picked up off of the Anna Salai pavement of all places, I suddenly realised what literature is all about. I had been struggling earlier to define exactly what I thought literature is, and this about summed it up for me.
I had had this argument with Chan about Salman Rushdie, whom she likes, and I don't. So she asked me why I don't like him, and I said, 'Well because I dont believe that's what literature is all about'. So she asks what it is about. After stuttering and stammering for a bit, the best I could come up with is 'it should be a reflection of life', an Aristotlean definition which could mean just about anything taken out of context.
The thing is, I knew what I meant, but I just couldn't find the words to say it. After reading this quote, which Bruce said about listening to the radio as a kid, I realised it really is that simple. That's what literature really is about - the good literature anyway.

A few posts ago, I had wondered what R&B is all about, and I had taken a shot at JayZ's 99 Problems. I had to have a rethink, cos even tho the lines 'If you're having girl problems I feel sad for you son, I've got 99 problems but a bitch aint one' are shocking, you have to look at the context.
In one stanza, he gets pulled over by a cop on the side of the road:

I heard "Son do you know why I'm stoppin' you for?"
Cause I'm young and I'm black and my hats real low?
Do I look like a mind reader sir, I don't know
Am I under arrest or should I guess some more?
"Well you was doin fifty-five in a fifty-four
License and registration and step out of the car
Are you carryin' a weapon on you I know a lot of you are"
I ain't steppin out of shit all my paper's legit
"Well, do you mind if I look round the car a little bit?"
Well my glove compartment is locked so are the trunk in the back
And I know my rights so you gon' need a warrant for that
"Aren't you sharp as a tack, you some type of lawyer or something'?
Or somebody important or somethin'?"
Tah, I ain't pass the bar but i know a little bit
Enough that you won't illegally search my shit
"We'll see how smart you are when the K9 come"
I got 99 problems but a bitch ain't one

It's violent, it's drenched with anger, but its also very very compelling because its honest. I find that I understand this and R&B in general a lot better after reading Alex Haley's Roots. Reporter saaar lent it to me, saying that its a good read. What I wasn't prepared for was the most heart-wrenching week of reading since Toni Morrison's Beloved - even more so than her, because even tho its heavily fictionalised, Roots still is based in fact.
For the uninitiated, Roots is Haley tracing his ancestors seven generations back, starting with Kunta Kinte (?) an African tribal who was shipped off to America. The atrocities committed to him are all the more heartbreaking because of the unsparing yet affectionate portrayal of his life before he is captured. It's such a wonderful story right up to that point - which makes the atrocities so much harder to bear. And then, again, after going through torture after torture, each more cruel and disgusting than the previous, more so because at the end of a day of being whipped to the bone, and shitting where he sits because he's chained up, and being branded on his skin, he has to hear the cries of the women tribals who were captured as they are raped every night by the whites. And then he finds some kind of solace in a comparitively humanitarian master in US - until his daughter is sold, only to be raped repeatedly by her new master.
With this history of violence, who is to grudge R&B any of its anger? My aunt was telling me the other day (and she's not really the US slamming type) that to this day they don't quite get that life of decency and dignity.
Again, this is only from what I hear, I haven't been to US, but if movies are any indication.... Because you always have the token black person, and everything is so pointedly politically correct, that, reading between the lines, you know those divisions still exist.
Also, I think history points out that any one community, on whom violence is perpetrated, would eventually turn violent themselves. Isreal is a case in point.

I still think with all this going on, that literature - and music - and any other art form - should basically be about what I mentioned above. Serious literature that is. Which is not to say that I'm saying that humourous or light hearted literature is in any way inferior to serious literature - there's nothing on Earth I enjoy more than Wodehouse or Tintin even... It lights up my day, it makes life worth living.
But when someone approaches a serious topic and spirals into identity crises and deconstruction and what not, I'm like get a life. And when I hear about people committing suicide because of a woman/man they were in love with, or a piece of literature that draws out the pangs of lost love, I'm like "If you're having girl problems I feel sad for you son... etc."