….music, language and art
Niederdeutschen. Lowlands Germany. Normaal musik. The Netherlands.
Here we call it hip-hop. Conscious rap. Dirty South rap. Soul music. Funk. The Blues.
Bessie Smith. William Grant Still. Big Mama Thorton. Betty Davis. Nona Hendryx.
We gon’ be alright, RIGHT??!??
Making strange historical connections to the culture of despair after Nazi Germany and after Apartheid and the study of marginalized youth on YouTube and teaching students to grapple with the despair of learning that our American culture is NOT what it claims itself to be when it comes to poverty, the working class, the middle class, business, education and much more. It can be depressing to study and think critically. The mind wants to lighten the weight of the burden by oversimplifying even the notion of “despair”. It’s merely a distraction not a “shit hittin the fan” confrontation with what’s really happening to the people in the nation.
Skimming though a Columbia Emeritus professor’s first book, The Culture of Despair (1963) by Frtiz Stern, I am starting to discover a rich definition of “despair” that is appropriate for my social inequality class discussion today. I captured this notion in my notebook:
“Despair, historian Fritz Stern writes, leads to a maze of self-afflicted hatred and frustrations [I would add resentments quite apparent among people of color, women, and college students]. He adds, “Despair [must] ultimately to yield to the promise of redemption. Hence the insistence on several steps to regeneration. The healing powers of Rembrandt, on the still slumbering powers of the Niederdeutschen–all these were verbal constructions designed to combat the deeply rooted sense of despair” (Stern 1963, 152).
This got me thinking about the power of the arts and media to regenerate and heal the illogics and psychosis that politics imposes on citizens. Stern writes that culture, psychology and psychic manipulation are harnessed in cultures of despair. Something to draw upon as we invent the format of our final presentations.
I decided to write a letter of acknowledgement to emeritus professor Stern. I always embrace intergenerational communication and I think in this age of technological information overload where our mobile devices control us with dings and buzzes, that we actually slow down and take time to compose handwritten letters or even an email to a retired professor whose research still resonates. I shared more of my notes with Stern:
Stern concludes the preface of the book with a wistful thought. Perhaps it is the very culture of despair that demands a historical return [from the living]. [I] “would prefer to live in a world in which the politics of cultural despair had nothing to do with historical resonance”.
[KG:] In other words, wouldn’t it be great to live in a world where the past was just that–behind us–not shaping us; easy and undemanding of our critical reflection and study. This is brilliant stuff!!
I added to Prof. Stern, “Sorry for using such lowbrow language. My 10th grade honor’s English teacher would staunchly protest the use of ‘stuff. But it seems fitting from the bit of information I examined about the cultural history of Niederdeutchen in 1970s subculture. Here’s a video of one of its proponents who reclaimed the use of Low German, which is the translation of the German term.
For more on Niederdeutschen See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_German#Contemporary Normaal and low German language reclaimed through subcultural music.
I don’t know enough but to quote Wikipedia just yet. Here is a bit of biography about Normaal.
Normaal is a rock band from the Netherlands, more specifically from the Achterhoek region, who sing in Achterhooks, a local variety of the Low Saxon language group. Bennie Jolink, who was an Arts education[disambiguation needed] student stationed in Amsterdam in the 1970s, started the band in 1975 as a reaction to disco and glamrock, in addition to the overall “Dutch snobbery” towards people from the Low Saxon-speaking regions, and use of the English language by many other Dutch artists. “Normaal” meaning “normal”, suggesting the same: “act normally”. The band has since gained national fame, and have had more top 40 hits in the Dutch chart than any other Dutch band. Despite this fact, the band never reached number one.[1] The music could be typified as “heavy country rock”, and possibly as a rowdier version of ZZ Top.