kagablog

I’m dancing wildly to the music, along with a bunch of equally crazy, smiling folk, under a half-moon and clouds lit by the city’s lights. I feel my belly expand and my breath goes right down. The band’s singer, Algerian-born Fethi Tabet, seems to feel it too; he’s making motions across his stomach and saying something about ‘spirit, spirit’, in French.

It occurs to me that music is a true vehicle to gain freedom, even if only temporarily. During the two hour concert there is only positive vibration. For those two hours we defeated all the shit outside, all the price increases, the rampant crime, the pollution, the chaos.

We are held by the music … in our elation, our celebration of life. We show off to each other, we play with our beauty and revel in the talents of our bodies as we waltz, polka and tango together.

The music holds us. We swim in it, we bathe in it. We are part of the river of music that has always been there, since our hearts began beating as a species and we started knocking things together to mimic the heartbeat rhythm. I look down at my footprints in the dirt dance-floor and I wonder how many of my footprints have been made to music and dance.

Shortly before the concert I watched the movie Favela Rising. Set in the extremely violent Vigario Geral slum in Rio de Janiero, early 1990s, it’s about the AfroReggae movement, led by Anderson Sa. The movement provides music and dance as positive alternatives to the slum’s kids, who until then could only work for gangs to acquire status and respect.

It’s an epic battle of good and evil, or as I prefer to see it, harmony versus discord. Roots culture - music, dance, art, story-telling and group participation in these activities - in these are harmony.

Western culture and globalization has divorced people from these structures, offering in their place discord: materialism, corruption, addiction to sex and drugs, gangsterism, the macho ethic, the myth of the individual.

Favela Rising talks about the Shiva effect: how transformation follows chaos, or how chaos is created in order for light to shine from the darkness. How the stronger the darkness/chaos/discord, the purer the light and harmony that arise from it. Anderson and AfroReggae are fantastically clear in their thinking, in their message, in their fearlessness, in their example.

There is more music in the world today than there has ever been. We can all tap into this harmony. The present discord is massive and global, but this can only create stronger light. There is no need for fear. The Shiva effect is here.