MUSICAL MATTERS

"Psychedelic Shack" by the iconic Temptations diverted black music ergo black culture from stone-soul to drug-pop in 1969. This new black music's mind altering psychedelic imagery, followed Marvin Gaye's iconic bass-riven reveille "Heard It Through the Grape Vine," in 1968. This hegemonic musical and cultural change paralleled Motown's move to Los Angeles from Detroit . It also tragically opened up the entire black community to a drug-driven, pill-popping, trafficking, hippie-like saturation. It popularized getting high. Many people were unable to self-correct their values in time to spare their families much grief . One wonders what might have been but for these change in the musical genre? The novel, THE DAY THE MUSIC DIED by Joseph Smith is a thinly disguised commentary on the era's vulnerability, susceptibility, to such massively alien pharmacological inputs. It reinforced the fact that drugs were introduced to stop the black revolution that was then sweeping the black community as Black Panthers and black rights activists recruited from the same pool . In due course, drug addiction's mania is said to have overtaken even Huey P. Newton, Black Panther Party co-founder, and many more, ironically. They were all victimized by the same cultural pharmacological inputs, that had sparked gangs, death, mass incarceration, black-on-black crime in quest of ghetto money!