http:/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12pwyzpOYh0

Classic example of the African American oral tradition in effect.

The two songs “Street Beater” and “Beat Street” represent quite different styles of music [Junkyard Funk and hardcore Hip-Hop respectively] while sharing a theme or message common to Black Art without regard to generation,  genre, or geographic location.   Irrespective of the fact that Ella Fitzgerald via Jazz came to represent African American elegance and refinement at the height of  Jim Crow while Mel came to hold court on the street in the midst of Reaganomics they are bound by a history of expression originating on the continent of Africa and later nursed in American cane and rice swamps, tobacco patches, brothels, cotton fields, in churches, from the poplar tree, on picket lines, on chain gangs and battlefields, under sycamores, at back doors and “Colored” fountains, near blast furnaces, in Miss Anne’s kitchen or behind bars for several centuries.

Black art at its best, functions as a celebration of our collective experience and is engineered to evoke as well as stoke that elusive quality of spiritual resilience (or “Soul Power” as Brother James Brown put it)  in the face of the unjust, adverse, and too often dire social, political and material conditions Black communities function in the midst of.  It is exhorts us to take heart and reminds us to live as icons of human dignity in the face of the dying institutions of inhumanity.  Black art documents and many times points the way to postures of sanity in a world drunk on the wines of greed and racial vanity.