Music and African Forced Migration

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MIGRATION
The first piece of music is “Strange Fruit” that was first sang in 1939. The song was an anti-lynching one. It was an ugly song as it depicted violence from white racists who lynched black people. In audio, the song can be seen as a poem with a slow meaningful lyrics, raw texture as well as slow homophonic rhythm. In writte, the song fulfills its role of offering an ugly but impactful metaphor for the mistreatment that was happening with the assistance of some dark images to compare the Africans who had been lynched to fruits dying as a whole generation of people was culled like farmers cut down their crops. The visual is very different whereby a stark as a noose is portrayed by Lawrence to hang from a knife-blade of a branch against a blank sky.
The song interested me historically and socially in the sense that it assisted start and impact the protests of that period. The song continues to impact the movement for civil rights even today. For instance, Kanye West used the song on his “YEEZUS” album. Musically, the song interested me in the sense that it is short but passes information to the audience in just few stanzas as well as several lines in general. It is not complex rhythmically as it embraces a rhythm pattern where the lines following each other have ends that rhyme with AABB format being a poem in the beginning. Taken as a song, it becam...