New brooms only Sweep Clean

"I have loved reggae as I have loved no other music. Not even the blues. I love its brashness, its audacity, its tones, its harmonies, its chords. I love its infectious beat, its spiritual strength and insistence on telling the truth in as raw and naked a fashion as possible. I love its spiritual militance: I believe it is the most militant music of the twentieth century. I love its eloquent articulation of a neo-African cultural space and time. I love how it embodies an utter refusal to surrender to the rat race, to Western ideology. How adamant it is to maintain an African-based rhythm, speed, and philosophical orientation, slow and meditative, reflective and wisdom seeking. I love its clarity of vision, its commitment to reexamining old myths and creating new ones. And I love that one of the fundamental elements in reggae is the use of proverbs.

I will always remember sitting in my family's living room in Virginia, listening to the Wailing Souls and hearing my great- grandmother echo a proverb from the song that was playing. "New brooms only sweep clean," she said, smiling. "New brooms only sweep clean. Now that's a good one." I had not even realized she was listening. But nothing could have demonstrated more profoundly the connection between reggae and the world I grew up in, with elderly black people who adored the well-spoken metaphor, who lived by contemplation and musing, and tried, as much as possible, to live by wisdom. People for whom culture meant the remembrance of stories, the accumulation of lessons, the codes whereby these are communicated, and the wisdom to interpret them; people much like those in the hills of Jamaica."

-- Anand Prahlad