Tibob;

Many good points; here is where we disagree.  Yours and Flambert's assertion that any attention should have been paid to Christians by that movement.

My view is that the Haitian Christian community and the part of Haitian society repelled by the Vaudou association are irrelevant to the music's success.  Example; if Bookman turned Christian tomorrow, started singing only about Christ or even making him a big part of their repertoire, they would loose me and most of the people I know as CD buying/concert going fans.  What would they get in return.......who knows?  In addition, that international following is made up mostly off (for lack of a better word) light christians and others.  Most are not heavily into religion, start screaming about Christ and they will throw the whole thing with Gospel and turn their back.  Let's just face it, it is not hip to sing about Jesus to these people, they don't want to be preached to.  And they are the "Hip" crowd of their societies.  On the other hand, you could scream about the loas and Ginin all you want; its foreign to them, they don't feel the religious connection, they are here for the beat and the different experience. The same is true with original reggae; scream about Jah and rastafari all you want, who cares, it has no spiritual meaning to a foreigner.

Furthermore I cant call the movement a failure because I really don't think they expected to make such a noise on the international market.  I would be surprised if this was part of their original plan. I think it came as a surprise.

The slow down on the international scene is partly a change of the times. Remember the Africa Sings Tours of a few years ago where you would have African/Caribbean/Vaudou Rock groups on the same stage; I have'nt heard anything about it lately.  The other reason and probably the most important is a lack of proper marketing.  To revive it on the international scene, I would suggest doing what some of the reggea bands do.  Cover Rock songs, hire Rock managers, try to open for Rock shows, sing in English (sometimes).

There is a reason it is called Vaudou-Rock on the international market; it Rocks.  Most Haitians have no idea what to make of those rock guitar riffs. A major part of the economic success of that music lays outside Haiti. Haitians will dance it at Kanaval or when its on the radio. Will they pay for concerts or purchase CDs....not to the level of Konpa.  It will remain a minority music among Haitians (nothing wrong with that) but with the right marketing and association (i.e. rockers), Vaudou-Rock or some derivative will make a name for Haiti on the World music stage.

Best of luck with your musical project.

By the way thanks for the individual "psychoanalysis" Doctor Phil.......I mean Docteur Tibob.

kreyolbro@aol.com

Kreyolbro - I agree with your analysis. Maybe the cost-benefit factor wasn't worth it.

Religious Christians, especially Protestants, have been the worst in accepting non-Christian anything. Although Islam is more deadly, the body counts by the Crusaders alone for 4 centuries IN THE NAME OF CHRISTIANITY may never be matched by any other religious group on the world scene.

I also like the Rock part of your analysis. COMPAS JUST DON'T ROCK! it's not the language, it's not anything I've heard so far. THE MUSIC IS JUST NOT ROCKING. On the other side, Rasin music DOES ROCK! And I agree about Rock fans not giving a damn about what's being said. They just want to rock!

Docteur Tibob ... hahaha haha ahahaha hahaha!

I've been avoiding that title ... but you are something else ...

LOL..LOL..LOL.. Tibob...thanks for the invitation to the spiritual land.  And where exactly is that?  Different people have different meanings of where it is.  Some say it is a physical place while others say it is purely mental.

Brother, I am not a spiritual person nor do I want to become a spiritual person.  You may think I am missing something, I beg to differ.

You are correct, I do rely on science, verifiable facts, or at least some rational cause and effect.  I do not care about spiritual questions and will not reply to them.  As for being more valuable to humanity as a spiritual person; brother you are bordering on preaching and judging an individual's worth based on your religious beliefs.  I sincerely hope that was not your intent.  I could say a non-spiritual person is more valuable to humanity and so on..... see it never ends. 

You need to leave the proselytizing for another thread or venue, or person.  Kreyolbro is immune to that type of thinking. 

kreyolbro@aol.com

Oh MY GOD! kreyolbro ... please let's avoid making assumptions.

I didn't say and will NEVER say that a spiritual person is more valuable to humanity ... How would I know? On the contrary, I'm leaning more on the assertion that spriritual people are more destructive to humanity since most world wars (if not all) since recorded history are based on spiritual nonsense.

My Religious beliefs ... I don't know how you know I've got those. I only said I've just completed a gospel CD at the same times I told you about my voodoo MUSIC accomplishments. Not that I don't have religious beliefs, but through my posts, I'm doubting that I ever thrown them at people's thoughts.

Religious Beliefs ... !!! I don't know much, but I know how to shut them off unless expressly solicited. I am the least religious person alive maybe. At the same time, no one has learned to compromise as well as myself. ALL FOR THE SAKE OF SOCIAL AND SPIRITUAL ADVANCEMENT!

Bordering preaching ... (That's a good one) I know you've been approached before by religious folks; which may have inspired disgust in you for those things of religious and spiritual nature. A Haitian adage goes like this: "CHAT BOULE NAN DLO CHO, LI PE DLO FRET". My bro, I am neither DLO CHO, nor DLO FRET!

Preaching ... (what a terminator!). My personal motto is DIALOGUE.

I did invite you in spiritual lands. But you quickly categorized my invitation as a move from a Christian in his evangelization journey.

After Docteur Tibob, will it be Père Tibob or Pasteur Tibob? Are you in a mission to try all the religious titles before my name? (Actually I sort of like Monseigneur Tibob - Are you bowing to this current post?).

What does the land of the spiritual mean to you? Forget about the Christians, or the voodooists or the Moslem, or even Science. What do you understand the word "spiritual" to mean without any association to your past experiences with unfortunate or fortunate encounters?

Tibob...actually I was tempted to finish my last post with Reverand Tibob...lol..lol  then I refrained..... lol..

I hear you bro....

To answer your question, "the land of the spiritual" means nothing to me at all.  No reaction whatsoever....if as you requested I ignore past experiences.

Let me try anyway; a place where faith replaces reason....lol

kreyolbro@aol.com

SPIRITUAL LAND - A place where faith replaces reason!

That's more intelligible than 99% of the definitions I've seen (don't you love how we decide to use stat numbers as we please?) Anyway, you get the point.

Your definition is simple, true at first glance but yet inaccurate for only one reason: CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER! It would be SCIENTIFICALLY close to being perfect if you said:

SPIRITUAL LAND - A place where faith has yet to be replaced by reason!

My bro, reason is nothing but the "solved" portion of faith. Science is the land where we accumulate everything we come to UNDERSTAND, that is a transfer from the unknown to the known. For example:

* A lot of people take the plane. Some don't know anything about the 'scientific' logic behind that massive machine light enough to fly. Before they take the plane, the religious among them will pray until heaven touches the earth. For those people, getting on the plane remains an act of FAITH!

However, be it Christian, voodooist, Moslem or else, if they know exactly the scientific explanation on the mechanics of flying crafts, getting on the plane becomes an act of simple REASON!

The point I'm making here is that faith IS first until it becomes reason through understanding/knowledge. Therefore, science state is a subset of faith land: the known portion of the unknown. Another example may be even more helpful:

* In Haiti, there is a "superstitious" belief that if a dog is dead on the house yard (lakou), don't drag the corpse on the ground or the dog's spirit will be mad and thus will kill any other dog that you will try to put on the premises. Another "spiritual" explanation is that the dead dog's spirit will communicate to the new living dog's spirit who will die being so sad of the doom reserved for 'him'.

Well, through time, 'pasteurical' medicine has made its way in Haiti and explains that dogs are always killed by hard-to-kill fatal viruses (if not physical accident resulting in sudden death). As a result, if one drags the corpse, those viruses will be spread accross the yard and will stay there until a new dog comes and catches them.

For those who know microbial science, it is a SCIENTIFIC act to have successive dogs die if the corpse of the first was dragged. But for those in ignorance of the scienfic explanation, it will remain a SUPERSTITION.

I can give tons of examples like that, explaining how FAITH-BASED understandings of yesterday crawled their ways to form SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE of today.

So if one really is after knowledge, why limiting our learning faculty to only that already solved portion of the spiritual; that is what we proudly call SCIENCE? (you see the irony of the western culture priding everything they do and belittling everything that surpasses their solving power!)

Kreyolbro, and all other post-ers, isn't it clear that science only offers the TAIL of knowledge? Wouldn't it be wise to UNDERSTAND the unknown while KNOWING science for a full knowledge quest?

I know you're not scared. Laziness is in action (other would say the 'spirit of ignorance' is in action).

What do you think? (all of you)

Very interesting Tibob; but again I must disagree.

"a place where faith has yet to replace reason"  that is your definition of it.  Remember; you asked me for my definition.  You may disagree, but there can't be a correct or incorrect answer.

Getting on the very first plane flight may involve only faith whether we understand the mechanism or not.  There is no precedent, nothing to go by.  Theory is about to be put into practice.

Me getting on a flight today has absolutely no faith involved in my decision.  There is a tract record of planes flying, reaching their destinations, and sometimes crashing killing all aboard.

I look at the pluses, the minuses, think of the risk and the reward at the end of the flight and make a rational decision to fly or not to fly.  Granted the religious among us will ask God's help for a safe flight.  Me on the other hand I am totally relying on the pilot's ability, the weather situation, and the mechanical condition of the plane.  I don't need to really understand what makes a plane fly.

"reason is nothing but the solved portion of faith"  again I disagree.  I don't see faith and reason as part of a continiuum.  I see faith as blind acceptance of things unseen or unexplainable.  There is no need to explain.  The believer in God does not need what we would call scientific proof, he/she simply believes.  If science came today with irrefutable proof of the non-existence of God, that will not change the mind of the true believer.

Let's look at your dog dragging example.  If indeed replacement dogs were dying after dragging a previous one and that occurence was well documented or accepted to have been well documented; people's decision not to drag then becomes a reasonable one.  They may not know the correct reason why the dogs were dying, but cause and effect has been established.  If we drag, other dogs will die or the likelyhood of them dying increases, and we have proof. That decision not to drag then was not based on faith.

Now science has shown the reason behind the occurrence.  Science has simply added more information. It has simply explained the phenomenon. It has not however replaced a faith based decision with one based on reason.

kreyolbro@aol.com

Kreyolbro - I'm wondering if you understood my post. You only said EXACTLY what I said to draw an opposing conclusion. Please read it again.

Faith is the HOPE of reason. This is a FACT! What ceases to be faith today becomes reason through understanding and improvement of our human understanding.

It's simple my friend, and you said it too: UNTIL UNDERSTOOD, THE THINGS OF FAITH REMAIN IN THE REALM OF THE UNKNOWN. Once understood, those things are 'trashed' into science. Science is great because it is the genuine testimony of the power of our brains, but it is also the aftermath of solved mysteries. Learning science is a MUST, the first step to universal wisdom since it provides what is known of what was once unknown. But it remains a corrollary, a complement of a bigger and larger stream: the unknown.

Faith is not how we accept things we don't understand. It's raher the TOOL we use to explain what we don't know. "Explaining what we don't know" sounds scientifically absurd ... but that doesn't ring any bell that science finds no 'reason' in that; faith deals with what reason has not yet touched!

It's like instinct; sometimes we 'feel' that something wrong is soon to happen and refuse to take the streets. If somebody asks you why, you just can NOT explain but you KNOW why. That's FAITH, my bro. A scientific person may find you very unreasonnable to base your fear to leave the house on something you can't even explain. Do you see the ironic ignorance of science?

Let's say you do go out and have a accident; defeated science will tell you that it's YOU who made it happen because you believed too much in it; as if it hasn't been proven wrong. Do you lament the nonsense of science here? The euphoric stupidity is the fact that science itself defines faith as an unreasonable belief in something with no scientific basis.

Let's say that nothing happened when you hit the road. Science will tell you everything 'was in your mind' as if your mind is not REAL. Scientific reasoning will always fail to understand that the extra-time you took to hesitate because of your fear is exactly the time that was needed for the danger to occur in the streets while you were inside.

Science, through western propaganda, has become the cycle of human insolence bragging our petiteness before the grandioso depth of what surpasses us in extra-ordinary terms.

NB- I am not referring to religious faith; this is "scientific faith" if you will.

Tibob;  No I did not misunderstand your post at all and I disagree with all of it.  You said "Faith is the hope of reason, and added that it is a FACT".  it is only a fact in Tibob's world.  In kreyolbro's world, Faith is the childish forsaking of reason.  Everyone on this site would have a different definition, and for them it is Fact.

 I have said the total opposite of what you said or meant.  You keep giving me your understanding of faith or that spiritual place.  I hear you, I just don't share your vision of things.  Everyone has their own idea of faith or spirituality. Some of my friends reach that stage after smoking a blundt.  It is not something that can be argued or defended, one can only share ideas.

On the other hand, one can show evidence of reason or rational thinking. I totally see the dog dragging scenario differently than you.  What do you think of my rebuttal to your flight and dog scenarios?  You gave an example and reached a conclusion, I used that same example to come with an opposite view.  Respond to my reply first and then if you still insist on pushing the same point, come up with some new examples. That is my idea of a debate.  If you ignore the rebuttal and just keep giving me your philosophy on things, that is a lecture, and we are just going to tulutuituir with no end.

If you can't see that, then we are speaking different languages, and our conversation is going nowhere.  You have a certain respect for faith or the unscientific, I DO NOT you see, that is the problem.  Your talk about the unknown, and the spirit, and science as western propaganda (now that's an interesting one) are falling on amused ears.

And this is my favorite ; kreyolbro what has happened to your spirit?  disappeared?   yes Tibob, as a matter of fact I sold it along with my soul (or are they the same thing in your world) to the devil.  In my world, this is the kind of question you ask someone in jest not as part of a serious discussion.

kreyolbro@aol.com