Ian Brown's The Fisherman, a run through history, is influenced by two of his Breezeblock choices: 'Nature of the Threat' by Ras Kass and 'B.I.B.L.E.' by Genius / GZA (See F.E.A.R.), especially the former, a track from Ras Kass's debut album 'Soul On Ice (1996). The referencing of a mobile phone and allusion to the Liberian Civil Wars (1989 - 1996, 1999 - 2003) sees Ian bring events right up to the present age (Jeffrey Dahmer serves this purpose for Ras Kass. Dahmer , murdered by a fellow inmate while in prison in 1994, was an American serial killer who murdered 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991, with the majority of the murders occurring between 1989 and 1991. His murders were particularly gruesome, involving acts of necrophilia, dismemberment and cannibalism).
The chorus of The Fisherman undoubtedly has religious origins. In 'The Calling Of The First Disciples' (Matthew 4: 18 - 22), Jesus said to Simon and his brother Andrew:
And in Luke (Luke 5: 1 - 11), we read of Simon questioning Jesus's command to put out the nets:
They then signalled to James and John, the sons of Zebedee, to help them manage with the nets.
'Fisherman's friend' is describing the relationship Man has with Jesus. Jesus is the fisherman's (i.e. man's) friend; He died for the sins of mankind. Thus, when Ian is talking to the fisherman's friend, he is talking directly to Jesus, as he reveals in a music365.com interview (16th February 2000):
Ian: No. I'm singing directly to Jesus. Yes, I do remember you - and thanks for the book. Happy New Year.
The earliest depictions of The Last Supper show, not bread and wine, but rather a fish on the table. The fish was an early Christian symbol; its letters in Greek were the initials of the confession: 'Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour'. This also has origins in the story of the feeding of the five thousand (Mark 6: 30 - 44) with bread and fish, thought of as a dress-rehearsal for The Last Supper. The lyric, "Man shall not live by bread alone" was the message of Jesus to Satan, when He was being tempted in the desert. When asked by Satan to turn stones into bread:
The following lines are Ian's response to a comment made by a 'Select' magazine reporter at Glastonbury in 1998, who, when interviewing Ian in a caravan, commented that he smelt badly:
During the Renaissance period, Michelangelo painted a picture of Jesus using his uncle as a model. This portrait of Michelangelo’s uncle has become 'the model' by which Jesus is depicted. "Declaration by the Pope of Rome for Jesus to have Michelangelo's uncle's nose" asks why Jesus should be designated particular features as a result of this act. Painting has almost burnt an indelible image of Christ onto the imagination of western civilization. Just as on 'Love Spreads', there is a questioning of the traditional perception of Jesus Christ here. Jesus was a Hebrew with mixed ancestry, including a number of ancestors from Africa, who are named in the gospel of Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus. Both Nature Of The Threat by Ras Kass and B.I.B.L.E. by Genius / GZA address this issue (the flow of 'Nature of the Threat' at this point confusingly appears to claim that Constantine, in the fourth century, commissioned the Renaissance artist Michelangelo (1475 - 1564) to paint the Sistine chapel. See the lyrics prior to the following quoted piece to see what I mean):
Ras Kass, Nature Of The Threat (1996)
The white image, of Christ, is really Cesare Borgia
and uhh, the second son of Pope Alexander
The Sixth of Rome, and once the picture was shown
That's how the devils tricked my dome
Genius / GZA, B.I.B.L.E. (1995)
Cesare Borgia (1475 - 1507), Duke of Valentinois, was the illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia) and Vannozza dei Cattani. It has been suggested that some pictures of Jesus Christ were based on Cesare Borgia when he was alive, and that this in turn has influenced images of Jesus produced since that time. It should be noted that most of the similarities also exist in pictures predating Borgia by centuries, e.g., the 550 A.D. 'Christ Pantocrator' ("Christ, Ruler of All") icon in St. Catherine's Monastery, Sinai. This is the oldest known surviving example of the icon of 'Christ Pantocrator', surviving the period of destruction of images during the Iconoclastic disputes that racked the Eastern church, 726 to 815 and 813 to 843 A.D.
At the beginning of the first verse of The Fisherman, there is an allusion to Saturnalia, a feature of Nature of the Threat:
It is thought by some that the early Christians chose to celebrate the birth of Christ on 25th December (they never claimed Jesus was actually born on that date) intentionally to oppose the pagan mid-winter festival of Saturnalia. Saturnalia (from the god Saturn) was the name the Romans gave to their holiday marking the Winter Solstice. Over the years, it expanded to a whole week, from 17th December to 23rd December. Saturnalia officially was bookmarked by these two dates but the celebration would continue for several days after. 25th December was also another holiday in ancient Rome, a celebration as the birthday of Mithras. As the Mithraic mysteries were in major competition with Christianity for influence in the Roman Empire, it has been suggested by some that the setting of 25th December as 'Christ Mass' was a canny appropriation made to counter the Mithraic threat. Some of the claims made by Ras Kass in this song are questionable, as I will examine later in the essay. Saturn, the Roman god of agriculture, was not a homosexual god; he was married to the goddess Ops and is regarded as the father of Jupiter, Ceres, Juno and many others. Jupiter supposedly chased him away and he was taken in by the god Janus in Latium where he introduced agriculture and viniculture. This event heralded a period of peace, happiness and prosperity, the Golden Age. December 25th was not "the birth of Saturn" (Saturnalia ran between December 17th to 23rd). The celebration of Christmas derives from the Heathen celebration of the Yule. "Coca Cola made X-mas" refers to the impact that Coca Cola's advertising has had on the celebration of Christmas; it is frequently credited with the 'invention' of the modern image of Santa Claus as an old man in red and white garments; however, while the company did in fact start promoting this image in the 1930s in its winter advertising campaigns, it was already common before that. In 1863, a caricaturist for Harper's Weekly, Thomas Nast, began developing his own image of Santa. Nast gave his figure a flowing set of whiskers and dressed him all in fur, from head to foot. A Boston printer, Louis Prang, introduced the English custom of Christmas cards to America, and in 1885 he issued a card featuring a red-suited Santa. At the beginning of the 1930s, the Coca-Cola company was looking for ways to increase sales of their product during winter, then a slow time of year for the soft drink market. They turned to a talented commercial illustrator, Haddon Sundblom (1899 - 1976), who created a series of drawings that associated the figure of a larger than life, red-and-white garbed Santa Claus with Coca Cola.
Satan is identified by the number 666 in the following text from Revelation:
Ian states "Number of the beast. Prophesized by those who roam the Middle East" because this is very likely an instance of gematria, an early form of Jewish mysticism. Its object is to conceal a name by substituting for it a cipher of equal numerical value to the letters composing it. In some instances, Ian has taken a reference and moulded it so as to form the narrative of a comparable modern day development. Compare these lyrics by Ian - "Fishing fleets slicing fins off pregnant dolphins in Japanese waters...Liberian militia, severing limbs off infants at the side of the road" - to the following lyrics from Nature of the Threat:
The following lyric from Nature of the Threat may have influenced Ian's reading and subsequent assertion to Melody Maker in April 1998, when he was accused of homophobia:
This is Ian's explanation of the matter:
Ian was the singles reviewer for that week and the tangent he took in reviewing a single by Divine Comedy caused a storm of protest. The single was taken from a tribute by various artists to renowned songsmith Noel Coward, whose homosexuality was the spur for a diatribe from Ian (He is alleged to have alluded disparagingly - "I don't trust that shit, me." - to Coward and Danny La Rue). Pounced upon by the journalist, Ian is alleged to have burst out: "Violence comes from Romans, Nazis, Greeks - they were all homosexual. And I've got gay friends that will back me up. I just think Noel Coward is an old tosser who got on with the Queen Mother." These comments seemed a world away from the man who had ten years earlier attended an Anti-Clause 28 march. Neil Tennant, who had compiled the CD, Danny La Rue's producer and others went public with their anger and so too did many readers who wrote in to complain. Not for the first time, Ian's historical claims were wayward. Along with Jews, Gypsies, the disabled and so called anti socials, homosexuals too were persecuted, considered to be unworthy of life in Hitler's pursuit of a pure race. Gay men, and to a lesser extent lesbians, were one of several groups targeted by Nazis during the Holocaust. Nazism declared itself incompatible with homosexuality, because gays did not reproduce and perpetuate the 'master race'.
Ian's reading on this subject may have been William L. Shirer's 'The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich', first published in 1960. Shirer, a radio reporter for CBS, covered Germany for many years until December 1940, when increasing Nazi censorship of his broadcasts made work impossible for him. Shirer's book, purported to be a 'definitive' work on Nazi Germany, can be criticised for its coverage of homosexuality in this period. In none of its 1245 pages can one find reference to the Nazi persecution of homosexuals. Shirer disparages the alleged homosexuality of some Nazi figures, denouncing them as "notorious homosexual perverts"; their homosexuality is referred to as "moral degeneration" and evidence of their "depraved morals." Citing rifts within the Nazi hierarchy, Shirer panders to stereotype when asserting that they "quarrelled and feuded as only men of unnatural sexual inclinations, with their peculiar jealousies, can." Forsaking an objective use of language to refer to the alleged homosexuality of top Nazis, Shirer has been accused by some of resorting to prejudice-laden comments that attack their homosexuality, rather than their fascism exclusively. As with Ian's comments to Melody Maker years later, there is an unjustified linkage between the alleged homosexuality of particular Nazi figures to the regime's monstrous crimes against humanity. Headline-making attacks, such as the ransacking of the headquarters of the German homosexual rights movement by fascist students and storm troopers on 6th May 1933, are not found in the book. Shirer cites the notorious Nazi book-burning in Berlin four days later, but fails to acknowledge that many of the 20,000 torched volumes were from the trashed headquarters of the homosexual rights movement, the Institute for Sexual Science. Also ignored by Shirer are: the outlawing of gay rights groups; the closure of gay bars and magazines; the criminalisation of the intent to commit homosexual acts; the creation of the Reich Office for Combating Abortion and Homosexuality; the compiling of 'pink lists' by the Gestapo; the mass deportations of homosexuals to concentration camps; the introduction of the death penalty for gay sex. Shirer could not justifiably claim to have had no access to source material on the issue; his own bibliography cites Eugen Kogon's book, 'The Theory and Practice of Hell', published in 1950. Written by an ex-Buchenwald political prisoner, it documents the grisly fate of homosexuals: "(they) had to slave in the quarry. This consigned them to the lowest caste in the camp during the most difficult years...virtually all of them perished." A whole chapter of 'The Memoirs of Dr. Felix Kersten', the recollections of Himmler's doctor, is devoted to Himmler's fanatical obsession with the extermination of gay people. In 1959, the leading Nazi Rudolf Hess explained in his book, 'Kommandant in Auschwitz', how he sought to 'cure' homosexuality by forcing gay inmates to undertake hard labour and compelling them to have sex with female prostitutes.
Ian spoke to Melody Maker again in June, in an attempt to rectify the situation, stating that he had been talking about 'homosexual power structures' throughout history and not homosexuality per se. He was lucky that his comments did not derail his solo career at the outset; in early 1997, Crispian Mills, lead singer of Kula Shaker, glamourized Nazism in allegedly saying "Hitler knew a lot more than he made out. The Nazis studied the Vedas, the scriptures, the Holy Grail... They were also into magic and all that. I'd LOVE to have great big flaming swastikas onstage just for the f*** of it." During an earlier interview, Mills had said: "You can see why Hitler got support. It was probably the uniforms that swung it." He was derided by contemporary acts for this comment and accused by newspapers such as the Daily Mail of harbouring Nazi sympathies. Their second album failed to make an impact and the band's career was sabotaged by the consistently bad press these comments invited. Four years after the Meoldy Maker affair, Ian later demonstrated equally poor control in a David Brent-esque comment, made speaking to The Guardian (Saturday 2nd February 2002), when asked what life was like in his spell in Strangeways prison:
Here are the entire lyrics to Nature of the Threat by Ras Kass, which I will subsequently break down and analyse:
The Hellenistic Era, Alexander the Great
Conquers all the way to India leaving four successor states
By the fifth century B.C.
R.O.M.E. succeeds to be
The conqueror of Egypt and Greece
But had the threat of the Black Phoenicians in Sicily
The Punic Wars began 264 B.C.
The Black general Hannibal and Carthaginian Peace
In 146 B.C. Carthage fell after a six-month siege
Rome sold every citizen in slavery, the first genocide of history
And more bisexuality in sight
Julius Caesar was known as "every woman's husband and every man's wife" (biatch)
Spartacus Revolt - a slave rebellion that lost
Where 6,000 slaves was nailed on a cross...
Cross ? Aw, shit ! Jesus Christ !
Time for some-act-right
Christians get your facts right
'cause Christ was not his name, that's Greek for "one who is anointed"
Yoshua Ben Yosef was his name, do Christians know this ?
So who do you praise, do you know his name ?
Or do you do this in vain ?
Accepting the religion they gave slaves to behave
Peep the description of historian Josephus
Short, dark, with an underdeveloped beard was Jesus
He had the Romans fearing revolution
The solution was to take him to court and falsely accuse him
After being murdered by Pilate how can it be
These same white Romans established Christianity
Constantine would later see the cross in a dream
In his vision it read "In hoc signum vinces"
"In this Sign We Conquer"
Manifest destiny, in 325 he convened the Nicene Creed
And separated God into three
Decided Jesus was born on December 25th
And raising on the third day is a myth
Plus to deceive us
Commissioned Michelangelo to paint white pictures of Jesus
He used his aunt, uncle and nephew
Subconsciously that affects you
It makes you put white people closer to God
(Yo ! The man got game like a mothafucka) True indeed, fuck it...Jihad !
In the 8th century Muslims conquered Spain, Portugal and France
And controlled it for 700 years
They never mention it in History class
'cause O'Fays are threatened when you get the real lesson
Moors from Baghdad, Turkey
Threaten European Christians, meaning: the white way of life
Hence, the Crusades for Christ
On November 25th, 1491
Santiago defeats the last Muslim stronghold, Granada
King Ferdinand gave thanks to God for victory
And the Pope of Rome declared this day to forever be
A day of Thanksgiving for all European Christians
Now listen:
When you celebrate Thanksgiving, what you are actually celebrating
is the proclamation of the Pope of Rome, who later in league with Queen Isabella
Sent Cardinal Ximenos to Spain to murder any Blacks that resisted Christianity
These Moors, these Black men and women were from Baghdad, Turkey
And today you eat the turkey for your Thanksgiving day
as the European powers destroyed the "Turkies" who were the forefathers
of your mothers and fathers...now fight the power, you bitch-ass niggaz !
Now around this time whites started calling us Negroes
That's Spanish for "black object", meaning we're not really people but property
And the Triangle Trade begins, they seize us
Queen Elizabeth sent the first slaves on a ship named Jesus
Stealing land from the indigenous natives
Gave them alcohol to keep the red man intoxicated
Whites claimed they had to civilize these pagan animals
But up until 1848, there's documented cases of whites being the savage cannibals
Eating Indians, in 1992 it's Jeffrey Dahmer
They slaughtered a whole race with guns
Drugs, priests and nuns
1763 the first demonic tactic of biological warfare
As tokens of peace, Sir Jeffrey Amherst passed out clothing
And blankets to the Indian community
Infested with smallpox, knowing they had no immunity
Today it's AIDS, you best believe it's man-made 'cause ain't a damn thing changed
Let me explain:
Now since people of color are genetically dominant
and Caucasoids are genetically recessive, if whites expect to be predominant
Meaning survive as a race, then they simply must take precautions
That's why they're worried about the future now
'cause by 2050 almost all the Earth's population will be Brown
Then Black, so understanding that whites counterreact
(I'm sayin'... man.. the fools ain't nothin' but a tea spoon of milk in a world coloured with joy)
So they created a system to force Blacks into an unnatural position
That reinforces the position of natural inferiority, in addition
Created guns and developed the ethnocentric view
That God justifies every fucking thing they do
Conditioned people to perceive white's culture as civilized
And every other culture considered primitive - not true
Racism is the system of racial subjugation
Against non-whites in every area of human relation
Entertainment, education, labor, politics
Law, religion, sex, war and economics
See Blacks were 3/5 of a man with tax purposes intended
You think you're Afro-American, you're a 14th Amendment
And a good nigger
Jews don't salute the fucking swastika
But niggas pledge allegiance to the flag that accosted ya
They never teach about the Breaker Islands like Jamaica
Where, before slaves came here, whites would take a
pregnant woman, hang her from a tree by her toes
Slice her stomach with a knife and let the unborn baby fall to the floor
Then stomp an unborn child in front of all the slaves
To inbreed fear, so they'd be scared and behave
And not rebel no more
Understand all whites must be perceived as potential predators
I paraphrase historian Ishakamusa Barashango
Understand that regardless of the lofty ideals engraved on paper
In such documents as the Constitution or Declaration
The basic nature of the European / American white man remains
Virtually unchanged...
So check it
This is the nature of the threat
This song is controversial in some of its assertions, and is in some instances, in error.
The first human, homo sapiens sapiens evolved over 45,000 years ago. The phenotypical traits referred to by Ras Kass are not recessive permutations associated exclusively with Europeans. A study of the Aborigine in Australia reveals a frequency of blonde hair. Conversely, many Asians have skin that is fairer than Europeans, and many Europeans also have the combination of dark hair and eyes.
Albinism is a lack of pigmentation in the eyes, skin and hair, an inherited condition resulting from the combination of recessive genes passed from both parents of an individual. This condition is known to affect mammals, fish, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. There is a contradiction in making such a claim ("Albinism apparently was a sin to the original man, Africans"), yet labelling Europeans "the first race haters" only a couple of lines later. The claim that Europeans are descended from Albinos and live in Europe because Black people disapproved of their presence in Africa is strongly questionable.
Those "mutants" also travelled to the east and west. Mutation was necessary in becoming human in the first place and with each mutation we are adapting to the world. The equator, it should be noted, emcompasses North Africa. More of Africa is above the equator than below.
This is a difficult claim to substantiate. Europeans were arguably not the first to enslave people of a different race, e.g., in the Bible, the Egyptians enslaved the Israelites (see Exodus 1: 1 - 22).
Grimaldi man has been disregarded by science. Modern humans are not descended from Neanderthals but co-existed with them about 40,000 years ago. Neanderthals, it seems, were not savage enough and were probably wiped out by Cro-Magnon, the predecessor of modern Europeans and Middle eastern populations.
This is in fact Cro-magnon art.
Europe was populated long before 2000 BC. From approximately 40,000 B.C., there were various migrations from the Middle East into Europe. The Aryan invasion theory of India has long been disregarded. India and the Indus valley was significantly populated for thousands of years prior to the presence of the Aryans and the civilization rivalled those in Mesopotamia and Egypt as early as 2,500 B.C. Aryans have not been credited for the Hindu civilization by archaeologists since the 1920s and thus the above viewpoint represents an antiquated notion. If one was to be pedantic here, there were no 'Russians' in 2000 B.C.
It should be noted that there are different theories concerning the establishment of the caste system in India: religious-mystical, biological and socio-historical.
Indo-European languages originated in Anatolia and dispersed from there, not India. Sanskrit is an Indo-Aryan language; Greek is an Indo-Hellenic language; and German and English are Indo-Germanic languages. The Aryans in India did not come in contact with any Greeks or Germans and thus did not influence these languages.
The Minoans were a pre-Hellenic Bronze Age civilization in Crete in the Aegean Sea, prior to Helladic or Mycenaean culture (i.e., well before what we know as Classical Greece). Their civilization flourished from approximately 3000 to 1450 B.C. Thus, 2000 B.C. is approximately one thousand years in error in its estimation.
If Mycenaeans did learn from Kemet ("the black land"), how does this explain the lack of Egyptian influence (e.g., Egyptian-style pyramids) in Greek architecture ? Stonehenge, archaeoastronomically designed, incorporating geometry and astronomy, was erected (The older circular earth bank and ditch, which constitute the earliest phase of the monument, have been dated to about 3100 B.C.) before the Egyptian pyramids. None of the aforementioned Ancient Greek scholars ever traveled to Egypt.
This lyric disputes Hippocrates' given title, "the father of medicine". Asclepius was the Greek's God of Medicine. While Asclepius was linked to Imhotep, only the former was worshiped in Greece.
The word philosophy means “love of wisdom”, not knowledge; there is a distinct difference - wisdom cannot be stolen but rather is something which one develops internally.
Homosexuality existed in Greece, but the culture was not predominantly homosexual. Homosexuals, by law, could neither vote nor serve in office. Pedaritus, a governor in Ancient Greece, once said, "Men who are like women should not be praised, nor should women who are like men."
Phoenicia was an ancient civilization in the north of ancient Canaan, with its heartland along the coastal plain of what is now Lebanon and Syria, between the Lebanon Mountains and the Mediterranean Sea. Phoenicians were not black and were most likely a Semitic people.
The definition of genocide needs to be understood here. Genocide is the systematic killing of a racial or cultural group; the people of Carthage were sold, not exterminated.
Christians do not claim that Jesus is named "Christ." Jesus is called the Christ however.
It should be noted that Josephus (c.37 – c.100 AD) never saw Jesus, as he was born after His crucifixion.
This ‘myth’ is recorded before 325, and by contemporaries.
France was not conquered.
The Moors were the medieval Muslim inhabitants of al-Andalus (the Iberian Peninsula including present day Spain and Portugal) and the Maghreb, whose culture is often called "Moorish". The name derives from the old tribe of the Mauri and their kingdom, Mauretania (not be confused with the country of Mauritania). Mauretania lay in present-day Morocco and Western Algeria.
Granada was not captured until 1492. On 2nd January 1492, Boabdil, the leader of the last Muslim stronghold in Granada, surrendered to armies of a recently-united Christian Spain.
There is no Thanksgiving Day in Europe and there is no basis for an argument that the holiday began on the European continent. The American holiday of Thanksgiving was established in 1863, after President Lincoln's Proclamation.
Religion was the issue of focus and not colour of skin (e.g., Jews were expelled too); the wording of Ras Kass's lyric seems to specify a racial motive. The claim that people from Turkey (Baghdad, Turkey ?) were the 'forefathers' of black people is confusing.
Negro means "black" (not "black object") in Spanish, Portuguese and ancient Italian languages, being derived from the Latin word 'niger' of the same meaning. The word 'object' is to be found nowhere in the translated application to the person being called 'black'. The term, of course, has had racist association in history but the definition of the word in this song is choice in its presentation.
These were not "the first slaves" belonging to a European power. Elizabeth I reigned as Queen of England and Queen of Ireland from 1558 until her death in 1603. Portuguese seamen first landed in Africa in the fourth decade of the fifteenth century. From the outset they seized Africans and shipped them to Europe. In 1441, ten Africans were kidnapped from the Guinea coast and taken to Portugal as gifts to Prince Henry the Navigator. Moors were still in power when Portugal began to kidnap the first African slave, which further contradicts Ras Kass's argument.
This lyric, taken literally, makes the false assertion that 'white people' have slaughtered an entire race.
Gunpowder was invented in China during the ninth century. Religion and ethnicity are two distinct entities that should not be confused.
Racism is the prejudice that members of one race are intrinsically superior to members of other races. The definition provided here by Ras Kass is inaccurate in its limitation.
The number that was to be used for tax purposes and for apportioning representatives in Congress was 5/5ths of free people plus 3/5ths of all other persons (which included slaves). See Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution, which was later repealed by the 14th Amendment.
The way in which this is worded makes little sense ("Before slaves came here", whites would do this "in front of all the slaves").
Ras Kass's reference source is the body of work left by Dr. Ishakamusa Barashango (1938 - 2004), whom he namechecks in the song.
Bibliography:
Slave trade: a root of contemporary African Crisis
Comments ? Thoughts ? Ideas ?
Discuss them in the Discussion Forum
Or email me.
Paul McAuley
http://www.thisisthedaybreak.co.uk
Email: Paul@thisisthedaybreak.co.uk
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