Lionel Richie surprised the world but not the philosophers--Freddie Kissoon

JULY 5, 2015 | BY KNEWS | FILED UNDER FEATURES / COLUMNISTS, FREDDIE KISSOON

This was such a phenomenal surprise that I don’t think any commentator should miss an analysis of it. Before last Sunday, if you had told anyone familiar with music, not necessarily a music analyst, that the biggest crowd ever to watch a performer at the annual Glastonbury Festival would be an aging singer of love ballads, someone would have insulted you. Lionel Richie, who combines pop, crooning, soul and rhythm and blues, pulled the largest crowd since Glastonbury started in the seventies. It is still hard to digest this fact. He did one of the most romantic, easy-listening ballads you could enjoy, “Hello” and the 120,000 attendees went wild. The Festival, which started in the mid-seventies to continue the dying hippie culture, has seen all the rock acts you can think of. If you go through the who is who list of rock stars, they have all performed at Glastonbury. Then Glastonbury introduced rap in 2008 and Jay-Z became the first such artist to entertain. This year’s rap singer was Kanye West. What makes Richie’s act so fantastic is that over ninety-five percent of the Festival’s fans are below thirty-two years of age. When Richie was a global superstar they weren’t even born. I still don’t understand this Richie craze, because even though he is a superb singer, I wouldn’t imagine that he is still at the top of his game to attract such an attendance at Glastonbury. But the Richie craze is still there. In 2007, the son of Gaddafi, who is currently in jail, paid him millions of American dollars to sing five songs. The Richie phenomenon tells the story of the unpredictable nature of life. Life essentially is an unpredictable thing. It holds unbelievable things that the sooner one accepts that fact the better one is able to understand the world. I don’t think a psychotic idiot like Donald Trump will go far in the upcoming presidential race, but life brings incredible things that we must accept as part of human civilization. Did anyone imagine that the huge empire named the USSR world have just slumped to the ground like a lump of sand? Americans were shocked to know that the most violently inflexible, anti-communist, anti-Black , anti-democratic, anti-homosexual law enforcement officer in the US, the FBI chief, J. Edgar Hoover was a raving homosexual (see Anthony Summers’ competent biography on Hoover) Apartheid fell just suddenly and maybe we still cannot believe it. When Barack Obama ran for the presidency against the heaviest heavyweight in the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton, no one on Planet Earth gave him even a millimeter of a chance. A Black American would probably become the US President in another 1000 years. Obama did it in 2008. Maybe we still cannot believe it. Allen Stanford spent money on cricket as if the world was about to end. Stanford is in an American jail and because of the length of his sentence will probably die in jail. The average person would be left psychologically stunned for a long time when they witnessed for themselves incredible things they believe would never happen. But anyone who picked up a philosophy book would tell you that life is about irrationalities, just as it is about logic and reason. The human must never take life for granted. Human existence is replete with inexplicabilities, inscrutabilities, vicissitudes, vagaries, and of course, insanities. Do not discount anything in life. The office boy who is yet to do his CXC examinations and who you predict will become a waste, may one day become the country’s president. My father’s cousin Dr. Leslie Mootoo used to hang around GCC asking my father to be a ball-boy (that is, fielding the balls while the cricketers practise). Leslie Mootoo later in life became a doctor. He is deceased, but will remain one of Guyana’s greatest medical doctors, while my dad threw away his life and was even contemptuously shunned by Dr. Mootoo. Life is pregnant with all kinds of weird possibilities. Look at what Lionel Richie did. I end with the PPP. Up to now, they cannot believe what life has done to them.