Bad News Brown (Paul Frappier), Hip Hop Harmonica Legend

 

I'm a harmonica guy. That means I am deeply interested in obscure musicians that play harmonica.  Many of these folks are mostly forgotten - only a small crew of harmonica cultists remember them. I don't want Paul Frappier to be forgotten.

Better known by his stage name, Bad News Brown, Frappier was born in Haiti. He moved at a young age to Canada and ultimately settled in the Little Burgundy neighborhood in Montreal. Little Burgundy was the hub of the English-speaking Black community in Montreal and was a center for music and culture. The great jazz pianist, Oscar Peterson, was from Little Burgundy. Frappier struggled in school due to dyslexia and left home as a teenager.  He was on the streets for a bit.  I don't know the details, but somehow he discovered the harmonica and found he had a natural affinity for the instrument. He combined his harmonica playing with hip hop backing tracks and became a very successful busker, often setting up in the Montreal Metro subway stations. The money he made playing on the streets paid his rent, kept him fed and ultimately launched his career as an emerging hip hop star.  His track, "Reign" from the 2010 album Born 2 Sin, has the harmonica front & center producing infectious, trance-enducing melodies.

Bad News Brown was catching fire. He opened for Kanye West, 50 Cent, and Snoop Dogg (back when these three were still top names in hip hop).  I think Bad News Brown was about to greatly increase the visibility of the harmonica with an audience that generally was not interested in the instrument.

This didn't happen. 

On February 11, 2011, Paul Frappier was found in an alley in an industrial area near the Lachine Canal in Montreal. Police pronounced him dead at the scene.  Bad News Brown joined the long list of hip hop artists that died from violence. No one has been charged with his murder.

The people in Montral remember Bad News Brown. they have memorialized him in murals, like this one:

I'm not sure that too many other folks remember Paul Frappier.  There was a brief flurry of articles in the Montreal press on the 10th anniversary of his death. There has been little progress in solving the crime that took his life.

I don't hear Bad News Brown mentioned by many other harmonica players or discussed in any on-line harmonica forums. I think our community should do its part to make sure that this innovative artist is not forgotten.

Motivation

 

I haven't been paying much attention to writing in this blog for the past few months. Life events have diverted my attention - I moved into a new home and I'm spending more time in the company of loved ones now that the Covid mess has transitioned from a life-threatening pandemic to another disease in the mix of things that impair and annoy. But it is a new year and that always causes me to ponder stuff. 

I have been thinking about motivation.

It seems to me that there is a segment of the human population that is highly motivated to act. People can be motivated by greed, or their sense of outrage over social injustice, or their desire to make art, or their thirst for political power - there are countless reasons behind high motivation. These highly motivated people drive human society. They tend to dominate the news cycle.

At the other end of the spectrum is the segment that has little or no motivation. These folks may be victims of trauma, may have a mental health condition, might be addicts, may have other impairments - physical/health issues or cognitive challenges. Also in this segment are the folks that have been beaten down over time by bad luck - multi-generational poverty, adverse childhood circumstances and random bad events. The people in the low-motivation segment often struggle to stay alive. They can't contribute much to the economy and may need assistance to stay housed and fed.

In the middle is the majority - ranging from fast-food workers to corporate lawyers. The people in this group have some motivation but not as much focus as the people in the high-motivation segment. Examples include the AT&T technician laying down hip-hop tracks in his home studio on weekends, the family doctor that loves to go deep sea fishing, the schoolteacher that is an expert on all the Star Wars characters and stories. People in this group might shift upwards or downwards depending on the random events of life - an unexpectedly successful investment leads to a fortune and a life of high-impact philanthropy, or an injury from an auto accident leads to an addiction to painkillers, job loss and broken family connections.

All of this human activity, the struggle and striving - it's meaningless to the universe.  It is a fact that humans are small creatures on a small planet in a vast cosmos.  Our species is also very young. Sharks have been around for 40 million years; homo sapiens showed up about 400,000 years ago. But, of course, our insignificant status is all we have. We can only be human beings interacting to our environment with whatever tools we can create.

There is a thing that gives me great hope. It is the ability of individual humans to deeply connect with each other, to get that feeling of shared consciousness and synchronized emotional states. It happens in so many ways - through rituals surrounding life events (weddings, funerals, birthdays), through festivals, through group spiritual practices, from creating and sharing music, from group efforts to protect and improve a community.  

The various motivational segments unite when human connection grows.