Is your martial art a tribute band?

Have you got all the moves; do you make all the shapes?

This is not an attack on tradition, but to some it might be a wake-up call.

According to the Cambridge dictionary a Tribute Band is, “A group of musicians who play the music of a famous pop group and pretend to be that group”.

We all like a tribute band particularly if they are doing a half-decent imitation of a band we really like. We can forgive the dodgy Elvis with the badly fitting wig, as long as he can belt out a spirited version of ‘Suspicious Minds’ or ‘Viva Las Vegas’ we will go along with the illusion and relive some part of our musical past; harmless escapism.

What if your martial art is the equivalent to a tribute band? How would you know? Would it matter anyway?

I realise that in asking these questions and framing it this way I risk being labelled a snob, or even worse, an elitist, but, in the interest of asking challenging questions I will continue anyway.

‘Ken Lee’.

As an example, imagine that you lived in some remote part of the world, somewhere like Bhutan, where access to music in the English language was really difficult, but you had stumbled across the music of the Beatles. You couldn’t speak English but all the same you adored the music, had all the mainstream albums and listened to them endlessly, tracks like, ‘Hard Day’s Night’, ‘Hey Jude’ etc AND you had memorised all the words and could sing them in a reasonable way but had no understanding of what they meant; it’s hard to think how that is even possible. This is where ‘Ken Lee’ comes in.

Watch this clip from Bulgarian TV show ‘Music Idol’

To cut to the chase; out in YouTube land I have seen karate kata equivalent to this song; like an explosion in a kata factory; mashed up bits of half-formed stuff all over the place.

The difference between that and a tribute band is that the tribute band is done with a sense of irony, nobody is taking it that seriously, it’s all done with a cheeky nod. And, at one level, it can be read as an homage to greatness AND they have to pay their PRS subs to the original band, and so for the originators the money keeps rolling in and the legend stays alive – everybody wins.

With the martial arts equivalent, what if, like the singer with her ‘Ken Lee’, you have no ‘cheeky nod’, you just blithely continue doing your thing (their thing) and believe you have the mandate to do so, without being called out? With some it’s a shocking lack of self-awareness, with others it’s a case of despite the Internet you somehow ‘missed a memo’. It’s like a Cargo Cult in a modern industrialised setting.¹

What if it’s worse than that?

What if your tribute band don’t actually play their own instruments and just mime along to a complete backing track, or the original recording? How shocking would that be?

A while back, on YouTube I saw a Wado karate knife defence demo. It was really crackly video very poor quality recording, but initially I thought it was Suzuki Sensei; whoever it was moved like him, had his little flourishes and stomps, surely it was him? And then as the demo went on to other stuff I realised that what I had been watching was the equivalent of a tribute band; somebody unintentionally (or intentionally) pretending to be Suzuki Sensei. It was only when he went on to other techniques that the wheels fell off.

I find myself wondering what the martial arts equivalent of air guitar would look like? What would be the nearest match to a fourteen-year-old in their bedroom with a hairbrush for a microphone? Would it be an overenthusiastic 1970’s teenage boy swinging ‘Nunchucks’ around his room, until it all goes wrong and he either hits himself in the nuts or smashes a mirror.

It’s alright me carping on about this, but what about a solution? By my thinking, the best example for solving this problem is one man…

Robert Johnson.

‘Robert who?’

Still staying with the theme of music; if it wasn’t for Robert Johnson there would be no Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Rory Gallagher, Keith Richards or Jimi Hendrix, all of them trace themselves back to a black musician who died at the age of 27 in 1938 and only recorded 29 songs. Every rock guitarist that has ever lived knowingly or unknowingly owes a debt to Robert Johnson. Johnson’s innovations acted as a springboard for great things to happen afterwards. But, if you listen to one of those 29 recordings you’d struggle to see the connection, but it’s there. Hendrix, Clapton etc. are not playing copies of Johnson’s songs, they have gone much further; in part aided by electrification, but also the ‘tradition’ has been given scope and freedom to grow. There’s that word again, ‘tradition’. This is why tribute bands in martial arts are retrograde.

I have seen an awful lot of live music in the last few years; particularly bands who are trying to get the big break, and as far as I can see, their biggest problem is they want to be somebody else. I have seen the ‘wannabe-chilli-peppers’, the ‘wannabe-foo-fighters’, etc, etc. but very little music that has pushed the envelope. But that’s not because their hands are tied by tradition; that’s a different story.

Progression, development and evolution.

Martial artists with their ‘hands tied by tradition’ can be the worst kind of tribute band.

Progression doesn’t have to be leaping on ahead at breakneck speed; that’s just reckless, and neither does it mean grafting other ‘stuff’ on to it (a common error that many martial artists resort to) that just creates a Frankenstein’s monster, an abomination best left in the lab. Or, for that matter, chasing after false Gods in the name of being ‘practical’.

There is always scope for development and without throwing away the core principles and philosophies that give the system its main identity. You can pretty much do anything as long as you can always relate it back to the core principles; these are the glue that bind everything together, without these all you have is a smorgasbord, an unsatisfying buffet that might titillate your pallet but ultimately leaving you unsatisfied and unfulfilled.

Maybe we will never be able to avoid the tribute band equivalent in martial arts; perhaps, like Elvis, they are ‘caught in a trap…can’t walk out, ohoo ohoo ohhh’ ?

Header image: Photo by Caio Silva on Unsplash

Photo of Robert Johnson credit Delta Haze Corporation.

1. Cargo Cult; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult