I'm Seeing the sound of the sea... ~Michael Nesmith "Rio"
I've never read a book so in tune with what a musician feels, what he or she sees, when playing symbols from a page, contrasting the diaphragm, sounding the notes which would set angels to attention. I've never read a book that says what it means to love music, to be enthralled with every passage of sound in one's life. And never have I read a book that contains in its pages its own soundtrack. But it's here, and it's here.
I don't think I have to say that any musician will love this book, as the division between someone who simply listens to music while jogging or cruising down the block and the person who hears the music, the notes fill up every corner of the air around him, has never been so aptly described. I have often said that Mozart or Beethoven would weep and render their clothes asunder if they knew that their most famous works are now used as cell phone tones, heard in grocery stores as an irritant, rather than praises to God, or messages to Life, Death, and Time itself. I want to grab the earplugs of the people around me and yank them out, saying, "Listen!! The music is all around you." Would they miss the trumpets of Gabriel for the autotuned babble of One Direction?
But this book contains all this, and a story as well. It is the story of Peter Els, a prodigy child musician (on the Clarinet, no less), and an outcast from the rest of the social order, as he spends his time listening to music and seeing inside of the notes what Kant would have called the Noumenal World. He sees the notes as the pure Forms, outside the cave, that other people can but dance to, shake their hips and gyrate. (No, I see nothing of this person in me at all..............) He sees in mathematics the numerical order of the musical world, and in Chemistry, the underlying tones of the Universe.
But, alas, he is torn to choose between chasing after standing on the mountaintops and gazing out at Paradise and real life, love of a woman, and the constant pressures to understand to his professors' ideas of music theory in the Twentieth Century. The book transitions back and forth between his life story, his past, the events of the 1940's on (reaching the present), and the point where the story begins, where FBI agents raid his home after finding potentially deadly homegrown bacteria.
Els becomes, perhaps, a mirror of Willie Loman, as well as the defiant character found in Faustian legend. All bound together in a work of literature that may not ever get the acclaim it deserves.
I say this because a reader who is not a musician probably will have little patience with the verbal description of long works of music composition. The reader will tire of little plot in the present and too much back story. A reader not familiar with Post-Modern literature will not understand that the journey throughout the book, in time and mind, is the story worth telling.
I've told my own story about singing, about belting notes in my car, where no one could hear, of singing Art Garfunkel's "Skywriter" in the grocery store parking lot, late at night (and this was before the days of iPods and mp3 players, where every bagger is totally deaf to anything going on around them because they're too busy listening to the rot in their brains.) I've told why, even though, to my parents, I had a great voice, but never used it. And I feel a kinship with Peter Els. The last thing he wanted to do was to actually publish a work, and he hated every time he did it. To face the criticism of the expression of the Music of the Spheres as Peter heard them, I wouldn't want to publish them either, but rather hold them close to my chest and hear the notes late at night, rotating around my room, illuminated by the lamp post outside.
Perhaps it should be obvious with an album title like What A Terrible World, What A Beautiful World, that the album's theme should be duplicity. It's something that has been done before, even in the genre which The Decemberists are known for. I loved the Simon & Garfunkel cut of Silent Night merged with a clip from the "Seven O'clock News." I know that it's possible for artists and music video producers to make such a cut now, but it just doesn't seem like something this brilliant has been done lately.
As I said in the previous blog, people nowadays are too afraid to stand up for their beliefs, for fear of being labeled an extremist, a racist, or an out of touch crazy person. It's what I find so refreshing about the Decemberists music, that they make bold statements with their music, and it hearkens us back to the folk music of the 60's. So as I listened to The King Is Dead album, with the "Bold and Brilliant" songs that are so much different from the excrement being played on the radio today (and I hear enough of it at work, I should know), I began to fear that their next album would be nothing like it, and it would be simply a shining diamond amongst a cable car of coal. It would be just another flash of genius like Keane's first album, or John Mayer's first album. I should have placed more faith in them, however. What The Decemberists produced was an album of songs written and formed and molded into a masterpiece. Social Media and the Internet has allowed Colin Meloy to describe the creation of the album, how it all came together, and I find it endlessly fascinating.
He says "We had to change, some." It what is so notable about the last two albums, because I go back and listen to the first 5 they released, and I just don't like them as much. They're darker, more "alternative," and they rely on solely narrative tracks about Mariners and dark and Gothic characters. I once read an article debating whether the Decemberists were an "Emo" band. With these last two albums, the answer is a resounding "no." This is why many of the reviews for The King is Dead are so negative. They didn't want their band to change. Well, Meloy had kids, one of the band members had breast cancer, and they started looking at life differently. They had to change, some.
But the duplicity of this world, this terrible, beautiful world, is what the album is all about. In "12-17-12," we have a father elated by the coming of his second son while dismayed at the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School. In "Cavalry Captain," we have the glorious leader of the army, describing himself as "the printed upon your stars," while convincing his underlings to ride off into battle, "and only for a second, we'll be alive." In "Philomena," it starts out as a 50's doo-wop hit, something that the Everly Brothers would sing, and yet, it reveals itself as an aroused teen trying to get under the skirt of his crush. In other words, a distinct reality from the "innocent" days we all think of the 50's, a time when probably so much more was taking place. At the end, with all this in mind, Meloy writes "The Beginning Song," in which he asks, "I am Hopeful, should I be Hopeful?" in a Prufrockian tone that easily brings up the room where women come and go. However, The Decemberists leave it on a note of wondrous positivity, a bold stand that says, "Yes, we should be hopeful."
It's an album that, I believe, should easily connect the older, more Gothic works, with The King is Dead. It works out well in my mp3 player, as the newer album is played prior to the older one, and it works out so well this way. "The Light, Bright Light..." joins right in with the "Bold and Brilliant Sun" that starts the previous album. It brings hope to a dark world, in seeing the positive side to what can be one very long marathon of Law & Order, where criminals and serial killer stalk the streets, and where there is no happy ending. But let's "raise our glasses, to the turning of the season," where we can do something about all this negativity, if we stand upon our beliefs and see the miracles that happen every day, the bright light all around us.
My parents took with them, on weekend camping trips in some old trailer, a black and white television, battery operated, that had a nine inch screen. It had an antenna (which I broke off, as usual), and they used it for watching whatever football game was on. It also had a radio, which was why, after we moved to Georgia, they put it in my room so I could have the radio on at night. I listened almost exclusively to Fox 97.1, the "oldies" station, which like so many of the good radio
stations, have now disappeared with the invention of mp3 files. People just don't like the idea of randomness anymore. And while that gives them control, it prevents them from finding something they like accidentally. On a sidebar, that also is much like shopping Amazon instead of going to an actual bookstore. You never get to glimpse an interesting cover or book out of the corner of your eye, to suck you in, open you up to entire new worlds and authors. It's the similar thing for radio stations, as you might never here the amazing singers out there because, with control, you might listen to the same 4 artists over and over again. I must admit, I'm quite guilty of that now, and I miss being at Borders and discovering new (or old) artists and their music.
But I digress. So I would have Fox 97 on all night, and I remember songs filtering into my dreams, and I would be, in dreamland, singing a song, and then I woke up and heard the same song on the radio. There are songs that I associate with 3 in the morning, songs I never heard except in the middle of the night. This is normal, for a song to transport you back to a place and time that you heard it first. I've talked about Heart's song "These Dreams," reminding me of sitting in a doctor's waiting room, with all the colors and sights and sounds of that room.
There are colors in music. I can see them, in my mind's eye. Sure, the artist says the word "red," and the song becomes red, but also if they say "rose," with all the archetypes and meaning that the color red (love, life, blood) and the rose (love, death, aging, beauty, pain) brings with it. The music itself does the same thing. Listen to the William Tell Overture, the first part, before the Lone Ranger theme, and you'll vision greens and yellow and peacefulness and spring. Or Mahler's 9th Symphony, and there's themes of sadness, blues and grays, blacks and minor chords. The same thing goes for the songs I heard at 3AM through my little TV/Radio in my room. Later, I brought in a boom box, and put in a cassette so I could record the songs I liked off the radio. I had a ruler pressed on the pause button (the record button was already pressed), and so if I heard a song I liked, I used the ruler from my bed to hit the pause button, and it would record the song. Now, with Spotify and other mp3 platforms, none of that is necessary. Think on it, no more cassettes filled with different songs, most of them with the first couple seconds of the songs chopped off, but that was okay, because it brought back those memories of hearing the songs.
To the music, then, only a few.... For some reason, all the songs with "Georgia" in the title are night songs. Ray Charles' version of our state song is a night song because PBS used to play it before they went off the air, at midnight. Course, now they don't do that anymore. No station plays the national anthem, because they never go off the air. Also, "Midnight Train to Georgia," and "Rainy Night in Georgia" also qualify. The latter especially if it's raining (which it does with increasing frequency nowadays.
Most of the songs I hear as 3AM songs are melancholy, usually in minor chords, like "Brandy" by the band Looking Glass. A song of the sea, of a love far away. Also, "Does Anyone Really Know What Time It Is?" by Chicago. The sounds are similar. For some reason, Petula Clark's "Downtown" also falls into this category, of a place where everything's going to be okay, where "people understand you," the soothing words when life just doesn't seem to be going well, and night time, you are by yourself, alone, and the words are needed.
Music is more vibrant, more poignant, in the middle of the night, when there's no other stimuli to get in the way. It becomes a companion, a stream of notes and colors and images and emotions that wrap around you and keep you safe. Just you and the radio, at 3AM.
Sometimes it's better to see the strings. Sometimes it's better to have asteroids as potatoes and painted shoes. If you're making a movie, and all the setting and non-human characters are created by computer, if the star of the film is sitting in front of a monitor someplace manipulating images, it's likely to pull down the film. When I think of my favorite movies, Where the Wild Things Are, The Neverending Story, and the original Star Wars movies, most things were made of costumes, models, giant sets. A minimal amounts of green screens. Actors nowadays will never know how to interact with their settings, as they are all acting in front of a screen made to digitally manipulate images. I mean, why shoot a film out at the ocean? Just create the scene, put sand on the ground, and get the right sound effect files from the studio computer. Jaws would (and is, have you seen the Syfy movies recently?) be so much easier to make. No need for skinnydipping scenes and blood and the sound of actual orchestras. Just create the sounds of the cellos on computer. We don't need the flute players anymore. They should go get a real job.
Of course, I'm being highly sarcastic. Star Wars would be nothing without John Williams and his brilliance. But maybe, just maybe, if Yoda were a puppet, and the city of Naboo had been made in some set in Brazil, maybe the new movies would have been better. Heck, people might have actually enjoyed Jar Jar Binks, instead of finding ways of killing him. The same thing goes with the music of any movie. But usually movies have budgets big enough to have a big name composer create a score for it. What happens when you are trying to make a video game, and it's the 1980's, and the technology isn't there for orchestral works, and your budget is slim? Well, you make your musical scores out of potatoes and painted shoes. Lets go for a musical adventure through some of the video games that I dearly loved as a child, not for the game itself, necessarily (although they were all great games), but for the music that artists do not get enough credit for, even after leaving tunes in people's heads for years.
There is no one who lived during the 1980's, and picked up the Nintendo controller, that can't instantly recall the theme for Super Mario Brothers. But let's go back farther than that, to the days of the Commodore 64. I must say, before I start this, that without the people that use Youtube as a place to store the history of mankind, from videos to TV to music to historical events, like Yeats' Graecian Urn, most of these pieces would be forgotten. Let us hope that Youtube retains its function as a time capsule for future people to experience the amazing things that our generation has created.
Dig Dug The melody track has basically two notes, with the other tracks going around it. Dig Dug took the annoying siren noise of Pac-Man and turned it into something worth listening to. And don't tell me that the modern day games are hard... they're nothing compared with the primitive AI of the Dragons that like nothing more than to breathe fire at you before you can blow them up.
Another version, played on the piano.
Necromancer, by Synapse Software, was amazing, if you kept an open mind. Grow trees to crush spiders, so the spiders won't grow and attack you while you fight the evil wizard. It's the beginning song that makes the whole game, tho.
Or if you want to play the game, click here: C64s.com.
Star Soldier and Gyruss. Nothing like space shooter games, where the space ships can bomb and blast everything in the air and on the planets below. Actually, I loved Zaxxon from the C64 days, but when the Nintendo came out, these two were the best space games made, in my opinion. Power ups, spaceships that are everywhere (think Galaga), but you've got to have the stimulating music to match the weaponry, something to activate my ADOS (Attention Deficit Oooh Shiny!). These both do it well.....
And speaking of stimulating, you can't go wrong with the Intro Theme of Double Dragon. I was never any good at fighting games, but the music on this one was amazing!
And before I leave Nintendo World (which, honestly, I could go forever about Zelda and SMB...etc...), there is no video game company which was better at combining graphics, music, and, well, everything, than Capcom, especially the Mega Man series. Mega Man 2 I would play just for the music. I'll put the Bubble Man stage here, just because it fits so well with my next point about video game music.
There's something about water levels and video game music. The 3/4 time of Super Mario Bros, level 2-2 is among the first actual "water" levels that I remember. When 16-bit music came out, composers used the water levels in games to let their ideas shine. The water levels were the soothing, ambient levels, where you could take the level, put the music on loop, and chill for an hour or two. Take Donkey Kong Country, for instance. I'm going to include a track on here now that is actually a remix from OCRemix which amplifies the original score. Just listen...
Perhaps the best water level music comes from the Playstation, from Final Fantasy VIII, the Fisherman's Warf level. Also check out OCRemix artist Tepid's version of it, which I have put on loop in my car and listened to it while I drove: You'll have to click here to listen to it.
Final Fantasy has such wonderful themes, so I'll put 2 more here and then leave it at that. What I'm trying to point out is that, while the Orchestral works of modern day games are beautiful and, in some cases, easy to make, the beauty that these composers made with just the most basic of electronic music technology is well worth listening, too. Discover the songs from your favorite games, and then see if there's any great Remixes done on OCRemix. Below is Relm's Theme from FFVI and then the final theme from Final Fantasy Legend from Game Boy. For the Game Boy theme, click on this link: This Link Here.
When we talk about communication as it relates to sex, perhaps none is so obvious, nor understated, as the modern use of music in today's world to promote sexual feeling and the social revolutions that surround it. I return once more to Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, and there find a treasure trail of information, opinion, insight, into the idea of music as an instrument to communicate sexual ideas, the feelings of pleasure, and on a directly related note, the siren call of the youth in America to use their massive spending power to satisfy that need for pleasure. There is no real way to work with Bloom's essay on Music except to paste it in almost its entirety, from pages 73-81. The first section of the essay shows the importance of music in the classical world, from the position that Plato gave it, to the treatment it received in the Renaissance. The important part of this is the relationship of music to the polar opposite symbols of reason and passion, Apollo and Dionysus. The pendulum, as I have talked about previously, has swung in both directions, from the Classical works of Bach, orderly, with predictability and stately timbre, to the more chaotic measures of Beethoven. But the assumption today is that passion and chaos sells, that the emotions that ride on each drum beat of Katy Perry's "Firework" with all the sexual imagery that that entails, is as appropriate for those listening to Kidz Bop as college age students making out in the dorm rooms.
Bloom's writing is sometimes complex, and I feel sometimes that in one sentence, I completely agree, while in others, I completely disagree. As Bloom's entire work is certainly polarizing, there is rational thought in all of it, While doing research for this blog, I found that the comments surrounding his ideas go from total agreement (see Mark Steyn's article written in 2007, 20 years after Bloom's book was published, to personal attacks that question the validity of his statements based on his Jewish roots or his sexuality. I have blockquoted Bloom's writings, while those with no indention are mine. Any formatting inside the blockquotes are also mine, if applicable.
This is the significance of rock music. I do not suggest that it has any high intellectual sources. But it has risen to its current heights in the education of the young on the ashes of classical music, and in an atmosphere in which there is no intellectual resistance to attempts to tap the rawest passions.
See, that's what I was talking about... I have no problem with dipping into "raw passions" when it comes to music, or emotion, or whatever. Just that there are times that music is meant to be experienced on a level where raw passions are brought out, and others, when economists and salesmen use music and it's effects to manipulate an emotional response, usually to purchase something. And this, too, is not a problem. That is what capitalism is supposed to do. And as everyone knows, "Sex sells." Thus, music is used to this effect.
Modern-day rationalists, such as economists, are indifferent to it and what it represents. The irrationalists are all for it. There is no need to fear that "the blond beasts" are going to come forth from the bland souls of our adolescents. But rock music has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire-not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored. It acknowledges the first emanations of children's emerging sensuality and addresses them seriously, eliciting them and legitimating them, not as little sprouts that must be carefully tended in order to grow into gorgeous flowers, but as the real thing. Rock gives children, on a silver platter, with all the industry, everything their parents always used to tell them they had to wait for until they grew up and would understand later.
I recall a meeting that my mom once attended with the Mustang Valley Elementary PTA, in which they exposed parents to the lyrics in 80's rock songs. One I remember my mom telling me about was "Bad Boys," you know, the one that they play on Cops... They said it promoted criminality in the listeners.
***
I read this passage and am reminded of the scene in Brave New World where the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning showed a group of students a garden where children were playing, naked, in various activities, including commercial-driven games and erotic experimentation. In BNW the idea of sex was a government-approved activity. Orgies took the place of religious rituals, merely the worship of one's own body. Specifically, the orgy aspect made it a worship of the body of the community, of society as a whole, a pleasure-driven life where the government gave happiness and controlled its citizens that way. In today's world, it is obviously not the government doing this, but rather the stronger influence of consumerism, of spending money for pleasure, of spending credit for pleasure, all to the benefit of corporate entities. A better way of life than government controlled citizens (a la 1984) because we do it of our own accord.
***
If we think of music as being a medium in which we communicate, instead of an art form, then we must look at the lyrics as poetry, as essays, as messages that are being sent to today's children. Music as a mode of communication is very overlooked in today's visual world. We criticize the sex and violence in television programs, even in music videos (when they had such things), but dealing with music, I think we often overlook it. I know I do, mostly because I don't understand it. I do wonder if words that are said, even when you don't consciously understand them, are interpreted and processed by the brain. Subconsciously, if you will. Anyway, because of the absolute inundation of music into our lives today, from grocery store Musak to Mp3 files on ipods and ipads and iphones, there is probably very few minutes that go by in silence. I recall the times at Borders when the overhead CD's ended, and, as much as we might not have liked the music, the thought of being in the store without it made us cringe. Better to have music playing then to deal with our own thoughts. But I digress again...
Neil Postman, in The Disappearance of Childhood looked at the sheer volume of information that children receive each day and have to process and deal with. In earlier times, that amount of data was limited, as parents were able to restrict the amount of stimuli children were allowed to take in. Television had only 3 or 4 channels, and was kept in the living room under observation of the parents. Or even look before that, before radio and television, only through books were children allowed to have information given to them, usually in the form of children's books or the Bible. In this, parents were able to shelter children from the real world, and the innocence of those children was kept in tact. Children were allowed to be just that. And think that, when Postman wrote his book, it was the 1980's, before the Internet and the Mp3 revolution, before Youtube and digital cameras and all the things that allow instantaneous consumption of music, video, news, print, almost anything a child does (or does not) want to consume and process. Pornography is easily available via the internet, for free, sometimes without the child purposefully looking for it. Music can be easily played via Pandora or Spotify, or Youtube, and the language and messages can be whatever the singer wants, without parental restrictions on what is learned. A child, as long as they can understand the ideas behind the words used, can process as much information as a parent can. In terms of data, there is no childhood anymore, past the ability to listen and understand. Kids don't even have to read anymore to get information, they simply listen and watch.
Young people know that rock has the beat of sexual intercourse. That is why Ravel's Bolero is the one piece of classical music that is commonly known and liked by them. In alliance with some real art and a lot of pseudo-art, an enormous industry cultivates the taste for the orgiastic state of feeling connected with sex, providing a constant flood of fresh material for voracious appetites. Never was there an art form directed so exclusively to children.
Ministering to and according with the arousing and cathartic music, the lyrics celebrate puppy love as well as polymorphous attractions, and fortify them against traditional ridicule and shame. The words implicitly and explicitly describe bodily acts that satisfy sexual desire and treat them as its only natural and routine culmination for children who do not yet have the slightest imagination of love, marriage or family. This has a much more powerful effect than does pornography on youngsters, who have no need to watch others do grossly what they can so easily do themselves. Voyeurism is for old perverts; active sexual relations are for the young. All they need is encouragement.
I found this last paragraph very interesting, as there are so many filter companies that block porn sites from children finding them. But outside of just curiosity, porn in a visual medium is only accessed by people who aren't able to have sex themselves. This would include those who are outside cultural aesthetic norms (i.e. ugly people), or those who are forbidden from sexual activities by religious beliefs, etc... So for teenagers, for example, the thought of watching two adults having sex might actually be revolting. Now, I'm sure a large part of teenagers (males, at least, I know nothing of the female population), have looked at porn online, but perhaps what makes this stimulating is the idea that it is forbidden by parents, or that it is religiously taboo. This makes it even more influential.
Now, for that first sentence above. "Rock has the beat of sexual intercourse." Imagine the percussion of thighs pounding together, or breasts bobbing up and down, of regular heavy breathing, of moans of "yes" and the like... It becomes the same tempo of most rock songs. My stepdad commented whenever there were teenagers dancing on television, for instance, that they were practicing their "sexual moves." He was very correct on this, whether it is consciously done or not.
We could write a book looking at the lyrics of even the most innocent pop songs, but since I've referenced Kidz Bop 19 on here already, let's take their version of "Dynomite." These are songs deemed safe for children. The lyrics are the same from the original version sung by Taio Cruz:
We gonna rock this club
We gonna go all night
We gonna light this up
Like it's dynamite.
Note the spelling and whatnot in the lyrics of the Youtube version, but that's another blog.
Even in this chorus, music and dance is equated with sex. It takes very little imagination to see how most pop songs, even written for children, are filled with sexual innuendos. Now, that is not to say that a 6 year old is going to understand that. A 13 year old certainly would, even if it is subconsciously. For another example, try Aaron Carter's "Bounce," off his second album.
The inevitable corollary of such sexual interest is rebellion against the parental authority that represses it. Selfishness thus becomes indignation and then transforms itself into morality. The sexual revolution must overthrow all the forces of domination, the enemies of nature and happiness. From love comes hate, masquerading as social reform. A worldview is balanced on the sexual fulcrum. What were once unconscious or half-conscious childish resentments become the new Scripture. And then comes the longing for the classless, prejudice-free, conflictless, universal society that necessarily results from liberated consciousness-"We Are the World," a pubescent version of Alle Menschen werden Brueder, the fulfillment of which has been inhibited by the political equivalents of Mom and Dad. These are the three great lyrical themes: sex, hate and a smarmy, hypocritical version of brotherly love. Such polluted sources issue in a muddy stream where only monsters can swim. A glance at the videos that project images on the wall of Plato's cave since MTV took it over suffices to prove this. Hitler's image recurs frequently enough in exciting contexts to give one pause. Nothing noble, sublime, profound, delicate, tasteful or even decent can find a place in such tableaux. There is room only for the intense, changing, crude and immediate, which Tocqueville warned us would be the character of democratic art, combined with a pervasiveness, importance and content beyond Tocqueville's wildest imagination. [Bold emphasis mine]
In my book, I have the bold sentence underline (among others), with the songs "Jeremy" and "Imitation of Life" written outside it. "Jeremy" is a song that speaks more toward the violence in today's society, but it's applicable to the idea of Plato's cave allegory. If only Pearl Jam knew how prophetic that video was. "Imitation of Life," by R.E.M. also deals with Plato's cave, as we are looking at a snap shot of life, moving back and forth, as if on that cave wall. Although they don't deal with sex and music, I'll put them here, too.
One other thought about this paragraph. Could the 1960's, the protests against the Vietnam War, Woodstock, the whole thing, have been able without the music stimuli that children were able to absorb during that era? One can argue that it originated from the radios in cars, where kids were able to hear the music that their parents wouldn't let them listen to at home. Course, this goes back to the beginnings of Rock N' Roll. Freedom, which comes from the resistance of parental guidance, which transforms into indignation, and into a movement of sometimes vague destinations. In the end, a movement with numbers such as those in the 1960's, or those, similarly, near Wall Street today, are ultimately helping the corporate and government structures they are fighting against.
Picture a thirteen-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home doing his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching MTV. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvelous, lifelike electronic sound and image reproduction he is enjoying. And in what does progress culminate? A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy.
Yup.
This description may seem exaggerated, but only because some would prefer to regard it as such. The continuing exposure to rock music is a reality, not one confined to a particular class or type of child. One need only ask first-year university students what music they listen to, how much of it and what it means to them, in order to discover that the phenomenon is universal in America, that it begins in adolescence or a bit before and continues through the college years. It is the youth culture and, as I have so often insisted, there is now no other countervailing nourishment for the spirit. Some of this culture's power comes from the fact that it is so loud. It makes conversation impossible, so that much of friendship must be without the shared speech that Aristotle asserts is the essence of friendship and the only true common ground. With rock, illusions of shared feelings, bodily contact and grunted formulas, which are supposed to contain so much meaning beyond speech, are the basis of association. None of this contradicts going about the business of life, attending classes and doing the assignments for them. But the meaningful inner life is with the music.
I think if I were to get a medical degree, the direction I would go in would be to provide hearing aide devices to future 60 year olds. How many times have I seen kids walking behind their parents with either their faces stuck inside a Nintendo DS or with earplugs stuck in their ears, connected to an ipod or other such devices. There is no communication anymore between parents and their children, and one could probably say the same between peers and even friends. Why bother when your ears are stuffed with rock music? I loved it when customer came up, asked me for a book, with the earplugs still inserted, as if they were listening to their music and expected me just to take them to their book. And without communication, where is the bonding going to occur? Where are the feelings of love or passion going to grow from, but from the rhythms of music going through their brains? Relationships become only about the percussive messages, and not about actual communication. It's as if people talked to each other as Bumblebee did in the recent Transformers movies. Only though radio songs and messages. A relationship based solely on music, and not through actual communication, is bound to fail, as the people watching the images in the cave can never be friends as they are too busy watching the wall to notice each other.
This phenomenon is both astounding and indigestible, and is hardly noticed, routine and habitual. But it is of historic proportions that a society's best young and their best energies should be so occupied. People of future civilizations will wonder at this and find it as incomprehensible as we do the caste system, witch-burning, harems, cannibalism and gladiatorial combats. It may well be that a society's greatest madness seems normal to itself.
To re-insert the scene from the Monkee's movie Head: "Pleasure, the inevitable by-product of our civilization (cut scene of a
butcher pounding meat)...A new world, whose only preoccupation will be,
how to amuse itself. The tragedy of your time, my young friends, is that
you may get exactly what you want."
The child I described has parents who have sacrificed to provide him with a good life and who have a great stake in his future happiness. They cannot believe that the musical vocation will contribute very much to that happiness. But there is nothing they can do about it. The family spiritual void has left the field open to rock music, and they cannot possibly forbid their children to listen-to it. It is everywhere; all children listen to it; forbidding it would simply cause them to lose their children's affection and obedience.
This is the psychological result of allowing children to have all the luxuries that the parents never got as they grew up during the Great Depression. This also prevents the parents from restricting the amount of information that comes to the child, and therefore, opens up children's minds to sex, drugs... see below...Bloom argues that the rise of psychology in the 20th century, especially of Freud, and the philosophy of Nietzche, has eradicated much of the spiritual beliefs being taught to children, especially now. The idea of Cultural Relativism, which says that very little is wrong or right in this world, which is everywhere in television episodes (which is one reason why I won't watch the new Transformer animated series on television, they've taken the moral absolutes out of everyone.), makes it so that what music children listen to is okay with the parents because they listened to the same as children, and because they can't define any message short of worshiping Satan as evil or wrong. Parents tend to underestimate the power of music in their children's lives.
When they turn on the television, they will see President Reagan warmly grasping the daintily proffered gloved hand of Michael Jackson and praising him enthusiastically. Better to set the faculty of denial in motion-avoid noticing what the words say, assume the kid will get over it. If he has early sex, that won't get in the way of his having stable relationships later. His drug use will certainly stop at pot. School is providing real values. And popular historicism provides the final salvation: there are new life-styles for new situations, and the older generation is there not to impose its values but to help the younger one to find its own. TV, which compared to music plays a comparatively small role in the formation of young people's character and taste, is a consensus monster-the Right monitors its content for sex, the Left for violence, and many other interested sects for many other things. But the music has hardly been touched, and what efforts have been made are both ineffectual and misguided about the nature and extent of the problem.
The result is nothing less than parents' loss of control over their children's moral education at a time when no one else is seriously concerned with it. This has been achieved by an alliance between the strange young males who have the gift of divining the mob's emergent wishes - our versions of Thrasymachus, Socrates' rhetorical adversary - and the record-company executives, the new robber barons, who mine gold out of rock. They discovered a few years back that children are one of the few groups in the country with considerable disposable income, in the form of allowances. Their parents spend all they have providing for the kids. Appealing to them over their parents' heads, creating a world of delight or them, constitutes one of the richest markets in the postwar world. The rock business is perfect capitalism, supplying to demand and helping to create it. It has all the moral dignity of drug trafficking, but it was so totally new and unexpected that nobody thought to control it, and now it is too late. Progress may be made against cigarette smoking because our absence of standards or our relativism does not extend to matters of bodily health. In all other things the market determines the value. (Yoko Ono is among America's small group of billionaires, along with oil and computer magnates, her late husband having produced and sold a commodity of worth comparable to theirs.) Rock is very big business, bigger than the movies, bigger than professional sports, bigger than television, and this accounts for much of the respectability of the music business. It is difficult to adjust our vision to the changes in the economy and to see what is really important. McDonald's now has more employees than U.S. Steel, and likewise the purveyors of junk food for the soul have supplanted what still seem to be more basic callings.
This change has been happening for some time. In the late fifties, De Caulle gave Brigitte Bardot one of France's highest honors. I could not understand this, but it turned out that she, along with Peugeot, was France's biggest export item.
Just as Nixon met with Elvis, or JFK with Marilyn Monroe. The government knows that Hollywood is a giant supplier of information to the youth of the country, you know, the ones with the highest amount of disposable income, and besides capitalism, that money can also go towards political activism. Just recently Lady GaGa, whose male counterparts will be discussed later, went to meet President Obama. These marriages of music and politics are measured tactics to keep the movements of musical social reform in check, allying themselves with the current administration. That marriage, of politics and entertainment, will become more and more connected, with the result of Brave New World, a government who controls its citizens with pleasure, being the end result. Perhaps we should have kept the Constitution as "the pursuit of property," and not of "happiness," as, in my opinion, our happiness is not what the government should be dealing with, but rather our safety. We shall, as Postman says, amuse ourselves to death, or even worse, to slavery.
As Western nations became more prosperous, leisure, which had been put off for several centuries in favor of the pursuit of property, the means to leisure, finally began to be of primary concern. But, in the meantime, any notion of the serious life of leisure, as well as men's taste and capacity to live it, had disappeared. Leisure became entertainment. The end for which they had labored for so long has turned out to be amusement, a justified conclusion if the means justify the ends. The music business is peculiar only in that it caters almost exclusively to children, treating legally and naturally imperfect human beings as though they were ready to enjoy the final or complete satisfaction. It perhaps thus reveals the nature of all our entertainment and our loss of a clear view of what adulthood or maturity is, and our incapacity to conceive ends. The emptiness of values results in the acceptance of the natural facts as the ends. In this case infantile sexuality is the end, and 1 suspect that, in the absence of other ends, many adults have come to agree that it is.
It is interesting to note that the Left, which prides itself on its critical approach to"late capitalism" and is unrelenting and unsparing in its analysis of our other cultural phenomena, has in general given rock music a free ride. Abstracting from the capitalist element in which it flourishes, they regard it as a people's art, coming from beneath the bourgeoisie's layers of cultural repression. Its antinomianism and its longing for a world without constraint might seem to be the clarion of the proletarian revolution, and Marxists certainly do see that rock music dissolves the beliefs and morals necessary for liberal society and would approve of it for that alone. But the harmony between the young intellectual Left and rock is probably profounder than that. Herbert Marcuse appealed to university students in the sixties with a combination of Marx and Freud. In Eros and Civilization and One Dimensional Man he promised that the overcoming of capitalism and its false consciousness will result in a society where the greatest satisfactions are sexual, of a sort that the bourgeois moralist Freud called polymorphous and infantile. Rock music touches the same chord in the young. Free sexual expression, anarchism, mining the irrational unconscious and giving it free rein are what they have common.//
This strong stimulant, which Nietzsche called Nihiline, was for a very long time, almost fifteen years, epitomized in a single figure, Mick Jagger.
Or, for today's world, Prince, Michael Jackson, Boy George, David Bowie, Marilyn Manson, Adam Lambert, even Justin Bieber, for the younger crowd.
A shrewd, middle-class boy, he played the possessed lower-class demon and teen-aged satyr up until he was forty, with one eye on the mobs of children of both sexes whom he stimulated to a sensual frenzy and the other eye winking at the unerotic, commercially motivated adults who handled the money. In his act he was male and female, heterosexual and homosexual; unencumbered by modesty, he could enter everyone's dreams, promising to do everything with everyone; and, above all, he legitimated drugs, which were the real thrill that parents and policemen inspired to deny his youthful audience. He was beyond the law, moral and political, and thumbed his nose at it. Along with all this, there were nasty little appeals to the suppressed inclinations toward sexism, racism and violence, indulgence in which is not now publicly respectable. Nevertheless, he managed not to appear to contradict the rock ideal of a universal classless society founded on love, with the distinction between brotherly and bodily blurred. He was the hero and the model for countless young persons in universities, as well as elsewhere. I discovered that students who boasted of having no heroes secretly had a passion to be like Mick Jagger, to live his life, have his fame. They were ashamed to admit this in a university, although I am not certain that the reason has anything to do with a higher standard of taste. It is probably that they are not supposed to have heroes. Rock music itself and talking about it with infinite seriousness are perfectly respectable. It has proved to be the ultimate leveler of intellectual snobbism. But it is not respectable to think of it as providing weak and ordinary persons with a fashionable behavior, the imitation of which will make others esteem them and boost their own self-esteem. Unaware and unwillingly, however, Mick Jagger played the role in their lives that Napoleon played in the lives of ordinary young Frenchmen throughout the nineteenth century. Everyone else was so boring and unable to charm youthful passions. Jagger caught on.
In the last couple of years, Jagger has begun to fade. Whether Michael Jackson, Prince or Boy George can take his place is uncertain. They are even weirder than he is, and one wonders what new strata of taste they have discovered. Although each differs from the others, the essential character of musical entertainment is not changing. There is only a constant search for variations on the theme. And this gutter phenomenon is apparently the fulfillment of the promise made by so much psychology and literature that our weak and exhausted Western civilization would find refreshment in the true source, the unconscious, which appeared to the late romantic imagination to be identical to Africa, the dark and unexplored continent. Now all has been explored; light has been cast everywhere; the unconscious has been made conscious, the repressed expressed. And what have we found? Not creative devils, but show business glitz. Mick Jagger tarting it up on the stage is all that we brought back from the voyage to the underworld.
I absolutely love the comparison here at the end to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The void that modern philosophy has left in the minds of the intelligent, and is now being filled, even in the minds of the masses, with popular culture and music, is much like the void in the heart of Africa, in the heart of the Congo. The problem is, instead of finding one's self, when we set out from the riverbanks and head into the unknown, we find other philosophies trying to get our attention. We find the metaphysical realm calling from the New Age rack, where the Law of Attraction reigns supreme. We find this need to enter the primordial stages of our Sub-consciousness, much as in the movie (and book) Altered States, where chemicals and stages of isolation were used to hallucinate the main character into some form of primitive man. But the clear winner is the world of popular culture, which clouds the void with suspension of belief of anything, except for that "We are the World" feeling that gets people to donate money. It provides for the hours of "entertainment" to be on in the background, in the form of TMZ or any of the various "reality" television programing. It brings artificial pleasure to the minds of everyone who would do anything except face the void that is in their own lives. We have found fame to be the new god, and the more outrageous and spectacular the stunt, the more that fame grows.
Fame is what brings us to riot after the basketball championship games, to make out in the middle of the Vancouver riots. To be noticed, to make Karaoke videos of ourselves and put them on Youtube, for all the world to see. The visual and audio world of communication collides, and it makes us feel happy. "Pleasure, the inevitable by-product," as the tour director said.
Sex is but one avenue which the producers of entertainment, including music, uses to make us happy, to convince us to buy stuff, to use all that disposable capital. Dan Ariely, in his book Predictably Irrational , studied a group of college students and the decisions they make while in an aroused state. He found that many of the students would make very different decisions while watching a porn tape than they otherwise would have. If a state of arousal is all that consumers need to change their decisions, then using the subconscious rhythms of music to influence children without actually showing them porn (although a shirtless Taylor Lautner will work just as well), is a great idea to get money from today's youth.
***
I really do recommend Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, at least to those who are of conservative mindset, as many of the things he talks about are very relevant to today's education system. And while the second half of the book is like climbing up a mountain with your teeth, it does reveal how many of the beliefs of today's world come out of the German philosophers from the 1800's. I doubt I will do any more actual blogs coming from this book, as it's been a while since I read it, but I wanted to finish this blog before I moved on to other, heavier projects.
Found this one interesting, although most of the post-25 threads have been silly. I got to thinking about it as there were moments in my life that have been scored by music, but not really albums, but one specific song at one specific moment that clarified things. Made it memorable, so that when I hear x or y song, I immediately recall that point. Ah... the daffodils in peaceful retrospection... oh wait, that's Wordsworth. Anyway... albums or songs that helped me through the rough and not so rough times. Chronologically, with long-winded explanations. :) Notice how, BTW, that quite a few of these songs tie myself with sporting events. There's something to be said for the breathing and the rhythm of a song when physically exerting yourself. 1. Monkees, "Door into Summer," from Pisces, Aquarius...etc I remember this song from the TV show (1986 reruns) that really helped me on my bowling games back then... I even broke 100 once. :) I still use an 8 pound ball.
2. Bush, "You've Got the Touch," from Transformers OST while singing that song, I could run like lightning, at Edwards every Monday running the length of the bus driveway... well, until my legs gave out and cramped or something. 3. Simon & Garfunkel's Greatest Hits got me through tough times, during Middle School, when I wished I had my books and my poetry to protect me.
4. Peter Paul and Mary, Lifelines. I bought it at Turtle's Music on the night of my high school graduation after we ate at Shoney's. That, along with Such is Love carried me through that summer which was depressing and life-changing, that summer before going off to college. The later, especially "Wild Places" helped during my Freshman year, when I was hiding from myself.
5. Hanson Middle of Nowhere. 1997. Ah.. I walked up to Walmart and purchased the cassette of it, and nearly wore it out on my walkman. I hope the college didn't mind me singing (loudly) through my earphones. I felt like I was a part of something, a part of a new and wonderful sound. A return to pop melodies and positive messages. Away from Nirvana and Pearl Jam and towards the pop end of the spectrum. Unfortunately, Hanson wasn't popular in College circles, and I have a feeling I wasn't the only one in the "Hanson closet" so to speak.
6. And during the days of my graduate school days, when I was coming home from Macon in disbelief on how bad kids are these days, I put in Billy Gilman's One Voice and sang all the way home. There is need in this world for positive messages, ones that very few grown people can actually make. We are too cynical. There were a few bright spots in the days when I was so depressed. Music helped. 7. Along that same time, I really got into the music of Engima, and the third album Le Roi Est Mort, Vive Le Roi, the song "The Child in Us," as well as some others, was very powerful to me. "You were the rain, you were the sun / But I needed both, cause I needed you." Okay, it sounds cheesy, but I love that song. 8. When I was teaching at Hell, I mean, Conyers Middle, and I couldn't stand the ruckus of the children (or the other teachers or administration), I'd put in James Taylor's October Road. "Baby Buffalo" is a song you can just breathe with. That album is as good as any HBP medication to relax heart rate. 9. For Christmas, a few years back, I got Linda and Robin Williams, The First Christmas Gift, which the title track changed the way I felt about working in Retail during the Holiday season. The best Christmas album ever, full of nostalgia.
10. I'm gonna cheat on this one... songs I can put on repeat for hours at a time: Billy Gilman's "I Am/Shades of Life" Heartsongs, Tepid's remix of the Fisherman's Wharf music from Final Fantasy VIII, the old version, at http://www.ocremix.com , Declan Galbraith's rendition of "The Living Years" from Ego You.
11. Okay, out of chronological order, cause renumbering them would be a pain, I remember at Band Camp, listening to Crosby, Stills, and Nash's Daylight Againand feeling completely at ease with myself. I hear that album, and I think of those times.
And I'm sure there are others, but those are the ones, if I had to make a Soundtrack for my life, that I would put on there.
In response to my last blog, Luke wrote some ideas down that need further looking into. Specifically, why do people sleep with the TV or radio on at night. For my own history, I never had anything on until I moved here to Georgia when I was 10. I remember going to bed at my house and turning on Fox 97 (by this time I would have been 12), and listening to oldies every night. I made these tapes of songs I liked, and I recorded them straight from the radio, which meant that usually the first couple seconds of music or the first word or two were always cut off. I even used a ruler taped to the record button so that, if I woke up in the middle of the night and heard a song I liked, I could use the ruler to hit record instead of climbing down off of my bed (it was the top part of a bunk set.)
Luke was talking about how often people have the TV or radio on as a defense mechanism, to keep the monsters at bay. And that's probably true, except I think that as time progresses, the monsters that are on the outside turn into the demons that are on the inside. People keep audio stimuli on to keep away the meandering thoughts that are stressful or disturbing. Money issues, personal quibbles with loved ones, the insecurities of life. It's what people watch that are interesting. The Tonight Show, which is on late, is filled with mindless comedy, interviews that are anything but illuminating, and a host that is bland and egotistical, and hardly funny. The best that can be hoped for is to stay awake until Conan O'brien comes on. Then there's more intellectual humor, if you can stay awake past Leno's banality. My mom has on HSN, which is filled with positive and sometimes instructive information on how to buy their latest X, Y, or Z. I usually have on Sportscenter on ESPN, or I might turn it over to FoxNews or Headline News, so that I can recieve a proper brainwashing. The reason I turn on the TV now is to keep my thought processes on more mindless matters. So, he's right. The stuff people leave on at night is pointless. It's supposed to be. (Although, I've learned not to leave X-files on at night, cause 1) I wind up watching too much of it and not going to sleep, and 2) screaming from the TV tends to wake someone up. On a related note, I used to never leave it on NBC cause they would have this show, Starting Over on at 3am which was all about women starting their lives over, and it would be a bunch of sobbing and crying, and it always woke me up, too. )
To think about it now, reality is what everyone is trying to escape from. There's more comfort in not knowing, in escaping reality, than knowing, and being afraid. And I can totally understand it, because I would rather drink Lysol than to have to go through my checkbook. It's genetic, I think. My dad couldn't balance a checkbook either. I think it's because of the same reason. Reality is too harsh, too uncaring, and it's better if I don't know, that it won't hurt me. Of course, that's not true, as the numerous $35.00 overdraft charges can attest to.
Sometimes people just can't accept quiet. They have to have some external audio stimuli to keep their minds off the other noises they hear in their minds. As if the conscious and sub-conscious are not to be thought of. And it's gotten worse now that portable sound devices are everywhere. Dozens of people walk by me everyday either listening to their i-pods (and sometimes singing out loud, which is another blog all together), or talking about nothing on their cell phones. It's all mindless matters, and they seem to fill their days with it. My mom wonders why I can't go to the store without taking a CD along in the car. Well, that's why. Aside from the fact that without the music, I will fall asleep driving very far, it also keep my mind "mindless" while I do the menial task of going from point A to point B.
So to answer the questions. Yes, I do keep the TV on as a defense mechanism, to keep the meaningful thoughts down and the mindless matters rising to the surface. Perhaps that is why most of my dreams take place in a mall (or because I work at one). There is time, in the shower, or sitting here, writing on my blogs, to think the deep thoughts, to understand the experiences and memories in my head. But there is also time for thinking nothing, letting stimuli enter your brain and leave it unfiltered, undigested (that people have a tendency to do this to important information, like listening to parents, is another blog altogether as well). That's why shallow summer blockbuster movies are so popular, or why rock n' roll songs of the Brittany Spears variety are so necessary now, because people don't want to think about the real problems in their lives, they'd rather think about or create false issues and problems in other people, or read, or watch TV (soap operas, for instance). It is the way today's world works. So while Victor and company fight out their problems on The Young and the Restless, we can sit for a time and ignore ours.
This Thanksgiving, having labored hard in the Honeybaked Ham line to get dinner, and making my Eagle Brand Pie, and licking the bowl (good stuff. :) ), I resorted to what the traditional Thanksgiving activities are for most people who have no propensity for excercising... watching TV. Namely, the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, and the myriads of football games that are on following (for I'd rather watch other people get hurt, than to do so myself.) And since I was doubled up on Prozac (for staying at home is such a wonderfully uplifting thing to do), and sleep kept bobbing in and out (for that's what too much turkey will do), I became witness to the total breakdown of media and entertainment. It all bugged me, and I became immensely thankful for the "Mute" button on my TV remote (or at least, thankful for the House Marathon on USA so I could get away from the cacophony of sounds on the other channels.)
But first things first...the parade. Much better this year than last, mainly because NBC decided it wasn't necessary to feature every Broadway play currently on and off, but of course that didn't matter, because I watched CBS, which would rather have showed interviews with this CBS show and that, with the cameras on the floats, which is what is most important anyway. Thanksgiving just ins't Thanksgiving without seeing Tom the Turkey wheeling down the middle of NYC. The main thing that made me switch to CBS was the pre-written drivel made for Katie Couric and Matt Lauer, who seemingly couldn't narrate the parade without cute sayings and cheesy segways. It reduced the broadcasters to clowns, and insulted the intelligence of the audience by assuming we needed to be pandered to.
Afterwards, I watched while warming up dinner, what would pass for football games at some Pop Warner league. The games were pathetic, hardly worth watching, except in March I'm sure any game would be preferable. And on top of the attempts at playing football, I had to listen to people attempting to sing. First off, both games featured singers (whose names I don't recall) mangling as best they could the Star Spangled Banner. There was no semblance of melody, of chord progression, of breath control. They were shouting into the microphones. It was amazing that they ended on the right note, or that they even sung the right words. The patriotism was lost on these supposedly Grammy award winning singers belting out the Anthem in a way that makes you grab for the remote to find something else on, and insults those that the song is sung for.
Next up, the brilliance of the campaign surrounding half-time. The United Way and the NFL Play 60 programs, each brought the biggest of youth pop stars out to sing away in hopes that ratings would improve and people might donate time and money to the worthwhile projects (which they are, by the way.) So the first game had Jesse McCartney singing from his latest album, which was nothing but cheesy ballads and dance tunes that are so far from what he is capable of. His days with Dream Street being long gone, and his singing career in decline, he really needs to focus on the acting career, since he might have decent longevity with, as long as the CW network can stay afloat.
Finally, the second game brought on the Jonas Brothers. A pop sensation much more than what Hanson ever was, and fueled by the machine that is Disney, they got up on stage and rasped out what passed for songs. Cuteness means nothing when actually using talent (which they have little of.) But tell that to the screaming teenage girls around the stage. Awful...simply awful...
I wonder what has made music these days seem so bad. Probably the same thing that created "Music Appreciation" classes in College. As if people don't know how to appreciate music. Well, it might be that they can't. I was listening to a Christmas album, Sufjan Stevens' Songs for Christmas in the car on the way to work today, and the song that came on was a classic hymn, "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing," and what made me really like it was that it was played in a slow 6/8 time signature. Counting the beats to six was cool, since most songs nowadays are in 4/4. And it's obvious that diaphragm control, tonality, chord progression...etc... are all foreign when it comes to singing and dancing and simulating sex on stage. Art has been swept away, leaving only lust in its place.
So for this Thanksgiving, I'm thankful for my Mute Button, and for all the music teachers out there that really try to make a difference in reducing noise pollution that radiates from every speaker and headphone that exists. I don't know if Don McClean could pinpoint the day the music died, but I'm sure it's already happened.
Dreams can be a wonderful, terrible, amazing experience, and the ones you remember can seem as real as anything reality can bring you. I just had one, and it was one of those fleeting dreams that, if only I could grab on, hold the melody, capture the words, I could produce a masterpiece of such beauty. And it's all up there, in my brain, far out of reach of normal conscious thought.
I was adrift in some computer animated soundscape, with acoustic guitars and some lyrics, but the song itself was cacophonous, multifaceted, and breathtaking. And I know it's something that's in my head, and not influenced from outside sounds. You know, you'll be dreaming of a song on the radio, only to wake up and hear that same song on the radio that's playing in your bedroom. Or I've even been dreaming and had CNN on TV and suddenly the world I'm in gets bombed with missiles, which have undoubtedly come from the news reports from the Middle East. But as I woke up, I noticed no TV on, no music, only the irritating grind of my computer fans. So whatever melody and counterpoint and whatever was playing in my head was being created by my own mind.
They say we only use like, 10% of our brain, but what if we can tap into the rest while we are asleep, and our subconscious takes over? What marvelous works of literature or music could be given to the world if only we could remember them. I can remember dreams where I was writing poetry, but I wake up, and the words disappear into the rising sun. With that one, I've always wanted to capture that onto paper, because writing is something I can do. The acoustic guitar masterpiece I just heard I can't capture because I have no skills on that instrument. Amazing stuff. The muse so often stays hidden, and those who can capture those moments can go down in history as masters. What if they were just lucky enough to capture those few moments and hold on, and bring it through to the sunlight? If only we all had the ability to express those works of beauty that are hidden within.
