@BShark
Thanks a lot for this link. I'll give it a listen tomorrow.
Glad you shared your knowledge of music with this old coot.
Nice to meet someone young that has learned what has come before and used it as a springboard into "finding" the music these days.
Music is probably more important now than ever to connect the generations in a knowable river, even though today's marketing of music often makes the easy stuff to find seem primarily an instrument of divisiveness, identity divisions, and resentment expressed with a mind numbing baseline, or else a whiney woman's voice migrating like a wandering bird hopelessly in search of a melody lost in a whirlwind of navel contemplation.
As the culture enters what some suspect could be a sign market of hypermodernity that may wear away history, itself, increasingly humans will have to do exactly what you describe has been your experience. Your parents have to hope their kids are listening to the oldies and what they are saying about the joy they bring, and then simultaneously encouraging their kids to dig for the new music in the cloud. I'm not a person who is pessimistic about where things are headed so much as wary of the inevitable traumas that will crop up as we head down the path, or network of paths that have newly emerged. I would have felt the same way in the early 1400s in the dawn of the Age of Discovery. Going to be great to find a water route out of the Black Plague years and to Cathay, but I'm feeling a little wary about the plagues we might encounter as we enter these new worlds. Be careful y'all! as we sailed with some really good portuguese port and sausages down the coast of Africa trying to find a way across the dead air before you reach the west African Coast, only to encounter some African Tribes wanting to sell us members of their tribes as slaves they have had anal sex with and tired of. And we suddenly go from wanting to find Cathay to being tempted by making some easy money turning around and selling slaves instead. Temptation, then a little Dengue fever. Some of us make it and some of us don't, and its all too big and sweeping and new for us to make sense of during our life times, except that we know something very, VERY big has changed from the old days of our earlier ancestors building those big, heavy gothic cathedrals. This African coast is refreshingly green, impossibly humid, and full of unexplored rivers and value systems we've never known before. And so on. We survived the Age of Discovery...barely. And we will survive the Age of Hypermodernity...barely. Music helped those African tribes groove through the risks of life in the green belt of Central africa after uncertainties and Middle Eastern slavers had likely first infected their tribes with slaving many centuries before the Portuguese came to Africa and got infected with it, too. Then some of those folks survived Dengue Fever and malaria and those survivors built an admirable culture in a lush biosphere, except for the bad habit slavery acquired from the folks in Northeast Africa that had slaved them and the Europeans along the coast. Slavery is the contagion that keeps on giving. Once it starts, it twists cultures and they soon have problems that they should never have to deal with. Problems that "bind us together, " as James Taylor sings in one of his songs about Martin Luther King. The British caught the slaver bug, too. The French caught it. The Habsburg Castillian Spaniards caught it. They spread it to the new world. The Chinese had caught it somewhere long before everyone but maybe the Indians of India, and the Indians probably caught it from their own bizarre caste system. Music has helped everyone endure slavery and the other evils of their times. It has carried the spiritual and emotional truths of humanity from generation to generation and from culture to culture. Music is an imperfect vessel. But its one we love. Everyone in power coopts it for a time, but for every oligarch trying to buy it with a spendy conservatory, some Bob Marley is out there composing the sounds he grew up with at the bottom of the culture. And contrary to popular thinking, many of the oligarchs are trying to save the culture just as much as the Bob Marleys. Some of those conservatories are godsends to the music, same as some of the old monasteries of western Ireland were godsends at preserving the scrolls of the ancient wisdom of ancient Rome and of early Christendom that would have been lost like the library of Carthage had they been burned, or abandoned, or salted. All the different kinds of music are all necessary to save the human legacy and connect it to the coming generations, especially during times when cultures are being fragged by competing orders vying for expanded power and when technology evolves in unforeseen consequential ways that bring the entire human order, or biosphere of cultures, into times of instability and perilous conflict. "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas" sung by Bing Crosby, and by many others, in 1942, and heard by soldiers by radio and recordings played over camp loudspeakers supposedly was part of what kept my dad from losing his sanity in December of 1943 one night on a island in the south Pacific. He said he just kept concentrating on it. You never know how this music stuff works. Tokyo Rose played American hits and tried to torment American GIs and Marines with memories of home, but instead the music galvanized their spirits and made them fight on, according to my dad. Music works in mysterious ways. If as reputed, intel and drug cartels have coopted pop music and have compromised some young men and women with the most vicious, vile inexcusable depravity of Monarch Mind Control Programming, it will most likely come back to bite these filthy bastards exploiting music some how or another. Music is a living river of human traditions, same as literature. When the occult masters, or the secular masters, or the religious masters, compromise their principles and misuse the music and literature for mind control and propaganda, through out history we have seen the wise words of Martin Luther King play out again and again. "The arc of the moral universe is long, but no lie can live forever." And when the lie is finally exposed for a time, change comes and most often with nonlinear virulence. Justice comes swiftly and yet the complexity that results never delivers us to equity that the disingenuous cannot disrupt over time. But the change comes and as Sheryl Crow sang;
"The change, change,
It will do you good."
And as Bob Dylan sang, there also come times when:
The line it is drawn, the curse it is cast
The slow one now will later be fast
As the present now will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin'
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'"
And then we find ourselves licking our wounds and trying to heal somehow with music from someone like James Taylor who has lived and lost and lets nothing stand between the feelings and the truth.
"Just yesterday morning, they let me know you were gone.
Suzanne, the plans they made put an end to you.
I walked out this morning and I wrote down this song,
I just can't remember who to send it to.
I've seen fire and I've seen rain. I've seen sunny days that I thought would never end.
I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend, but I always thought that I'd see you again."
You have dug up a thousand, maybe ten thousand songs I have never heard. But you will play them for your children, same as I played the ones the radio delivered to me and that I played for my children.
Music in all its forms. Sports in all its forms. Literature in all its forms. Movies in all their forms.
These are the four rivers that keep flowing from the past through the present to the future.
Politics, war and economics are just the records of our dog fighting over money and power.
The four rivers of music, sports, literature, and movies are the records of who we are and what was felt deeply.
The one worlders and the mind controllers are trying to dam them up and divert and valve them to the service of their orders.
Those orders that respect and nurture those rivers grow into great cities beside and along their banks.
Those orders that disrespect them and try to pollute them with lies and deceptions are eventually swept away by them.
It has happened time and again in history.
Sometimes the people just walk out of the cities and move into the country side, as happened apparently in Yucatan with the Maya.
Sometimes the leaders are so corroded by corruption that the order breaks down internally and other orders from outside sweep in and fill the power vacuums (Hamlet anyone?).
Sometimes the leaders get a death wish from hubris and attack other orders and cultures that are simply too powerful for them to ever overcome and they are crushed.
But no matter what happens, the four rivers resume flowing through the cultures that succeed them.
Time waits for no one and for no order that is not busily building for its own people's futures. As Bob Dylan sang:
"He not busy being born is being dying."
But music (and so culture) for me really comes down to what Chuck Berry sang:
"I have no kick against modern jazz
Unless they try to play it too darn fast
And change the beauty of the melody
Until it sounds just like a symphony
That's why I go for that rock'n'roll music
Any old way you choose it
It's got a backbeat, you can't lose it
Any old time you use it
It's gotta be rock - roll music
If you wanna dance with me
If you wanna dance with me"
Chuck.
He knew the sound of an assembly line.
His music often captured that sound and of cars rolling down the roads.
We've got to find where that river Chuck tapped into has flowed again.
Its there.
Not the same spot in the river Chuck stepped into, but where the river has flowed to.
I suspect you and @approxinfinity have done your digging and found the underground river I am talking about. I suspect you are sharing some of it.
Its a wild, big, two-hearted river, to recall Hemingway, trying to heal from WWI in the back woods of Michigan by using it as a metaphor for the brutal recovery he endured in a brutal world.
The four rivers entwine and have many tributaries.
The river that washed up Rock and Roll Music by Chuck Berry was the river of everyone's music, same as White Christmas fell like snow flakes on the river of everyone's music that had ever felt the beauty and loneliness of a winter night and turned to whatever god and loved ones they had so as not to flee from the feeling of smallness in the face of a big beautiful, but indifferent world turning in directions potentially dangerous and not easily foreseeable.Its the same river that washed up "It's the End of the World as We Know it". It washed up "Oh, Sussanah," and "Cross Roads." It washed up "Fire and Rain."
It washed up El Paso and Ring of Fire.
It washed up Lady Gaga singing "The Lady Is a Tramp" with Tony Bennett.
It washed up all the great songs you know and deeply connect with that I have never heard and maybe will never hear.
But truly, as James Taylor sang:
"We are riding, on a rail road
Singing someone else's song..."
It washed up "Ohio" and "For What Its Worth".
"Moon River" and "Where the Boys Are."
Over the "Rainbow" by Judy Garland, also by Iz.
It washed up "Moon River" and "Don't Think Twice, Its Alright."
It washed up "Purple Haze," and "Little Red Corvette."
It washed up "Fight the Power" and "Battle Hymn of the Republic."
"Careless Whisper" and "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry."
And since I am baring my soul about the music I love that has washed up from this river, let me pause and just say it here.
"Sergeant Peppers" and "Burning Down the House."
It washed up "Help Me I Think I'm Falling" and "You Oughta Know."
It washed up "The City of New Orleans" and "The Great Compromise."
"Light My Fire" and "Ring of Fire."
I'm leaving the last 20-30 years of what washed up to you and @approxinfinity. I couldn't do it justice.
The only band I know of and like these days is a band called Lake Street Dive. I don't know why. I just do. I've tried to go see them twice, but once they were sold out and once i had scheduling conflicts. I don't like a lot of their stuff, but the songs I like I REALLY like. I have always been a sucker for women with pipes. I liked Natalie Merchant a lot. This woman on Lake Street Dive moves me the way Merchant used to, but only on a couple songs. The band gets too concerned with references, especially to the worst stages of Paul McCartney's song writing. But when that lead singer really lets go in a song with some funk, it gets me like I were 18 again. Go figure.
And yes, I've already picked what I want played at my funeral: "Last Date" by Floyd Cramer and "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" by Iz. Then after the coffin is in the ground and everyone is departing? "Burning Down the House." These could change, if you guys give me a divining rod that reconnects me to the underground river.
Outta here.
