Expand Your Musical World

We all have our favorite musical genre. That's fine, but if you just give a listen to some other styles, you may be surprised at how much you like some different things.

When I grew up, rock and r&b were the big things. Okay, that was fine, but I knew some unusual folks and, through them, I was exposed to traditional folk and blues and jazz and my world expanded. As I grew older. When I went away to college, I became exposed to classical music and the world opened more. When I went back to South Florida, the demographics had changed and I started hearing Latin music and that was a further expansion.

From there, I grew even more exploratory, listening to music from India, the Mid East, Indonesia, China and Japan. I sought out folk music from places as diverse as Ireland, Norway and Nigeria. I became an almost obsessive fan of Brazilian music.

All of this expands your mind, something we all can use.

Of course you will still have your favorites (in my case, jazz) and least favor (I loathe hip hop and most heavy metal), but, by hearing the music of other cultures, I am more able to understand the people, and we all need to understand each other better.

Listen to Your World

I love music. To me, it is the highest art form. In books, the artist works with words. Painters and sculptures work with solid materials. The musician works with the vibrations of air. Just think, they work with a totally intangible medium and produce works of great beauty.

Nature is musical. Next time you have time to spare, listen to your surroundings. Indoors, you might hear the hum of various appliances the rustling of papers, the mixing of foods and drinks, snatches of music and TV, the sounds of family and pets, maybe even sounds seeping in from outside.

All of that is wonderful, but nothing compared to what is outside your door. It is like the difference between good pop music and grand symphony. Outdoors, you hear birds and trees and insects, each doing their thing and creating wonderful sounds. On some days, they are joined by wind and rain and, on exceptional days, the booming of thunder, in many permutations, joins in. Blended in, if you live in towns and cities, you have the rumble of traffic, punctuated by horn honks and tire squeals. Toss in the sounds of, calling greetings, shouting questions and answers, sometimes yelling ad cursing in anger. often topped off with the great sounds of the machinery of human industry.

Looked at one way, all of that is just random noise, an almost overwhelming cacophony. But, if you relax and let it come to you, you will begin to notice rhythms and harmonies constantly changing and always surprising. A beauty is seen, albeit a strange beauty, but beauty none the less.

What Are You People Thinking?

Today, I am going to act like a grumpy old man, but I have to get this off my chest. I have written about my dislike of rap, hip hop, whatever you want to call it. I have, since the first time I heard it, considered it a childish attempt to make music by people with no musical talent. I go out of my way to avoid hearing it.

Recently, while watching a little campaign coverage, I caught a bit of Jay-Z's act at a  Clinton event. It was despicable. It was loud, droning electronic squealing, backed by simple minded percussion, and interspersed with strings of idiotic profanity.

I don't mind loud. I grew up with Hendrix and Cream and Zeppelin. I do object to loud with no point. I do mind simple percussion, but I can overlook that. I do not mind profanity in its place. I read many authors who use a lot of it and, on occasion, have let fly myself with a string that would shame a drunken sailor (apologies to all drunken sailors). I do mind mindless repetition of nothing else? Don't people even remember how to use words anymore? Is this what we are reduced to?  

These idiots are not musicians and they are not artists. At best they are con men who have figured out a formula for getting rich off of the publics ignorance. At worst, they are vicious thugs who are spewing their hatred for everything and getting rich off the bile they vomit up. Hearing that nonsense made me feel like I was being assaulted, and in fact, that may be the point, to make the Audience feel afraid and edgy. It is complete crap and anyone who listens has some serious mental issues.

Music is more than the Beat

I am not a musician; I don't even read music, but it is my favorite of the Arts. The very idea that humans can communicate thoughts and feelings just by making sounds, by disturbing the patterns of the air, by vibrating molecules in precise ways, is astounding. Music is the most ethereal of the Arts. It produces nothing tangible, nothing you can see. The vibrations are there one instant and gone the next, yet those vibrations can be profoundly moving.

I do not care what kind of music it is, classic, folk, country, jazz, pop, blues, rock. It is all great.owever (I am sure you knew a however was coming along), we are currently being deluged with what is labeled as music, but is, in fact, noise. Music, by my definition and by the definition of many others, requires a beat and a melody.

Now, I am fairly loose about what I consider melody; some of the jazz and rock I love is fairly odd, but, in those pieces, I can always detect some theme, some flow, that coalesces into a melody, however odd it may be.

There are 2 genres however that seemingly just do not understand that there must be something besides a pounding beat. I speak, of course, of hip hop, or rap, or whatever it currently is called, and extreme metal (speed metal, death metal, black metal, again, I have trouble keeping up with their ever changing names)

Hip hop, sounds to me like the simple rhyming games we played as kids. Most, is just a beat, with some electronic squeaks and squeals. The beat, when you strip away the surrounding noise, is about as complex as the rhythms I heard when I was a child, as girls chanted while they jumped rope. The only difference is the words; the little girls I heard never just chanted a range of obscenities. To hear those half bright thugs referred to as hip hop 'artists' is nauseating, an insult to the entire, long tradition of art.

Just as bad, maybe worse, are the purveyors of metal.  What they play is nothing but rhythm played as fast as possible at ear splitting volume. I have no problem with volume; I grew up on Hendrix and a myriad of other musicians who understood the volume could be used to create different sounds and they used those sounds  in the context of the music they made. They used them rhythmically and melodically. I do not hear that in today's metal. Instead, on the rare occasions I have tried to listen, that I just feel assaulted, sonically raped. Maybe that is the idea. I have heard that those bands are trying to shock their audience into some kind of altered awareness. I have trouble buying that but, maybe. If so, that need to change tactics because all they will create with what they are playing are a bunch of half deaf, brain dead, little zombies. The reason I say that these guys may be worse than the hip hop guys is that many metal players actually can play; here and there a passage escapes them that actually resembles music before it is swept away by the roar of screeching electronics. These guys are potentially talented and capable of creating something musical and to throw away talent is a far greater sin that not having it and just trying to make a buck, like the hip hop producers.

There. I have that out of my system and I feel better. I promise I will not go off on a rant like that again, well, not for a little while, Next time, something positive, I promise.

Beauty and Fun for Humans

Like most folks, I love books, movies, TV, music, games and sports. I have become a bit disenchanted with modern trends in all 6 of those categories, but, there is no reason to abandon those pastimes.

I am not by nature a very nostalgic person , but I recognise quality. I find present day entertainment lacking in quality but, I tend to think of this as, at most, an annouing trend. By examining the past, I believe we can find a way out of the current sludge that we are fed by the various media and start something of a new era, one not clinging to the past, but rooted there,

Human society is created by building on the past, adapting it to aquired knowledge and producing a synthesis. We seem to currently be trying to completely abandon all past value in an effort to create some kind of new techno-society. In a sense, that is succeeding, but it does not lead to a new beauty, a new quality. Instead, we are creating some sort of mechanical world. The Singularity that people like Ray Kurtzweil babble about may be near and if it is, count me out.

I like entertainment that stresses humanity. The books of Twain and Poe and Dickens, the music of Robert Johnson and Bob Dylan, the movies of John Ford and Robert Altman. I like games where people interact directly with each other, not through game consoles. I like sports where skills other than raw power are valued.

In this blog, I am going to give into nostalgia, a bit, in order to remind folks that there was a time when humans and their stories were of the greatest value. Those of my era may find some pleasure in remembering some of the things I will mention. Those younger may be inspired to look at the past. I hope so because I would hate to see so much of value, so much beauty, lost.