Prophet? Musician? Both?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
5 Comments
This is what I’ve been listening to when I get up in the morning (if you like haunting, Celtic melodies): “Fear a bhata” performed by Capercaillie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5muVg_ZWek
Lovely ~ and for those who may wonder the meaning, here’s a translation.
Meanwhile, real human beings in any number of idioms continue to make real music. Jazz, blues, Celtic musics, bluegrass and other country styles, Latin, Caribbean + African styles of all kinds, the astounding musics of the Indian subcontinent and the rest of Asia, the venerable and still vital Western European orchestral tradition…it’s all out there, accessible by a simple click of the mouse. This is a golden age of music, really, and the word is spreading like wildfire among those with the talent and intelligence to understand. In the styles in which I specialize…North American jazz and latin music for want of better descriptions…the worldwide explosion of fine players has been almost geometric in progression. One begets two beget four beget sixteen, etc. I just did a teaching residency in a fairly remote, semi-rural part of North America where I heard a 15-year old who is already almost good enough to compete as a working jazz musician in NYC, and last week in another teaching situation with high school and intermediate school-level players a college student from Indonesia who is studying jazz in Holland and happened to be in the building did me the favor of subbing for a missing student in an ensemble. The piece was a sort of funk/jazz hybrid…a Duke Ellington tune done in a James Brown-influenced style…and this guy just nailed it. Indonesia and Holland…not New Orleans and Harlem. Worldwide. I regularly play in NYC with 20-something jazz musicians from any number of countries and locations who are so far ahead of previous generations in their developmental processes that I am continually amazed. It’s a running joke among the older players. “Where did this motherfucker come from!!!???”
Recently Booman took me to task for dissing Led Zeppelin…yet another bunch of mediocre garage band musicians who hit it big when the whole corporate culture hustle first began to get up a head of steam. He called me a snob. I’m not a snob, I’m simply a witness to what is happening underneath the cultural wet blanket of corporate Omertica. The human spirit remains unquenchable and unconquerable.
Vaya!!!
AG
Man, it must be great to watch a talented kid burst into bloom like that! Good you share your talent with them.
Both.
When you get right down to it…and I don’t care if it’s Bob Marley, Johann Sebastian Bach, Gil Evans or hundreds of others…all transcendently great musicians are on some level prophets. They make sounds that have never been heard before, sounds that as time passes become the norm because they resonate with other musicians and also with non-musician listeners in a certain way…in a way that includes the body, the soul and the mind in equal parts with great power. They predict the future by their own present.
Now of course…so do many other lesser artists and/or poseurs. The difference? Their “future” is much shorter. Eventually they are forgotten while the real deal becomes as eternal as humanity. (However “eternal” that may be.) In the case of American pop, that “future” has diminished to only a year or two or three at best. As the pop mentality/pop production craft becomes ever more mechanistic, the sounds are not the attention point. Only the “star” matters. I just bumped into a Google’s U.S. trending searches of 2012 article. I was browsing through it and I came upon a name that was totally unfamiliar to me, Carly Rae Jepsen. I followed a YouTube link to her hit, “Call Me Maybe.” She is a total clone of the eternal little teener blonde girl…whatshername, Taylor Swift. She’s just Taylor Swift in a brunette hairdo w/a touch more upfront sexuality included as a differentiation tool. Mechanistic to the max. I am not at all convinced that aliens are not already here and very active, producing humanoids in a control system that aims to take over the entire culture.
Tayloroids.
Beiberoids.
JZoids
Maybe even Obamaoids and Romneyoids.
Oyd vey!!!
Stay tuned.
I don’t want a birth certificate.
I want a DNA sample.
Bet on it.
Later…
AG