Tagged: music
My Living Room Came To Life
“I don’t think you understand. My living room came to life. I can only interpret this to mean that my will, my hopes, my desires–that I–manifest the future,” Pete told his friend.
Given that Pete, like any man, has an impressive streak of riding high on life at times, we should note that his claim isn’t quite unfounded. Before explaining his claim’s seeming impossibility, we must first denote 2012’s sublime specimen of synchronicity. Back in 1989, as a mere child of eight our hero saw the film Top Gun. You know, the movie starring Tom Cruise that pretty much did recruiter’s jobs for them ever since? Yeah, that Top Gun. He then went on to become a military pilot. While serving as a pilot, he was a member of a squadron which had an unofficial theme song. The theme song was Bon Jovi’s Wanted Dead or Alive. Here’s the kicker. In 2012, Tom Cruise starred in a film called Rock of Ages (which unlike Top Gun did not inspire anyone) in which he (TC) sings Wanted Dead or Alive. Think about that for a second. Coincidence or not, that’s some seriously Mufasa C-O-L shit.
Back to our story…
“No Pete, I do understand. I just don’t think it’s more than a coincidence. I don’t think there is any hidden meaning. I can’t believe I’m even acknowledging the idea that you control the future, but I am, and you don’t,” the Debbie-downer replied.
“You can’t tell me it’s just coincidence. When people walk into this place what do they see first? Metallica hanging on the wall. Then they notice the beautifully 670lb Steinway and Sons grand piano,” Pete said, taking a breath that signaled that he was not going down without a fight. “And last night, for all the world to see, Metallica and a Steinway and Sons piano performed together on the same stage! How many people have Steinway and Metallica in the same room?” he asked, using hand motions to bolster his claim. “How many? Maybe 3. Maybe 20. But I’m one of them,” he said, his crescendo one self-assessment away from its peak. “Man, I feel good right now!”
“Yes Pete. And did you notice that you have a globe of Earth in the room too? And the performance happened on Earth!” his friend mocked. Continuing, he said, “And there are lights in this room! And the concert had lights!” Pete was no longer smiling. “And we’re in a room. And they performed in a room!”
“Go to hell.”
“And there are people in this room…”
Older Metallica Fans Depressed By Recent Findings
Rock Gods Metallica just became the first band to perform live on all seven continents last week. Adding icing to the cake, they accomplished this enormous feat within the last calendar year. However, the news isn’t all unicorns and rainbows. Without stating its intentions, a private polling organization released survey results which strain credulity, and frankly, are depressing.
736 randomly selected participants, ages 13-25, were given the following information and question: “Metallica just performed on on Antarctica. This means they have performed on all seven continents in 2013. What is a continent?”
- 13% answered “I don’t know”
- 36% answered “Something in space; like an asteroid, I think. Metallica sure is crazy”
- 19% answered “It’s another word for country”
- 32% answered “One of the main landmasses on the globe, usually reckoned as seven in number (Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, North America, Australia and Antarctica).
More surprising than the fact that more participants thought a continent was an off-earth body is that these young people never learned that the longest answer is usually the right one.
Nevertheless, “you can’t keep a good dog down” as they say, and the older Metallica fans are lifting themselves out of these findings’ mild depression by reminding themselves that over the last 22 years Metallica’s Black Album is the “highest-selling record in the U.S., period.”
Life Without Money
No, he didn’t mean to conjure up some imagination-land inspired by John Lennon. He simply meant to capture some observations about life. Sometimes he had lots of money, and sometimes he had just enough money. He figured this made him similar to other people.
Of late, he found himself in the “just enough money” category.
Maybe it was just him, but when he had lots of money his problem was perfection. In both situations he spent all that he had, but when the dollar amounts were great, he took time away from some things he now values tremendously to find “the perfect” item. First, the perfect piano (really, it is amazing). Second, the perfect guns. Then there was the baseball phase. He bought the authentic Babe Ruth replica mitt. He found the greatest soft-toss machine, and accompanied it with an on-the-field hitting net the MLB itself uses in spring training. And just before the money ran out he bought the perfect motorcycles. One black-and-chrome American classic, and one dirt-cheap faux sport-bike. Not to mention the top of the line protective gear.
Had he stayed in that position, his next plan to relieve himself of money was race-car driving lessons. Yep, it was going to be great. Oh, and not that he was the boastful type, but this was on top of saving for college, having a nice home etc. But today? Today, he doesn’t plan out his expenditures. He pays for what needs to be payed for. And there’s something more. It’s difficult to describe, but for him there is a very tangible, attractive quality to the dream of returning to wealth. It’s almost as if he finds the dream of wealth more gratifying than the possession of wealth. There are times when he really, really, really hopes to have lots of money again. Sadly, though, he knows that when he does, the dream will end.
The Secret to Avoiding Danger
To begin, I learned that an email containing my last blog Special Fourth of July Interview with A Mugwump was not sent. Read it.
For today, read on to reveal the secret.
Censorship is murder. To be a human, as opposed to all other known life forms, requires an unfettered ability to communicate one’s value (in the form of words, images, or music) to other humans. And an external restriction of a person’s expression of value is the same as telling them they have no value. In other words, to censor is a malicious attempt to end the censored’s life.
Defining censorship in this way is meant to cause careful consideration of censorship. Exploring censorship at its most basic level is the only way to get to the root of the issue, by definition.
The fairly recent article, “The Ed Sullivan Show and the (Censored) Sounds of the Sixties”* is the case study in question. In it, Ian Inglis discusses the widely popular Ed Sullivan Show and its unique experiences with censorship. That television show showcased up and coming performers every Sunday night. Popular wisdom states that if a performer appeared on the show, he/she would achieve great material success. The article discusses three now well-known performers and their experiences with Ed Sullivan’s censorship.
First, after being selected to appear on the show, Bob Dylan was asked to perform a totally different song than the one he had planned to perform on the show. Second, the Rolling Stones were asked to change a lyric; they did. Third, The Doors were asked to change a line from one of their songs. They paid lip-service to the request, but when live, they did not change it. Inglis concludes, “Ironically, one consequence of the censorship suffered by all three performers was that their positions were unequivocally enhanced (Inglis 571).”
Inglis rather wordily describes the simple fact that censorship is murder. Each instance demonstrates this perfectly. First look at what happened to the Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote the song in question, “Let’s Spend the Night Together.” Before their performance, an outside entity changed the lyrics. Logically, though subtlety, this means that while the performers looked similar to the Rolling Stones, they were in fact some other band, some new band. By allowing their lyrics to be changed, in effect, the Rolling Stones murdered themselves for that night. Next, take Bob Dylan. He wouldn’t concede to the censor, so he didn’t perform on the show. It is now clear that The Ed Sullivan show never wanted Bob Dylan to perform. They wanted someone who looked, acted, and sounded like Bob Dylan to perform. When they couldn’t get what they wanted, they murdered him. Finally, take the Doors. Long live the Doors. They played the game, they fooled the “man”, and they played their song, uncensored. The only performers who remained unscathed, then, were the Doors.
In my own life, an even more appalling proof that censorship is murder took place when I was young. My mom censored my sister from the New Kids On The Block “Step By Step” album. To the uninformed, this may not seem like murder. But those of us who are close to the situation know that the New Kids On The Block died after releasing that album. The New Kids On The Block never released another original studio album after “Step By Step.” The five men who made up that group did eventually release more original songs, but under the name NKOTB instead. How can this be explained except to say that censorship is murder?
The question remaining is why did Ed Sullivan and my mom choose to murder these performers? To discover the answer, we must turn inward. Violence is often committed against those who we find threatening. Murder is the fullest expression of violence and is resorted to when all other attempts fail. Time and time again we see that if humans feel they are in danger, they remove the danger. If necessary, they remove the danger through violence. What danger can possibly exist in the form of words, music, and/or images? In and of themselves, they are unable to physically harm a person. Therefore, the danger in question must be regarding the mind. A short story can help explain the deficiencies in this way of thinking.
Aircraft pilots are people who professionally deal with avoiding death on a daily basis. To draw the metaphor, we could say they professionally deal with avoiding danger of any sort. This is very different than most other professions. But it is common knowledge within the aviation community that at the end of the day a pilot really just wants to have successfully completed the same number of landings as takeoffs. The point being that a pilot counts success as being alive at the end of each daring flight, not whether or not some particular mission was accomplished.
Pilots avoid danger. Censors believe they protect people from danger. It should prove very instructive, then, to learn how pilots avoid danger. Pilots avoid danger, not by actively avoiding danger. Over time, the community of pilots discovered that if they attempted to avoid danger, they only compounded the danger already inherent to human flight. Instead, they fly correctly. They focus their energy on learning the right way to fly. Naturally, this matches the safest way, but it is important to note that pilots think in ‘correct vs. incorrect’ not ‘safe vs. dangerous’ terms.
Regarding words/music/images, the same principle should be applied. Artist’s (people) should not be censored because their art may cause harm. They should be encouraged to achieve their fullest potential. Regardless of whether the work is appropriate or inappropriate, it may have value. The only way to measure the value is to determine its quality. Ancient wisdom would have us believe that there is a time and place for everything. Rather than focus on the–as demonstrated by pilots–ineffective idea that danger can be avoided if it is censored, how much better informed could a population be if it only cared about quality?
Returning to the thesis then, we need to remind ourselves that what we’re really discussing is freedom and value. If Ed Sullivan would have simply acknowledged those three performers had value and the public wanted to see them, not look-a-likes, the results would have been untainted. As it stands, the saying, “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” rues the day. Would those three performers have had such success if no censorship attempt was made? Probably. So the fool, then, is Ed Sullivan. The fool, then, is the censor. Humans require the freedom to communicate their value. Inherent to the act of censorship is the death of this freedom to communicate. Furthermore, we have seen that censorship does not—cannot—deter any coming danger.
*INGLIS, I. (2006), The Ed Sullivan Show and the (Censored) Sounds of the Sixties. The Journal of Popular Culture, 39: 558–575. doi: 10.1111/j.1540-5931.2006.00279.x
Are You Singing?
How can He hear us, if I can’t?
You should understand that I believe that in this world that God created, everything that happens is part of God’s plan. Everything. The good, the bad — everything. How could it not be? The catch is we, the humans, are always able to change what is happening, to improve it or maybe to take a step back and say, “Hmm, maybe this was a mistake.” It is an enormous amount of responsibility.
Anyone who knows me knows I love Metallica. Their music demands to be performed on electric guitars and amplified drums. I think most would agree that all heavy metal should be amplified. It’s kind of the nature of the beast.
Anyone who knows me knows I also love classical music. Classical music (classical meaning ‘the best’) is written for acoustic instruments, and rightly so. Something magical happens when music is acoustic. Something so magical, that over the years many have remarked that classical music is surely the voice of God. I have always liked this metaphor if only because it highlights that music is a universal language.
I’d like to take the metaphor a bit further. If mankind was created in God’s own image, and music can have the effect of sounding like the voice of God, what about when we sing? Wouldn’t our “made in God’s image” voices actually sound closer to how God’s voice sounds? (Assuming of course, that He has a voice.)
I point this out because, again, in my recent visits to a church, I have been perplexed by the changes. There is an amplified band singing, words are displayed on the screen, no written music is anywhere to be found, and I can hardly hear anyone over the band, save the person standing next to me. (Great voice, btw.) It most certainly is not music to my ears.
Worship via music is one of the main reasons I see for going to church. I have always liked singing in a large group. I liked it as a kid at church, I liked it in the Air Force on those special occasions, and I like the idea of it now. I think singing, especially large groups of men singing, is just great. Doesn’t everyone?
I think I know what is going on. I bet that over the years, like in all other areas of life, people’s enthusiasm has been waning. Who wants other people to hear that they can’t sing a note? It does take some energy to sing, too, and we’re inherently lazy. So at first the music leader’s volume gets turned up, the thinking being that it might encourage more people to sing if they aren’t afraid of being heard. Then a band is introduced instead of a piano or organ. Now we can all pretend that we’re singing, and no one will ever know the difference. At least that’s how I see it.
As for me, I want people to sing out loud. I want to sing out loud. I want to feel the power in the music. I want to hear the voice of God. I want guests to visit and feel the inescapable love that is expressed when a group of like-minded people worship with music.
The easy answer is to find another church. Should this be about easy though? I don’t know. I just don’t know.
If I was a pastor, I’d want to hear the congregation sing. I’d use it like a thermometer. I think even the most accurate digital thermometer would tell a pastor of churches like I described above, “Meh. Lukewarm.”
But that’s just me. What do you think?
Who Killed the New Kids?
“Censorship is murder.”
Too strong? I thought so at first. Then again, this was an assignment for college and I wanted a good grade, so I decided to run with it.
The task that lay before me was developing this radical thesis. So I thought and I thought and I thought. I asked my housemate what he thought. So he thought. Then we both thought. Here’s the result: Censorship is murder because I believe that “to be a human, as opposed to all other known life forms, requires an unfettered ability to communicate one’s value (in the form of words, images, or music) to other humans. And an external restriction of a person’s expression of value is the same as telling them they have no value. In other words, it is a malicious attempt to end their life.”
It was beautiful.
After developing my thesis, the next assignment was to write about my first experience with censorship. What I discovered was frightening. Even now, I am afraid of the implications.
187. 68. 32. Those are the amounts posters and/or pictures of The New Kids on the Block my cousin Jenny, my sister Kate, and I had on our bedroom walls, respectively, in the summer of 1990. I feel like I should be embarrassed to admit this. I would be if I led the bunch. That I was a distant third clearly showed I was just trying to fit in.
For those of you who don’t recall, The New Kids on the Block were it back then. Their top single, “Hangin’ Tough” spent 132 weeks, that’s nearly two and a half years, on the Billboard charts.
Despite the New Kids’ success, all was not well in households across America. Mine was no different. My memory gets fuzzier by the year, but this much I do remember. My sister was taking piano lessons. She was three years older than me. She was 12, I was 9. Mrs. Misty Bolton, the wife of our church’s pastor of music, was her piano teacher. Even a cool lady like her couldn’t see the storm brewing on the horizon.
I can hear the nice, neat, well-timed piano playing now. Whatever my sister may have lacked in expression, she made up for in crisp playing–just like an older sister to show how its done.
At this point in the story, it’s important that you join me in the room.
You’re already at the front door of the house? Good. Open it. Once you make your way through the front door, you see a hallway to a kitchen table straight ahead. You discover that what you thought was the right wall of that hallway is actually the left side of the staircase which leads to the second floor and a little balcony. Turning all the way to your right, you see the room where the piano is. You know the piano is in the room, not because you see it, but because you can see a reflection of it in the wall sized mirror that hangs opposite it.
This room, unlike any other in the house had a name: the “blue room”. It was named for its predominant color, beginning with the blue carpet, extending to the blue walls. The blue carpet was a plush, thick, luscious carpet that incurred my mother’s wrath if it was needlessly tread upon.
“Key-an’t you go around?,” she’d exclaim. She could be rather vain about carpet.
Do you see me yet? Good. Here it comes.
“Mom! Comeeer. Misty, I mean, Mrs. Bolton says she’ll teach me to play the New Kids on the Block songs if we buy the book! Can we? Pleeeeease?,” my sister begged.
Our mom was no push-over, but it seemed like such a simple request involving learning to play piano didn’t necessitate that kind of begging. It turned out that no amount of begging could overcome the music snobbery we were about to witness.
“Nnnnoooo, I’m not going to hee-ave you playing that garbage! It’s bee-ad enough I hee-ave to hear it and see it all dee-ay long as it is. I will not buy thee-at book for you. Nice try though.”
Crushed! Devastated! If my sister wasn’t crying on the outside, she was on the inside. Try as they might, my boy arms lacked the strength to lift her out of her misery.
-Fast forward to the next lesson-
Guess who showed up with the sheet music book for the New Kids’ latest album “Step By Step”? Mrs. Misty Bolton. This was a bad idea. She obviously had not spent much time in our house. Suffice it to say, my mom was not happy. And so after my mom let Mrs. Baldwin know she wasn’t happy, she made my sister pay for it out of her piddly allowance and then she took the book away and hid it. No piano of hers was going to play the New Kids’ music, and no piano teacher was going to defy her wishes!!
Well, there you have it. My first experience with censorship.
What’s that? You thought I was supposed to be explaining how this experience led me to believe censorship was murder?
But don’t you see? I just did. My mother censored the “Step By Step” album. You still don’t understand? Okay. Okay, quick reminder then. How did the New Kids follow their “Step By Step” album? Don’t remember? That’s because the New Kids on the Block never released another original studio album. By the time those five guys did release another original studio album, they weren’t the New Kids on the Block anymore. They were NKOTB. Still not with me? Fully connecting the dots now– a simple writing assignment in which I was asked to defend my original thesis, that censorship is murder, led me to stumble upon the frightening revelation that the New Kids on the Block died after my mom censored their “Step By Step” album. Therefore, my mom killed them in an act of what appears to be cold-blooded murder! This is the same woman who raised me to do the right thing and all these years she’s been hiding this secret! She, too, must pay for her crime. And I have to turn her in. But how do I turn in my own mom??!
I guess, I’ll just have to take it step… by… step.
We Need Time Keepers
It turns out James Hetfield with his rhythm guitar, not Lars Ulrich with his drums, is really the one who keeps Metallica in time. Okay, truthfully this is probably debatable. Nonetheless, there is an opportunity for a great metaphor here. Who among us would dispute music’s inherent power?
Aside from what some noble, lofty lyrics of poets and dreamers say about finding music in nature and what not, in order to create music someone must keep time. If no one is keeping time, no amount of effort can transform noise into one of humanity’s most powerful expressions of itself. Music.
What about life? Cannot life itself be interpreted in a similar manner? In the end, noise and music are probably not perfectly distinct. There is likely a continuum with one end being noise; the other being music. What would it hurt to place human potential along a similar continuum? One end being not reaching potential, possibly not even seeing the potential; the other being maximum potential realization.
And if somewhere on the noise to music continuum there appears a time keeper, would not the human-potential continuum also need a time keeper? Need people who actively prescribe the standard of measure? Not some ultimate quality control dictating to all whether the music is good or not, no. These people would simply be keeping time. Might these human-potential metronomes even borrow similar tactics from mechanical metronomes and repeat themselves steadily with regularity? Asking, “How are you today?” (Click) “How’s your goal coming along?” (Click) “What’s the next step?” (Click) “I care about you reaching your potential and am here to help in any way you think I can.” (Click)
And just like the wind-up metronomes, might even these human-potential metronomes occasionally need to be re-energized every once in a while? Remember then, it is the same fingers that make the music which are the ones that have to take a break to reset the metronome. Wouldn’t it be the same people busily reaching their potential that need to take a break and reset these human-potential time keepers? Notice even that winding up a metronome still requires purposeful effort.
Thank you Cherry Creek Toastmasters.
Yes. We need time keepers.
Captain’s Log 