Driving Music
If there is anything that I really consider I spend a lot of time thinking about it is music. Not in any superior technical way, mostly just in the way people of the last lets say sixty years have. I wouldn't say I have the best ear or my opinions any better than most peoples but I definitely know something good in most genres of music. You know that song that just blows your hair back and you need to know the artists right away. I pick out that music very well on first listen. It is something that is magical and maybe it can even semi transform you.
There is a lot written on the subject, how music predates languages and how the first languages were likely sung not spoken so clearly there is something primal about music to our species. In the last sixty years or probably the last thirty to forty years, music has become linked with driving for most people I think. No one sits around and listens to records anymore which is semi-escapist in its own way but it expects a level of thought. I mean our minds don't shut off in the same way. Sitting in a room and listening to music is a lost art, listening to anything really is but lets stay on music for the time being.
I always find it odd that baby-boomers in general complain about our music lacking substance. I mean we just don't intake it in the same way they did so we don't demand the same things out of it. We don't sit and listen to music as an experience or a teaching tool or a search for truth. We don't take many musical artists as philosophers or even deep thinkers these days. How many of them write their own music anyhow? I mean lets not get too heavy into how bad pop lyrics are they always have been bad, but the song-writers of today are still there and they are good just different.
Most were raised with music as background noise and to an extent it is. It is a gentle sway or force on our lives sometimes taking over when that song comes on the radio and wraps you into it an your body innately responds. Whether you dance, sing-along, jam down the gas petal, or just allow the music to take over that main receptor channel of sensory intake its magical. The reason why we don't have meaningful lyrics is that it isn't enough. As much as I love Dylan, guy can't sing and most of the music is eh. The Beatles, arguably the greatest band of all time, captured great lyrics with good music that wrapped you up and made you listen to the lyrics. Few songs do that today, capture your ear or mind and make you listen to the words. Half the times the words are escapist in themselves asking you to just tune into the beat and dance, sway, forget. Music does a great job at making us forget the shit times things are and at least asks us to look at the good things.
We as a generation are often so beat down that is all we want to know that there is some good and our artists, writers, and musicians provide that. I am talking about the people that write songs not mega label production artists. I don't have the energy for world peace, sometimes I barely have the energy to get out of bed. The world seems to being going to shit around my generation: debt crisis, unemployment, global warming, political strife (in so many ways); all i want is to realize there is something good, that love exists for some people (maybe someday for me), that tomorrow has the potential to be better.
I no doubt want to solve those things or at least contribute to the best of my ability. Just don't shit on us and our music because your music which called for an end to famine, materialism, inequality, war, and injustice which you a generation seemed to want very badly in the late 1960s fell through the cracks and is leaving my age group with a larger mess. At this point I just want hope that it will be better. That there is something to dance for sometimes and if I work very hard enough anyone who wants can spend their life together, we can save as many animal species as we want, and tomorrow can be better. I have lost my dreams of doing something magical and revolutionary but I have not abandoned my hope of leaving something better than was left for me.
There is a lot written on the subject, how music predates languages and how the first languages were likely sung not spoken so clearly there is something primal about music to our species. In the last sixty years or probably the last thirty to forty years, music has become linked with driving for most people I think. No one sits around and listens to records anymore which is semi-escapist in its own way but it expects a level of thought. I mean our minds don't shut off in the same way. Sitting in a room and listening to music is a lost art, listening to anything really is but lets stay on music for the time being.
I always find it odd that baby-boomers in general complain about our music lacking substance. I mean we just don't intake it in the same way they did so we don't demand the same things out of it. We don't sit and listen to music as an experience or a teaching tool or a search for truth. We don't take many musical artists as philosophers or even deep thinkers these days. How many of them write their own music anyhow? I mean lets not get too heavy into how bad pop lyrics are they always have been bad, but the song-writers of today are still there and they are good just different.
Most were raised with music as background noise and to an extent it is. It is a gentle sway or force on our lives sometimes taking over when that song comes on the radio and wraps you into it an your body innately responds. Whether you dance, sing-along, jam down the gas petal, or just allow the music to take over that main receptor channel of sensory intake its magical. The reason why we don't have meaningful lyrics is that it isn't enough. As much as I love Dylan, guy can't sing and most of the music is eh. The Beatles, arguably the greatest band of all time, captured great lyrics with good music that wrapped you up and made you listen to the lyrics. Few songs do that today, capture your ear or mind and make you listen to the words. Half the times the words are escapist in themselves asking you to just tune into the beat and dance, sway, forget. Music does a great job at making us forget the shit times things are and at least asks us to look at the good things.
We as a generation are often so beat down that is all we want to know that there is some good and our artists, writers, and musicians provide that. I am talking about the people that write songs not mega label production artists. I don't have the energy for world peace, sometimes I barely have the energy to get out of bed. The world seems to being going to shit around my generation: debt crisis, unemployment, global warming, political strife (in so many ways); all i want is to realize there is something good, that love exists for some people (maybe someday for me), that tomorrow has the potential to be better.
I no doubt want to solve those things or at least contribute to the best of my ability. Just don't shit on us and our music because your music which called for an end to famine, materialism, inequality, war, and injustice which you a generation seemed to want very badly in the late 1960s fell through the cracks and is leaving my age group with a larger mess. At this point I just want hope that it will be better. That there is something to dance for sometimes and if I work very hard enough anyone who wants can spend their life together, we can save as many animal species as we want, and tomorrow can be better. I have lost my dreams of doing something magical and revolutionary but I have not abandoned my hope of leaving something better than was left for me.