Wednesday, April 16, 2014

When I Write, I Listen [two cranes in between spotlight 29]

One of the great tension points in the creative art of “making it in the music business” comes when we fall out of the circuit of our choices, where we lead ourselves and pad our life view with friends, associates, and people who have similar views, and into “the real world”, where there are scarcities associated with choices and people who might not share the same world view start fighting for the spotlight or the microphone – something Taylor Swift found out about …(twice?). 

There is a spiritual battle in America still; it is not a race card battle, it is not even so much an “I know better” or “I am better” battle.  It is a space and resources struggle that has been going on for centuries, but was basically brought to America with the settlements.  God built the USA land like the master architect.  We don’t really have to argue about if there is God, because you either hear and obey the first commandment or you don’t. 

The U.S. is blessed with the continental divide; the divide is both a symbolic divider between “the American ‘Mid-West’” [“the East”] & the natural American West [“the West”] & a physical divide.  While we can as natives of the American West see clearly what desert life is, we also can have a particularly rewarding experience of God, reality, dependent on Earth, dependent upon water, will, & the determination to survive.

What was natural to many of the Native American tribes of the upper Ohio and Great Lakes region was pushed into the American West by the ideas that were foreign to America from God.  Natives & “Christians” moved West from the peaceful tribes.  It was a similar experience on “the trail of tears”, but not from precisely the same Earth roots.  Even this subject starts “the argument” in some circles.  That argument started way back East – maybe even at “the triumphal entry”.

And then there was “that summer” ….  We choose to speak a common language with respect and understanding, or not.  America has a special place in the world that is coming to the crossroads.  Those intersections have come about because of both American productivity and ingenuity, and the arrival of the opening hand of this time’s “ceremony in the air”.  Technology has come to us with the understanding of both the arts and the sciences, which are fused in music, and created in the constant scope by God, the giver and creator. 

Easterners and Westerners have a different experience of what God can do.  We get into our circuits and we think we have a great idea, and then we run into the reality of costs, either in human terms or in spiritual terms or in terms of expectations to which we cling.  The Puritan remnant elements – the hard Eastern Christians – act like the Pharisees, sometimes justly pointing out our lack of humility and how we don’t glorify God & serve our neighbors; the non believers & “the liberals” gather together and tell us what they think we should do.  “Hollywood” is waiting for a decision; ratings hang in the balance.  What do we choose?

Musically, the best music of the past half century has grown out of the struggle to express the personal battle between believers, non-believers, implementers [the “Conservatives” who would liberally apply their circuit rules to all of us] & improvisers [those who sit in the “liberal arts”].  It was the rise of the singer songwriter that changed where we conversed.  The singer-songwriter who connects to our personal experience most will generally get the “best ratings”.  Gradually, even as early as the 1960’s, there was a divide in American music that was directly parallel to East/West cultural expectations and experiences, regardless of personal beliefs.  That divide sunk into the politics of the nation, as “commercial art” usually does. 

The issues can be blown out to the macro level or they can be brought back into the personal level.  When a lyric (or musical phrasing) connects with a greater audience’s experience, we tend to find the territory of “hit music” – it reaches far into broad based culture, beyond or about politics.  We document God’s story in this way, because that story is “about” our life under God.

Hidden in the science of the technology that we use for recording is the map that we’re supposed to use to communicate that we are indeed a united people.  Culturally, we have our battles for the microphone & the spotlight, but it is God who is asking us “are you ready[?]”.  If we don’t teach that communication, and practice it as writers [“singer/songwriters”] we never open the whole field of the underlying “theory” which God gave us.  Music theory, particularly “western music theory” hasn’t changed since before the dark ages [or longer], but we pretend it doesn’t mean anything, or we don’t learn that the macro connection we feel as artists [either as producers or consumers and end users] or the micro is our chance to take part in the whole culture creation of value. When we understand how to apply creation of value through our communication, then we open the door to abundance.

It is my experience that God told us an incredible story, and that we tend to ignore that story because we build into our expectations a level of pride that attaches our personal expectations to not only our point of view of what value is, but also as our projection of what others “should do” and who they “should be”.  If I as a Christian challenge other Christians to open the Lotus Sutra, consider the Mahayana line of Buddhism through T’ien Tai & Nichiren Daishonin, I might be cut out of the music in “Music City” [there’s enough evidence to show that is the truth]; if I as a Buddhist suggest to other people who “practice” to consider the implications of Christ, Jesus’ death on the Cross, and how that might impact their enlightenment in life, well, I might find myself exiled to a “small fishing island” ….

As musicians, as artists, we are blessed to be the individuals who represent the greatest connection to the culture that is our human identity; we can choose to glorify our higher intelligence, or we can lose it to the sands of time.  There are many days I wonder what we’re going to choose, the living “nowhere man” or “the fool on the hill”, but then I take a step back & consider, “living classical”, maybe they are one and the same in the story, the nowhere man living in the woods [of the emotion of desire] & the fool [in his mind].  When we make music that fuses these stories, we transcend and start the dialog. 

There is so much to talk about before we read the golden version of 1984 in the land of milk and honey, where Walter Mondale [“the Russians”] are going to raise our your taxes – as the Police {policeman on the street} told us [while touring Ukraine*?].

 

*United Kingdom Russian Applications Inside Network Extensions – “Nam-Myo-Renge-Kyo” [Happy Easter?] Suggested listening [not from the Russian Album] from Band on The Run:: “1985” … .

  

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