A Muse in the Land of Ick
An Apocryphal Anthology
1
The blues in practice is straightforward—not wanting what is not wanted. A begrudging acceptance of suffering. Without the blues, a mind runs like a hamster wheel, spinning all day to convince itself it wants things it doesn’t want. Or it may build forts and hide under the blankets to avoid noticing it doesn’t like things it doesn’t like. A mouth animated by a mind like either of these will smile and say it likes the way things are going, even if that way is to hell.
Not a bluesman. A bluesman dislikes a bunch of things about the audience, the band, himself, and gets paid to dislike it, by having the blues. He is an expert in the art of hostility.
A bluesman is forged when a musician is forced, generally by a woman, to raise the vibration of his every day life. If he manages the bare minimum of one semitone per day for six days in a row, this vibration creates a tritone against his root vibration. Volumes have been written about the psychological depths of the tritone. Dante called it Inferno. Robert Johnson called it the crossroads.
Only after passing through this sinister interval and arriving at the five can the musician turnaround and return a bluesman. Many will then stay on the root note for some time. Keep it low key. The bluesman knows from experience that raising the vibrations too high disintegrates everything. If he hears an aspiration to higher vibrations in another musician’s playing, a bluesman will linger on something less fleeting, less changing. A one chord vamp. Just play a groove. Get your footing. Less is more.
Keep this in mind when visiting the grave of a bluesman.
2
Gospel music is a uniting of discrete units into a propagation field that dissolves the individual unit when it aligns with the field.
Like a puddle in the rain, there are individual rings spreading out, but there is also a complex whole of something larger that is buzzing and changing in a way that would be predictable, if it was happening slower. But it’s too much, too fast, so it appears as a buzzing whole.
The proto Germanic root of the word “gospel” is two words; god, a word that meant to fit or unite, and spell, a word that meant news or story. The godly spell in this case is playing that fits and unites the whole. It’s not a specific thing or entity, it can be different things at different times. It can be a bassline, a chord progression, a lyric.
When everyone plays a fitting part, the gospel singer sings a melody that unites the whole, and is transmogrified. She begins focused only on her tiny drop in the large puddle. She then relaxes her gaze, zooms out and becomes the buzzing whole. The collection of drops whose ripples spread and interact in too great a quantity, too fast to keep track of as individual events. There’s just a buzzing whole.
Until it stops raining.
3
Americana music is geared toward minds prone to fantasies about the simple life. Tales of down to earth people who may not be the most sophisticated and fashionable, but are the salt of the earth—real people with a common wit and wisdom.
There are many people who actually fit that description, but they do not listen to americana. Those people listen to soft rock, Kid Rock, or Christian rock. The term rock in music is short for the three pillars of hedonism—sex, drugs and rock and roll. To put terms like soft, kid, or Christian in front of sex, drugs and rock and roll is to subvert the subversive. Its a double subversive. People who listen to these three types of rock are not listening because they like double subversives in music as they like double negatives in speech, they listen because they are the type of people who have never noticed any of that and don’t care, and still wouldn’t care if you pointed it out to them.
The people who listen to americana are the type of people who have at least intuited that terms like soft, kid, and Christian rock are a little confused. They are people whose tattoo artist says they are influenced by sailor tattoos (not to be confused with people whose tattoo artist is influenced by prison tattoos. Those people listen to country or trap music). After they get their reasonably skillful nautical tattoo, their friend, a photographer, takes portraits of them and their tattoo, and has an art show displaying the results. That music you hear, that band that plays at the gallery opening/beer tasting? That is americana music. This is my favorite music.
Our forefathers fought and died for this music.
4
Jam bands are a manifestation of a core impulse in the American psyche. Like a carnival, they attract all walks of life, societal castes, geographies and backgrounds. This convergence results in an undifferentiated mass of bodies mushed into hive mind on a grand scale.
The resulting monster wants the same thing all our wild, foolish ancestors who braved the vast oceans craved. A psychotic break. Not individually, but a communal dissociative episode shared amongst this new type of tribe fused into an unseemly superorganism.
A jam band performs not to a traditional audience, but alongside waves of chaotical oceanic movements, activated by lights and sounds and intoxicants, sublimated into a collective of moving limbs and nonsensical intuitions about life, the universe, and fashion. It may not be pretty, but if that doesn’t describe what it means to be American, I don’t know what does.
Actuaries have found the survival rate for these types of events to be surprisingly high, given the circumstances.
5
The job of an advanced musician is to kick a speaker, which dangles down from an adequately high ceiling hung dead in the center of the audience. It must be kicked in such a way that the speaker orbits the periphery of the audience and returns back to the front of the stage, where it can again be kicked as a new cycle begins.
For this, the musician must play the instrument sitting down with the feet up, in the ready, at the edge of the stage. For each revolution of the speaker, the musician must kick it at the right angle, in the right direction, at the right time, with the right amount of force, in order to keep the speaker in proper orbit. Otherwise an audience member, who may have paid upwards of $119 plus $23.50 in various crap fees to willfully trap themselves inside the orbit of the speaker, can be brutally whacked in the head with the heavy satellite. The serious harm, both spiritual, emotional and physical, to the individual and the collective in the event of a mistake is indeed a sobering incentive to practice.
This advanced technique is called surround sound, or circle of trust. As you would assume, only a very mature musician can be trusted for a gig of this sort, a gig of such great consequence. Knowing that infants, elderly, demented and infirm alike are at risk of speaker collision, the musician must have steadfast concentration, pinpoint accuracy, and immense judgement to be trusted with the safety of those in the circle. When performed masterfully, it can be an experience like no other for those in the circle of trust.
Fatalities are common.
6
In order to tour, a band will need a bus. At least a cargo van. Probably just a cargo van. There is a proper way to tour in a cargo van. You must have the bags, instruments and amplifiers in the cargo area. The arrangement of the equipment in the cargo area should never be exactly the same as it was last time. There should be, but probably won’t be, a barrier between the musicians and the music equipment, at least while riding in the van. You might assume this is so that if there is an accident the equipment does not fly up to the cockpit and cause gruesome injury to a band member, but this is only a secondary reason.
The main reason is to deter the bass player. Although when a band tours in a cargo van, it is always the guitarist in the driver seat, the drummer riding shotgun, and the bassist in the backseat, it is the bassist that takes on the most responsibility.
The cardinal rule of bass players riding in the backseat of a cargo van is to never play guitar. The bassist can lie down and take a nap, read, play bass, daydream, or anything he pleases really, except play guitar. If he does play guitar, it should only be for a few notes.
The reason is that guitarists are mostly an unstable, impulsive bunch, and can only be trusted to drive with a drummer riding beside them, watching the road. If the bass player dares to play guitar in the backseat of the van, the intense flash of jealous rage springing up within the guitarist will cause them to spontaneously turn their head and glare at the backseat guitarist. Therefore it is extremely important that the bassist not play guitar continuously for any length of time, to avoid tragedy.
In the past there have been rare cases of mistreated bassists continuously playing guitar on purpose, to spite the guitarist. The survival rate for this type of situation is less than 1%, although there is one story, possibly apocryphal, of a bassist who played guitar in the backseat of a cargo van with such psychedelic intensity that the van actually lifted off the ground and flew out into space. Physicists theorize that the dramatic rise of the guitarists blood pressure entered into a symbiosis with the gravity of the bassists guitar playing, allowing the van to reach escape velocity.
Everyone who has tried to reproduce this is dead.
7
Jazz is an eerie phenomenon that has enchanted parts of some American cities since the early twentieth century. The anomalies reached a climax in the nineteen seventies but have been on the decline since the rise of He Who Shall Not Be Named (Kenny G).
You can still experience it in certain areas around New Orleans, New York City and some other places. It will either be in a very dingy, poorly lit dive bar, or in a truly upscale restaurant or music venue. The quality of the jazz is consistently high in the dingy places, but can be hit or miss in the upscale locations, like the Lincoln Center in NYC.
Those who have witnessed jazz react as if to the sight of a beautiful young woman tormented with schizophrenia smiling as she walks down the street. There is a strange panicky magic to her, and one can’t help but hope for a miracle reemergence of sanity in the poor cat, which only poignifies the hopeless beauty.
Savannah, a notoriously and opportunistically haunted city, has had its own bouts of jazz in its history. In this city, jazz currently is comorbidly associated with Cuban cuisine and festivals for the elderly.
Though death is rare, it is important to maintain healthy boundaries when jazz is present in the environment.
8
EDM is a problem that emerged as a byproduct of music in the nineteen sixties. Remember the story of how the Beatles stopped touring because they could sell out large stadiums, but they couldn’t actually be heard in those stadiums, because adequate sound systems had not been dreamt up for such a situation?
Well, soon those sound systems were both dreamt and realized, and we've all become the victim of them. Initially, the sound system was created for the music, and the music was created for the people, like nature intended. Unfortunately in some circles the flow reversed, and people began creating music for the sound systems.
The audience for EDM diverges from the audience for music, in that an audience for music wants to feel more human, while the audience for EDM wants to feel annihilated by machines.
Although creating EDM is a true art, and its creators are master craftsmen of the highest order, there certainly is no excuse for supporting this abomination.
At least not when actual annihilation by machines looms over us all.
9
There comes a point where there are no more notes to be played. Further playing only generates a left handed karma that quickly bends back upon itself like feedback, killing the overplaying musician. A wise musician will recognize the situation and stop immediately, pack up the gear, load it into the van in a new order never before concocted, and retreat into a remote cave for some time.
Silence is the most dangerous of notes. It is in silence where the vibrations horseshoe. The highest becomes indistinguishable from the lowest. The lowest may as well be the highest. A lot of woodshedding must be done in isolation before such a note can be played in public.
The hidden years in the life of Jesus were spent doing something. Whatever it was, it seemed to work. This is all that can be said about this silent period.
Try not to die.
10
There is another inflection point earlier in the arc of musicery where an audience will buzz in suddenly like a swarm of locusts. The job of the musician is to give these locusts enough to chew on so that they don’t start cannibalizing each other and swarm away, as quick as they came, biting at whoever is in front of them.
To do this everyone in the band has to be constantly producing much more than they came with. Every instrument must be like the basket at the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes.
This can only go on for so long before something terrible happens. Just ask Jesus. To be honest, it is best if you just don’t feed them, and let them go to some other band. There’s always the tourists. They usually tip ok.
Crucifixions are rare.
11
Ancestral music must have arose from the need to scare animals away from camp. Making loud noises and banging on things is the kryptonite of the animal kingdom. Humans must have evolved a defense mechanism of merging into a hivemind for survival. One bee is not so scary, a hundred flying at you in formation is terrifying.
Humans never were the apex predator. It was the superorganism that emerged when our ancestors danced and banged and yelled in formation that usurped the lion kings of antiquity.
And so it will be in the future, when we are usurped by the superorganism that arises from machines. The only thing capable of contending with such a thing is the silent note, or the clear light.
Otherwise we all die.
12
In myriad traditions across the ages, the moment of death is not conceived as an end, but a transition. In music, this is called the turnaround.
In the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the stream of perception at the moment of death enters into a series of bardos, during which there are opportunities to recognize the clear light. When the clear light is not recognized, the karmic energy releases into another round of rebirth in one of the many realms.
Our journey out to the five and back to the root eventually completes. Every journey is unique, just as every van loading is slightly different. How you perform at this crucial juncture determines in what realm you will walk the next go around the block, until the clear light is recognized.
The blues…