So I started a long while back with no better outlet for my frustrations and pride as a razor-wielding critic of popular culture. Journals don't have soil for ideas to grow, it's all sand you're casting your seeds onto, but the fortunate thing for people like me is we have the internet these days and I can change the ground I sow. These "breadcrumbs" have sprouted into a garden this Spring in my school work, but more on that later.
"I also take the position that contemporary history is going to be retained on [music] records more accurately than it is going to be within history books," said Frank Zappa in a 1972 interview with Martin Perlich. When I remembered this today, it struck some kind of mental bell that sympathetically vibrated another cluster of neurons which tossed back this quote from Stephen A. Tyler in an essay he wrote for Writing Culture: Poetics and Politics of Ethnography in 1986, entitled "From Document of the Occult to Occult Document":
The model for postmodern ethnography is not the newspaper, but that original ethnography--the Bible.
Correlation doesn't mean similar causation, but these two quotes crested a wave building for over a century in what we religion scholars and theologians call the Social Gospel movement. The idea is that Jesus' teachings were counterintuitive--for people whose notion of the divine was objectified and lifeless. Oral histories and musical ritual are at the core of our human ingenuity, and the pants we started to put on this ability is in my opinion what started our estrangement from what we already know, what Lao Tzu and Socrates both knew before Jesus put it into language the drone could barely start to understand.
Of course, the best way to get to the total layman is Hegelian dialectical talk, and this has been a struggle for Marx critics who have to stomp out his fans like multiplying roaches. Marx was inspired by Hegel, the kind of literary philosophy he founded, to use Richard Rorty's terms. I'm throwing names at you because an oral tradition is equal parts performer and subject matter. If you're not interested, go away. Zappa continually told critics the same.
So here we have the danger of translation. Nietzsche hated the message of Christianity. I try not to judge the message or the messenger (arguably indistinguishable if they are true to its content), but hate the sin of misinterpretation so long as it is rigid.
By "the danger of translation" I mean that if people don't get a consistent grapevine, one that is living and intact through all the hands that pass it down to you, then what they get at the end of the vine is rotten grapes. You have to tell the whole story, and the story has always been bigger than any format can contain, so we hold rituals to continue the story and then after the section is over we all go back to work or bed. Not telling the whole story is what people call "heresy." For ages, the extended format of our oral storytelling has left people of the finite book to think we are babbling with no plot, just entertaining...whatever that would mean. Have you ever tried to get up in front of people without material or some emotion to communicate?
Anyway, heresy has thus become associated with those who spend their lives fighting against it. One book can never tell the whole story, but those who hide behind the book sound a lot more authoritative (performers don't author anything).
What does this have to do with rock music? Modern music in general has both been extraordinarily marketable and liberating in the West for the past century for the same reason. Blues and folk music blossomed with live translation from white boys, but that arena is luckily enough of a conversation space for the translators not to be confused with the ones who carried the message through slavery. In the 1970s and '80s, white people got a little carried away with the liberation their own open-mindedness brought, and the cohesiveness of utopian vision in the '60s died. But it rose again, according to disciples like me, in the sensibilities of '90s rock. Now the second wave has left most people just tired of the old and completely estranged from the present and future. What to do?
Well all I can say is there's a tsunami of prophetic artwork coming our way. I might write a book about it. Someone else might make a musical career out of it. We're all just telling stories and reconnecting (re-ligio: "re-attach"). Meditation doesn't just happen among neurons, it can happen in a social setting--that's what the brain is anyway. Am I calling myself a prophet? Only insofar as "prophetic" is a word most aptly used to describe things which are not profitable.
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