There really was better music… really!

Originally written a couple of decades ago, this piece is obviously dated - I have applied some ‘Contemporary’ corrections but have not changed anything of real substance. (dbf April 11, 2025)

My wife is reading "Dave Berry turns 50" and noted that Dave, Sage that he is, says that in 1974 music underwent a seismic shift which signaled that times had well and truly finished a-changin' and that we were heretofore heir to, endless and excruciating decades of drek -vis ABBA and Barry Manilow. Is it too much then to assert that in 1971 Donny Osmond - as a stealth pawn in this nascent dystopia - was responsible for the demise of brothers Jimi and Jim and sister Janice?!

Way too far I suppose… but; it is entertaining to muse on the astronomic offset between the brothers Osmond and the cutting edge of the day. Of course our dead archetypes were also geniuses of self destruction; continuing the dubious tradition of candles burning @ both ends - twice-the-light-in-half-the-time.(thanks to Joe Walsh) Being on the edge hurts, and this pain, (in close concert with banal stupidity) is a very effective anti-evolutionary space to occupy. 

Silliness aside, there is something in the notion that music - 'POP(ular) music' - has been on a de-evolutionary trajectory since ca. 1974. 1974 is for the sake of argument; not a declaration of ground zero.

The whole point of this is that the state of the 'POP' song - a commodity of general population Media which purports of be the latest and greatest new singer/dancer etc., is in it's most abysmal state - abyssal, debased, bereft, broken and thoroughly bankrupt since the beginning of the commoditization of Music.

Auto-tuned, emotionally embalmed, instrumentally deballed and conceptually catatonic, the 'POP' song of today is a Zelig entity - interchangeable,  interminable, intent-less and Noble Gas inert. The agony of Argon; reactionless, zero potential energy - space filling and nothing else. 

I'm not just sniping - I am accusing the songwriters, producers, bankrollers, musicians, recordists and the remaining vestiges of the former music companies and all their minions of collaborating in a massive scam. The conception, preparation, execution and delivery of nothing for something. Never has so much exquisitely honed craft been concentrated on something as vanishingly small - on a zero sum. Sure, sure - there's a boatload of chops and other technical prowess involved in making this music - but the requirements of monochromatic sheen, pulverizing loudness and lyrical vapidity, reduce any breakout vibe or detail back to the lowest common denominator, pastiche after rehash of something spewed-forth way back in the noughts.

Why are so many minds concentrated on a sound so interchangeable, so massless and so miserable? 

Must be the money…

Oh! and the approval of adoring 'followers' who 'like' culture to death. A sad state of affairs.

Noting that it’s April, 2025 and Trump is doing his dance on everybody’s preconceptions, hopes and dream..

March 2021 - One year since you sloughed the mortal coil....

What as year it has been since you went on your mortal way.

One thing I know is that, had you lived until this year, you would have been miserable - mortified by the bilious bullshit of ‘the trump,’ and torn apart by the tension, the frisson, the savage clash between knowledge and superstition.

Nearly half of our co-americans are sufficiently brainwashed that they have adopted as fact, lies upon lies, fundamental falsehoods, and a fairyland misima of zero sum/zero value/zero worth of magical thinking layered atop as baseline of fundamental, intractable I-Me-Mine personal politics and racial bias as a frosting on the frothy confection of Evangelical Christian fervor and delusion.

What comes now is a matter of push and shove, beg-borrow-and-steal politics thrashing about in Congress and the Senate, with the hope that we’ll be alright if we do this together!?

HAH!

Vanity at it’s finest.

Greta would have been angry, confused and miserable if confronted with the current battles and BS. I’m satisfied - as only a widow can be - that she’d be grateful to pass on this.

I do not believe that any information: personality, belief, knowledge or knowing can pass beyond the death of a person. Physics, robustly, backs this up. There is NO afterlife, no prelife, no not-life existence. Period.

I saw this in Greta’s face - or rather the meat left behind - that her left cheek, her lips and her lovely chin, began to hang from her fantastic cheek bones, her jaw and her brow. It’s funny when transmogrifying a living thing into a ‘not’ living thing, how the structures that lent shape, form and beauty; release their hold on the visage and begin to be molded not by life, but by the alabaster color and firmness of the skin, hanging from its life scaffold - from the trellis that life used to form her from twigs, to tree, to snag, to food for the billions within us.

Had det godt, Ann-Magreth. Life is Good even when it’s gone.

What do I do now that my wife is actively dying?

This Is no sarcastic joke.
All of a sudden, my wife of 40 years is in the end stage of metastatic colon cancer with supporting acts in the liver, lungs and lymphatic systems.
Last Wednesday it was just like she’d had a bad case of gastritis, but by Thursday evening it was clear that there were tumors throughout her abdomen and lungs.
I am bereft.
Greta, Ann-Margerth by birth, has been the structure of my life for the last ~41 years.
When we met - the first day of school (Nansenskolen) in September 1979, I was not looking for a soulmate, but she was it - plain as day, obvious to the blinded - she asked me if I were her boyfriend and I melted, my stone hard heart laced itself into her ‘vida’ —- into the eternal forests of Norway and we gave rise to massive Love, mountains and myths.
We connected so early in our time together that I today cannot fathom a final separation from her. Joined @ the Hip from the earliest moment, the inevitability of separation is so shattering that it does NOT compute.
I will not drink myself to death. Tempting as that is - who am I kidding, I could NEVER give in to that stupid and crass ‘lol solution’ to my misery.
I MUST honor her throughout the remainder of my life with creativity, energy and manifest adoration.
I will honor her by living a technicolor life. Everything on display, nothing throttled back, full ‘steam’ ahead - fully ‘in’.
Greta, I adore you. I worship you, I need you. I - AM you.
I love you.

What do you do when…

… you have become sick of the Good Music?

"Good Music" = the repertoire which used to give you pleasure, a sense of belonging, or a feeling of unity with the continuum of a particular tradition, culture, movement or moment.

I find myself nearly unable to listen to most Beethoven symphonies, any Brahms at all, the entire Romantic tradition (though honestly, I *never* dug it), Classical Guitar and even a few of the great Bach organ masterpieces. Don't forget most Handel and ALL of the minor Classical composers. La Mer? No longer tolerable - sorry…

I still deeply adore the severe Viennese tradition once it became atonal - Webern, Schoenberg and Berg - and then Stockhausen, Berio, Ligeti, late Copeland, late Stravinsky, Davidovsky, and so on. Most Bach - save the Brandenburgs - is still transcendental for me. And Buxtehude of course! (exclamation IRONIC)

In the region of Rock Music (so called) toleration is much less clear cut. I find the intolerable only by listening to the Radio or by dropping the needle (I wish) on a chestnut and seeing whether or not I feel ill. It's treacherous to listen to 'Album Rock' and drive @ the same time because of the chances that something once tolerable will pop-up and cause a sudden lane change due to leg spasms or involuntary shaking.

_______________ April 11, 2025 _________________

(If that infantile moron Ted Nugent comes on the radio, I immediately know two things; one, the radio station has had a momentary lapse of quality control and that - curmudgeonly as I am - I was not wrong about his music. The low common denominator of rock. There has to be a nadir in any category and 'the Nuge' occupies the rock caboose. Graceless, utterly bad finger-flopping of the basest kind. No Ted, you're not even fast.)

Sorry about that digression… Casting aspersions @ a player is not my MO. In fact I lament that guitarists seem to have an overactive tendency to belittle other players. Nugent should, by rights, never enter the conversation but when he said that J. Garcia 'couldn't play guitar' I lost all respect. Jerry would be hopeless playing T.N.’s type of Rock & Roll - Likewise, Ted playing with the Dead is a non sequitur. How do I return to a higher level of discourse after stooping as low as that particular buck skinned bum?

By abruptly changing course; as follows:

I think that when the act of listening to rock music (in particular) is removed from the context and level-of-consciousness in which it was voraciously consumed there is a disconnect (damn! I hate that word) between that music and the contextually removed listener. Or, no longer stoned at all, or, only seldom, a crucial aspect of the connectedness to the music is AWOL. And, sitting with one's significant other who happens NOT to have grown-up in the same era or taste universe, makes listening to a variety of acts all but impossible,. or (fill in the blanks,) a cringe fest. It's disconcerting to realize that Grace really was out-of-tune often enough when singing live, that it is impossible to cajole anyone into liking the Airplane. I *love* Jefferson Airplane and it pains me that my wife cannot tolerate even a cursory listen. At least she likes David Crosby's "If I Could Only Remember My Name" (1971). 

in the future… the future is now…

…there will be (A)rt, as there always has been Art. This (A)rt will be arrived @ much as Art has always been arrived @, but there will be some salient differences that bear on the seeds from which it is given warp and weft; not to mention the ways in which it will be used.

We suppose that Art has always come-to-be by persons who are just a hair more sensitive to their 'Strange' than the norm. Strange being that unfiltered access to the something within themselves which causes a potential to form between that something, and a medium, where a representation of that tension is tickled into forming and becoming stable enough to see, hear, smell, taste or feel. Way too much verbiage has been expended in homage to this 'Loop' of creativity. I am not a Romantic Poet, a philosopher nor a researcher using function scans to map the regions of the brain that light-up when the Loop is underway; only an artist who is occasionally shocked into making pictures, music, gardens and food that are evidence of a creative process afoot.

Ah yes, back to the seeds. In History, Artists have been trickle-fed creative nourishment - examples of the Loop @ work in the lives of other Artists. Drawing, painting and sculpture were not nearly as available for consumption as they have subsequently become. Art was jealously owned, walled-up in religious institutions and the domains of wealth. An artist in one region of the world was likely unaware of artistic output in another region for all of the obvious reasons. Bach's splendiferous works were likely not played by others let alone seen by his brother and sister musicians until long after he was dust. Works of art were *owned* by whoever commissioned that work and as said, rather selfishly retained. "No need for a copyright, it's MINE!" 

Thus, cross pollination was limited to 'schools,' clusters of students and post-students grabbing @ the hems of a 'Name-brand' painter/sculptor, etc. As we know, many works by the 'brand-artist' were in fact executed by the hem grabbers, err students.

In the November 2, New York Times Opinion section, Blake Gopnik came forth with a contrarian view on 'Art' forgery which points-out that a 'benefit' of the practice is that works which might-have-been painted by the inspirer of the 'new' work are painted and as such enrich the oeuvre. Critics of this POV - chiefly an academic, an author currently grinding his axe on the 'values' of connoisseurship and a gent who seems to value money over the art itself, blast away @ this heresy with froth and sweat - (cold sweat) I assume. Frankly, it is very intriguing to consider what budding artists would learn and invariably contribute to the legacy of their inspiration if this practice - as it was in antiquity - were a norm rather than a scam. 

As a musician, it is obvious to me that 'The Blues,' 'The Pop Song,' and 'The Rock Opera'  are 'styles' that inform current practitioners. While not precisely the same thing as 'doing a Pollack,' many, many acolytes have done work that is a hair more than an homage or a pastiche of a Beatles number. Composers are honored for doing quality 'representation' of seminal work, but coping a Kandinsky is dishonored? Get a life… Yes, I know, the problem is when money and misrepresentation comes into the equation; yawn, nod, nod and caveat emptor.

The long-and-winding-road (hard to avoid isn't it) empties out here… yes, the whole point is this screed is that people producing (A)rt today are exponentially more informed by a variety of sources than ever before (the seeds). Thus, when the subconscious processes which do the mystical part of creation finally vomit the 'notion' which drives an act of creation, there's forging going on. Or call it neural nourishment or creative catharsis, modern creative 'seeds' are the most marvelous things in that the same seed can grow into fabulously variety.