On January 11th, 2016, I started a daily practice of writing a joke meditation of the day called Cracked Pot Meditations. I was still recovering from the treatment of cancer, and I was having very challenging cognitive issues, so I chose just to put something simple and easy to write every day. Posting it to the blog allowed me to have some accountability. Some of those meditations were poorly written and unedited. I have gone back and begun editing these and adding an illustration, starting with the April 27th meditation. I hope you enjoy.
Meditation for May 1st
Guitar, Bass & Drums Again?
Rock and roll is approaching 100 years of making kids smoke cigarettes and engage in premarital sex. The trio of instruments—the guitar, the bass, and the drums—has kept our feet stomping and our heads bopping for decades now, and it almost seems like it isn’t slowing down. Even pop artists will put out a “guitar” album.
Really? Another band with a guitar player, a bass player, and a drummer? Another band is trying to perfect metal, punk, rock, or punk rock metal? Give up.
It all sounds like cover bands now. No one is doing anything remotely interesting anymore. People try to make it noisier or cleaner all the time, but it’s about as interesting as New Country, which uses the same instruments. Some people will add a comedic schtick to it in hopes of making an over-saturated genre of music interesting, but in the end, it is just a goofy song.
Even in the late 60s, the Beatles were tired of the rock formula and started using French horns and sitars. All these ’70s bands were trying to push the limits of sound by creating these huge progressive concept albums. The eighties saw the death of the acoustic instruments for synthesizers, but they all came back to the backbone of post blues white people music: rock and fucking roll.
It’s over, dude. Let’s try to do something interesting that sounds different from the same old song and dance. Get some horns and rely on melody instead of volume to emote. Critics even say what genre you are and what band you remind them of. You aren’t original. The perfect mousetrap has been made, and you are in a factory making them.
Genres of music are so restricting. You have to wear a costume and act a certain way, be up to date on who is who, be interested in only a handful of bands, and be “ironic” if you get caught liking anything else. There shouldn’t be such a thing as “guilty pleasure”.
Put the guitar away. Those songs have been played already. Duane Eddy has already done all the riffs. Learn the tuba.
Prayer
Dear Chuck Berry,
They still try and sound like you.
You kept it fast and simple.
Now it’s time they look out and away from what is already done.
You didn’t have decades of rock to be influenced by.
They insist on sticking with a very tight formula, bottled up in specific genres.
No one is a true student of music anymore.
They all come from garages.
No one spends years at a conservatory anymore learning an instrument from a world-renowned maestro.
No one will try to find the notes between notes,
The sound that hasn’t been heard before,
Tell a story without lyrics,
Put the listener into a trance with a single note.
No, it’ll be a guitar player or two, a bass player, and a drummer.
Can we move on?
Amen.
Craft
Listen to Mahler’s symphonies. Listen to Mozart, Brahms, Wagner, and Beethoven too. Listen to the Verdi, Strauss, Bizet or Puccini operas. Lay down and listen to whole jazz albums. Sketches of Spain, A Love Supreme, Mingus Ah Um, Somethin’ Else, and Out to Lunch. Listen to the jazz albums that changed all the other genres of music like the Shape of Jazz to Come, Bitches Brew, Spiritual Unity, Head Hunters and Ascension. Hear the prog-rock albums in their holy entirety like Fragile, In the Court of the Crimson King, Selling England by the Pound, Brain Salad Surgery, and Third.
Stop just playing Black Sabbath & Flag.
Goal
Look forward instead of back for the song. Make music progressive again.