"I love music."

"when we're kids, that's where things hit us. in the magical places. the bones. the fear, the wonder. we see. we hear. we feel. it's all immediate."
-from the blog of the incomparable rick diamond

A child lives on a farm in beautiful, rural Indiana. There is a stream down the way by a thicket of oak trees, and the child wades knee deep, exploring. It is a strange and unfamiliar world. The child's fear becomes curiosity, and curiosity, exploration. Each pebble is itself a seed of wonder, and those seeds, over time, germinate into a love, an interest, a hobby, an education, a degree, a profession. The child has become an expert. Knowledge replaces fear, certainty replaces curiosity. The strange and unfamiliar world of the child's youth has been explained in diagrams and chemical compounds, acronyms and algae.

In this life, the luckiest of us do what we love and love what we do, or what we get paid to do, or who we are, or however you choose to say it. But we also pay a heavy price, a price paid in the currency of beautiful, blissful ignorance. We gain both knowledge and power, choosing the red pill, braving the rabbit hole, from the depths of which we can never return. Politicians and preachers who dream of changing the world become immobilized in vast swamps of red tape. Doctors and nurses long to heal people that are tangled in a web of federal paperwork and insurance.

From the general to the specific, a quote, a story, a diatribe, and finally, me. Except for a youthful love affair with drawing, I have always wanted to be a musician. No, strike that, I have always been a musician. I just wasn't very good at first. But I waded in that stream, year after year, never distracted, never deterred. I sought out my love, my interest, my hobby, my education, most of, but not quite a degree, and my profession. And after a lifetime of dedication and practice, the view is strange and new, and quite wonderful, and horrible, and fascinating and extremely specific, and oftentimes extremely vague. I love every endlessly frustrating moment of it.
Like a high precipice, the view is vast and lonely. Music, for being a language that the entire world speaks, boasts an absurdly low literacy rate. Ironically, it seems as if those of us who learn its mysteries forfeit the very perspective that once captivated us. I am truly overwhelmed by this: music trumps everything. It is the absolute favorite thing ever, of every person, in the entire world. Go ahead, try a random sampling of myspace "About Me" sections. How did music become this all-powerful deity, this monopoly?
I'm about to go pick up some brand new posters and fliers for my next show. They are advertisements. Commercial advertisements. In this free market, an incredibly high demand for music is met by an even greater supply, and as a result, fierce, tooth and nail competition ensues. To make a very, very long story very, very short, I spend a hilariously small amount of time actually making music. I can't really complain, because I'm part of the problem, the overpopulation.
But sometimes, it just gets to me, this whole money-driven music business thing. $68.50 +tax. That's what these posters are going to cost. It's an $8 cover, so 9.3 people need to come to the show as a result of these posters to break even on them. It reminds me of a Derek Webb lyric: "I'm a prophet by trade and a salesman by blood."
I worry that for all we perpetually profess our love for music, we are doing more harm than help. Have we not diluted its potency? Our Culture of More has infected what used to be High Art. With the flick of the wrist, 10,000 three-minute-thirty-five-second pop songs march rank-and-file through our gadgets and gizmos, iPods and cell phones, climbing up thin, white tubes into our hungry ears.
I wrote a song recently (good, now there's one more), here is an excerpt of the lyrics:

Songs for the world, for boys, for girls,
for cars and bars, elevators and looking at stars,
for catching you when you fall.

Music is a whore, and anyone can make her come
at their beck and call.
You can turn her down if she gets too loud.
I want it all now: a baby grand, a cover band
in the palm of my hand.
When you're in love, when you're in pain,
when you're not even really listening...

a monopoly on beauty, the economy of art.
With one hand in your pocket, the other in your heart.

It's actually a really good song. I can't wait to record it...though...of course, I'll need to find ten or twenty thousand dollars first. And I haven't paid off my first record yet...so...why don't you and your friends mosey on over to iTunes...see, you can buy my songs there, they're only 99 cents each...

...sigh.

Epilogue

And then, I got in my car and turned on the radio, and it was The Voice: Frank Sinatra assuring me that Nice & Easy Does It Every Time. And all of my cares and qualms dissolved, and I remembered why I love music. But then, the music faded and was replaced by a conversation between Terry Gross, host of Fresh Air, and Alan and Marilyn Bergman, who wrote Nice & Easy for Sinatra and explained the song's genius in terms of commercial and sexual appeal.

Music may be the king, but business is the power behind the throne.

Iambic Pentameter & Kitchen Magnets

Strangely, I have a history of writing Shakespearean sonnets on refrigerators.

Magnets and poetry: two very powerful things. In fact, most of us don't realize how strong electromagnetism really is. A quick, mostly painless lesson: there are four fundamental forces in the universe. Two of them, we're very well aware of: gravity, which glues us to the planet, and electromagnetism, which is everything from radios to rainbows to X-rays. (The other two forces are the strong and weak nuclear forces, which are really cool and extremely important, but for now we'll focus on gravity and electromagnetism.)
You would think that these two forces would probably boast similar strengths. They both act on huge, impressive levels, plain to see with the naked eye. But in reality, there is a mysterious discrepancy between the two. Brace yourself: electromagnetism is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times stronger than gravity (spoken: one decillion). It seems like that mind-boggling number has just wrenched this whole debate cleanly out of our feeble human hands, but there is actually a very simple scientific experiment that we can all do to prove this point beyond the shadow of a doubt. Back to the kitchen magnets.
Place a paper clip on the floor. Now pick it up with a magnet. There, you see? You have just used the electromagnetism contained in one kitchen magnet to lift that paperclip -- thereby overcoming the gravity of the entire earth. Sounds like some decillion strength to me.

Every weekend, I drive about 40 minutes south to New Braunfels, TX to play at a piano bar, and then I drive 40 minutes north to come home. I've had plenty of time to explore the radio stations available to this route. Saturday nights, driving home, I listen to Austin's own KUT 90.5 FM, the Putomayo world music hour. Sunday nights, for about half of the drive, I listen to 89.1 FM out of San Antonio, the BBC world service. But somewhere around exit 217, the frequency begins to give way to Austin's 89.1 FM, which at that time, is a preacher man:

"...felt in Wall Street, where shares opened sharply higher, and elsewhere in Europe. In afternoon trade in New York isn't asking Job, he's telling him. Now listen, there's plenty of people out there that say, you know, they say they have Jesus in their heart with the liquidity problems facing many banks following the US housing slump. On Thursday, London's FTSE 100 fell too far to come back into the fold? Well I say, there's no ocean deep enough, no river too wide, the power of angels or demons, nothing..."

It's around this time that I have to abandon 89.1, and if nothing of interest is on 90.5, I turn to an unlikely friend: AM radio.
Austin's KLBJ 590 AM is supposed to be a 24-hour news station. But when I'm listening to it, in the small hours, it's this guy's interview show, most conspiracy theorists and such. One guy made the case that Bush is never going to leave office, that all it would take is another 9/11-scale event, and the administration could declare martial law. Another show was about UFOs. Seriously. But hey, you never know. It's good that these people are out there. Some of them end up being right all along. Hell, Al Gore was probably on that show in the 70s.
This past week was actually really interesting. You see, it was about magnets. The host was interviewing a professor from Arizona State University who is a pioneer in the field of magnetic therapy -- magnets used as a natural method to heal. Magnetic fields pass through all cells and tissue, and can help increase blood flow and promote metabolic processes. It was actually very interesting and sounded very well-grounded in science.
The professor went on to point out that any moving matter at all creates an electromagnetic field. The earth, a river, even us. Technically, when you move, you are creating a magnetic field. This has been confirmed by experiment, i.e. wave your hand in front of a sensor, that sort of thing. He went on to reason that if our bodies can both create and detect these fields, then to some extent, people can theoretically heal each other, i.e. wave your hand over a blood clot. Maybe guys like Jesus are just one big electromagnet. One decillion strength.

Rain & Renewal

I didn't shower this morning. What's the point, really? You don't have to smell like Pantene Pro-V to sit at a desk. It was an ant-marching-along day. It didn't start like that. It started by being hungover, and while I'm on the subject, it ended by sitting butt-naked in my car, down by the river. But I'm getting ahead of myself...back to the ants.
I spent about seven hours today trying to convert my blog into a slightly better blog. By 7:30, my once apt eyes were blurry, struggling to differentiate between xml, html, xhtml, etc. I remember days ago telling my reflection that he was badly in need of a shave. Scruffy-faced, unshowered, I tore myself away from my "work" only long enough to indulge in the most basic of human necessities: mouthwash and coffee.
I finally reached a stopping point just before dusk. It's amazing how hard you can work and yet feel like you've accomplished nothing. The weather seemed to reflect my mood, nodding off into showers and broad, grey clouds. I should've chalked up the whole day as a loss, from my dehydrated morning to an overly-hydrated night.
But I didn't.
I put on my all-purpose shorts, grey and tattered, found my old sneaks, and drove down to the river. You aren't supposed to run in the rain, I mean, not really. Rain is all, you know, well, wet. I ran a mile, and another, and thought about so many things. I think I thought about everything except stopping. The rain stung my eyes and arms. I even thought about nothing for a while, and was, admittedly, a little disappointed to find myself so thoroughly not whisked from the planet into a state of far-Eastern nirvana. Although running comes close. It's a powerful meditation. Just as you don't really hear the clock ticking, or feel your heart beating, so it is with your foot steps, pounding out the quarter note.
I felt like I could run forever, or at least for another few miles. That's probably due as much to my new knee brace as it is to an obscure feeling of spiritual elation. I finished. I stretched. My shoes felt unnatural, so they had to go. Socks too. There is something deeply troubling with the infrequency with which we as a people dig our toes into soft, wet mud. The sky was blue and grey and purple and pink. The light sky became dark and the clouds lit up with sunlight, reflected by the moon.
There was no need to wear my dripping shorts into my nice, dry car.

European Progress vs. African Groove

I chose a topic dear to my intellectual heart, because it's so pertinent to my life, and yet so often ignored (or at least overlooked). As a disclaimer, I cannot possibly hope to capture the breadth of this in one measly blog, but then, I guess that's why it's a blog, not a sociological doctoral thesis.

Read this excerpt from the dedication of the Aerospace Medical Health Center in San Antonio, Texas, November 21, 1963. America is in the heat of the space race, and President John F. Kennedy explains why.

"But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."Next is a conversation from a great fiction novel by Barbara Kingsolver, called The Poisonwood Bible . (In 1959, Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist, takes his four young daughters, his wife, and his mission to the Belgian Congo - a place, he is sure, where he can save needy souls. Things don't go as planned.) In this conversation, a young, white, American missionary is asking a native African some questions about the history of his continent.

"What happens when we come to the river?"
"We'll cross it, of course."
I laugh. "As easy as that! And what if the ferry is stuck without a battery on the other side?"
"In the Kingdom of Kongo, no batteries. No trucks, no roads. They declined to invent the wheel because it looked like nothing but trouble in this mud. For crossing the river they have bridges that stretch from one great greenheart tree to another on the opposite bank."
"But what if it's a huge river, like the Congo, which is much broader than the reach of any vine?"
"This is simple. Such a river should not be crossed."
That answer makes my Western skin crawl! Is that a dare? Are you trying to say that I can't make it across? Let's arm wrestle!

I love these two examples because they illuminate a great philosophical rift between two very different peoples. One culture is unwilling to cross a one-mile-wide river, while the other is willing to cross a 240,000-mile swath of the cold vacuum of space.

For years I've been fascinated with the ancient origins of the rudiments of culture. Some are obvious: Hawaiians adorn themselves with native flowers; Persians cover their faces to protect themselves from sun and sand storms. But some things are not so obvious, and to me, the greatest of these is the European notion of progress. A culture of "er". Higher. Better. Prettier. Smarter. Faster. Cooler. It's a blessing and a curse that affects us all, and it's so inherent, so completely woven into our brains that it requires no justification. It is self-justified.
Just as interesting, and in stark contrast, is the African notion of groove. Steady. Expressive. Repetitive. It's a process of continuously gleaning something new and meaningful from that which remains unchanged for hundreds of years. An intricate rhythmic pattern, or a traditional melody echoed down through the ages. Australian writer Christo van Rensburg explains, "The African concept of music is totally different to the Western one though. Traditional African musicians do not seek to combine sounds in a manner pleasing to the ear. Their aim is simply to express life in all of its aspects through the medium of sound. "
These two vastly different views came crashing together like so many other things throughout the long, messy integration of African and pre-African-American American culture. Today, the cross-pollination is complete, saturating every Western note with a heightened sense of African awareness and every African rhythm with a lush backdrop of European harmony. The results can't be overstated. Blues. Jazz. Rock. All of these wouldn't have been possible without the subtle interaction of two styles, born worlds apart.

So, if you haven't realized yet, I'm a musician. (You probably know that from the www.davemaddenmusic.com web address, but hey, anything is possible; you could theoretically be reading this a thousand years from now in a post-url society.) Music is the lens through which I view large swaths of my life. And to an extent, music is an accurate barometer of culture, because, well, to an extent, everything is kind of a barometer of everything else.

Here's a specific example about the origins of what we call "blue notes", which requires some basic music theory knowledge. Western music utilizes a septatonic (seven-note) scale (c d e f g a b) while most African melodies are sung in a pentatonic (five-note) scale (c d f g a).
As you can see, "e" and "b" are missing from the pentatonic scale. Africans attempting to sing Western melodies, usually hymns, understandably had trouble singing the 3 rd and 7 th scale degree; those notes were sung "out-of-tune", a little flat (just as Westerners would be unable to sing the more sophisticated semi-tone scales found in most far-Eastern cultures). Those "out-of-tune" notes are blue notes, which, among other things, give blues its characteristic sound.

Jazz weaves the two cultures together in an inseparable, seamlessly fluid way. The influences are more a blood transfusion than a prosthesis; it's impossible to pinpoint exactly where one style ends and the other begins. In contrast, I would site modern, radio-friendly hip-hop as more of an oil-and-water mixture--the influences are complementary, but wholly distinct. Many tracks, such as Destiny's Child, "Jumpin' Jumpin'", are little more than 18 th century orchestral pieces set to a badass drum loop. Go ahead. Listen to it.

As I said, it's impossible to do justice to this topic, and even if I could, we still haven't even touched on the increasing influence of Latino music in America, which will play a huge role in the next hundred years. The foreshadowing is unmistakable: I recently wrote a song that features a prominent clave pattern. Arriba!