The Mosh Pit 10.16.09: The Music Manifesto
Posted by Dan Haggerty on 10.16.2009
411’s Dan Haggerty takes a look at every music fans favorite saying “Play it on 10”. Are we really talking about music? Or is this a way of life? The music is speaking to us, and it’s time we started listening! Click the link for all the details.
As I sit here after several weeks off and a blank screen staring at me, the only thing that springs to mind is the words of a wise man who once said we should skip the format and just put pen to paper. Idea being, don't box yourself into needing to answer to something when you should roll with whatever motivates you. Good advice for an enterprise based primarily on creative input.
It's interesting, work has been a bitch and as I approach the end of a massive one year project I'm certainly stressed, yet that stress doesn't necessarily mean I'm burned out as I actually enjoy my job. But the subject has been tumbling through my mind and when that thought process returns to the music I love and drives so much of my time, I can't help but start to connect the dots.
Stress… I see it on so many people's faces, people going through the grind. The world seems to be built upon this old classic quote that many tragic poets like to remember:
I, a stranger and afraid In a world I never made ~ A. E. Housman
We all do it, working for the weekend of what not, life being a dance of meeting obligations that seem to be everyone else's. Blech…
That is when I turned my thoughts to the roll of music in the life of people. More importantly, I asked if there is a role music should play in people's life, or maybe a role it does even if we don't admit it to ourselves.
Why yes, yes there is, so excuse me for a moment as I prep the area. I've had a bad couple of weeks so hang onto something (preferably a good drink).
*tap* *tap*
Is this on? Good
The Music Manifesto
I've never worked with so many people in my life as I have in the last year, and despite the fact it has been accountants to truck drivers, line workers to business managers, or any other spectrum of supposed opposites that plague the work force they blur into one image. Supposedly because the more you deal with people, the more it seems they are not that different.
These are the people I see at the concert venue, and yet they are not the people I see at the concert venue. The music changes people. It changes me. It's like a sea of people walk in and discard their skin like soiled raingear so the dry, happy, real people come out for a short time. They have a good time enjoying the show before putting their real skins back on and heading out to real life.
The more I think about it, the angrier I get. How in the blue hell did we get to that point? Wouldn't life be more interesting if that good time we had at the show was the natural state of things? I'm not talking about unleashing a mosh pit or invisible ninja's here, although that would be interesting to see break out at the local Wal*Mart, but the general good time everyone has as a natural state of life.
Who put the goddamn engine in reverse here?
Wasn't life supposed to be some promise of the pursuit of happiness? No one expects happiness to be handed to them, but shit many faces I pass on the street look like the pursuit had been downgraded to a pointless chase before being sold off for a vague sense of smuggling happiness in when no one is watching.
And yet, you watch a guy listening to a song and you can see that pursuit cross his eyes. Actually, you can see he has found that happiness! Music is that wonderful journey into the better part of us. We forget about the other stuff, or even that we should be more serious. Music is the forgotten great equalizer that exposes the parts of our character we deem necessary to keep low.
Fuck that shit.
Who in the hell decided we should keep ourselves low?
Life is what we make it. The next politician that talks about the common man is going to get a size eleven shoved so far up his ass my shoe is going to pop out of his mouth like Pez candy. There is NOTHING common about man. We just get so wrapped up in everyday life we forget the shit that makes us more, and in doing so forget to take the time to allow ourselves to be more.
Music speaks to the soul. It speaks to the part of us that wants to be more. It is the compass that reminds us there are journeys we can make, because it speaks to the real places that live within each of us. It inspires. It races past your mind and talks directly to the core you that make your values and emotions. It's more than a toe tapping good time, it's the speed of your emotions, the RPMs to your motivation and the fuel to take that journey to the places you want to go but forget to visit in the mundane crunch that is life.
Screw that. Make that journey, you deserve it. Even if you can't actually do it now, music as art paints those pictures of life in your mind. It reflects your moods, and speaks to the things that make you tick. Your conscious allows the sound to become the soundtrack to everything that makes you uncommon. Somewhere deep underneath the to-do's of today are the plans you wish for the future.
Music is such an honest form of art that it only communicates with the things you really feel.
Even in the worst of times, the right song fills the gaps in your emotional state and answers the need to work through the crap. There is nothing wrong with being sad, angry, or even scarred. Emotions exist for a reason after all. Your five physical senses tell you how the world impacts your body. If something is hot, it feels warm or it burns you. That is how your body gets the information it needs to deal with the world.
Emotions are your senses telling you how the world impacts your mind. All the pointy headed gobbley-gook spouted by fuck nuts from ivory towers regarding chemical flow, mental endorphins, or whatever doesn't change the fact that those are physical reactions your body is making to metal reactions. It's how your body reacts to your emotions, key point being your mind is still in command.
Your body needs fuel, and so does your mind. Your mind is the spirit that acts and reacts to the world, and it's your emotions that react when the world acts on your spirit. Music, like all good art, reaches in and taps that spirit. It inspires you through your emotions by interpreting the things important to you. You know why people hate money so much? The problem is that money will take you anywhere in the world but it won't tell you where to go. Music also won't tell you where to go, but it is the one thing that will take you on journeys that you want to make. It points the way if we would listen to it. We just need to listen to it and realize we're hearing the places we want to go. Music is just the colors our soul paints when inspired by it's muse. Somehow too many people, and really its all of us to various degrees, stopped listening. We hear it, we live it for a moment, and then return to our regularly scheduled program.
Fuck that.
Take the moment when you're singing along to that song, doing that dance strut, playing the air guitar in your car, or just fist pumping to something tough, and grab that moment. It's the music reaching deep into you and speaking to your soul. LET IT OUT. We spend way too much time living the way others think we should, instead of doing what we want to do. Just do it. That song that just rocked your world put a goddamn spotlight on the real you. The part that was meant to kick ass, take names, and everything else we thought of life when we were young and ready for world domination.
That is why you liked that song!
Why did we think so optimistically when we were kids? Because we were young and didn't know better? Naive? Or is it the fact we buried it under the day to day grind we slap on the label of "The Real World". We encounter bullshit, and when dealing with the bullshit we came to expect bullshit, then in turn we braced ourselves for a future of bullshit, somewhere along the way letting those tired expectations become our new perception of life. We let that ass kicking kid become an alien idea that didn't fit the world we found ourselves needing to living in. Sure, the truth is in the middle, but so what. We know what we didn't know before, now we just need to find that sense of life that made us want to rule this world when we didn't have the experience to back it up.
You know what I hear from most people as they get older? They say "I wish I could go back with what I know now!"
Well… That sounds good to me. So do it. Sure, you can't be a teenager again, but shit I survived my teens once, like I want to try and pull that off again. But the thing about those times was that sense of life, the hope for the future, the "I'm going to kick ass when I get out of here" attitude. It is still there. Too many people just allow it to be buried under that mountain of bullshit.
It's there still, and you know how I know it is? It's spattered on every person's face when they listen to a song they love. I can go into a concert, see the wear and tear on people, some shoulders even slumped when walking in, then the music hits and every mother fucking person, me included, is living with life set to eleven. Big ass grins on their faces, fiery eyes, jamming the hell out. Those weren't the same people that left their jobs several hours earlier, are they? Why yes they are. They just needed to wake up.
Wake Up!
It's in all of us, and the beautiful thing about music, the essential thing no one ever talks about, is that it bypasses the clutter in our immediate lives and speaks to the real you. Music is that bunker buster that blows past the mountain of bullshit and gets to the real deal. You, in turn, are inspired by it and live within its hallowed sounds in a world uniquely personal while the jam rings in your ears. You're the only person in the world who hears the song that way. No one song, style, muse, lick, lyric, or whatever is truly number one, as it all becomes a process of personal interpretation; one song and how millions of restless spirits act and react to it. Just you and the music. The real person in each of us getting that fuel to once again step out and soar.
You want to go back again? It's easy. Go pick one of your favorite songs from your music collection and play that baby on 10. Loose yourself in the music, then somewhere in the middle of that song grab a hold of what you're feeling and don't let go.
THAT is you. That is the part of you that people complain they want to go back to. It's there and it never left. The reason that song is one of your favorites is because it answers to the things you like and believe in, even if we forget it. Music is too noble to settle for the clutter, it goes straight to the heart of the man and the life beating through that heart to keep those horns raised high.
That's the easy part. The hard part is hanging onto it when life comes crashing at you later. That is the trick, and it takes time to build back up to take it on. Life isn't easy, nor is it fair. But you can do it, and you know how?
The same damn reason - The dude rocking the fuck out isn't the same person compromising to life crisis #465. At that moment, he's doing the exact opposite – He's living on his terms. Good lord, we don't compromise on our musical tastes, but we'll compromise on life? Screw that. It's about time we took on life with the same attitude we take on our musical choices. To live life in the same zone we listen to our music. We already know how to do it since the music is in us, highlighting that guy who knows what he wants. It is there, we just don't use it.
Time to start using it baby!
You know you want to. You already do it through the music. And don't give me any shit about how you can't just walk into a store and take no prisoners on someone. This isn't a call to forget the golden rule or act like a dick. You can be civil without compromising, but more importantly you can act with the same spirit that makes you sing out loud to a song in the car despite hundreds of people passing by and thinking you look like an idiot. Why do we not care then, but do care at that work meeting when we need to find our real voice?
These are the components that make us… us. It's the idea, the values, and the personality conflict that makes each of us unique in this twisted universe. Music, in all its glory, brings that out of us. Music IS the ultimate art form because it is incapable of compromise. Even the worst radio pop ditty at least has the purpose of making someone happy. It reaches into you as you reach into it, song and man finding that perfect point where the world makes perfect sense.
Time to play on 10 kids, and in that spirit I'm going to be the man to answer Houseman's lament:
I, a stranger and afraid In a world I never made. ~ A. E. Housman
Bullshit. Crank the volume up and make it your world! ~ The Mosh Pit
So embrace your favorite music. It is the vehicle for embracing your passions for it is those passions that embrace the music. We want to play music on 10 because we like it on 10. Its damn well time we listened to what the music has been telling us and started living it. Not always loud, but certainly proud. So get out there and rock the fuck out. Except no substitutes and settle for no compromises. We get one trip and it needs to go where we want it.
I'm going to say this again, like I have said it in the previous 100 columns, only now I've final told everyone what I mean when I say it: Go grab your favorite album from the shelf and play it on 10. If someone bitches, then wave to them and tell them we said hi.
