Like Background Music

MP3

I: Art As Decoration
I am not here just to match your curtains
I'm not a sentence on your resume
I wasn't sent to try and supplement you
I'm not the busy work along your way
I'm the money where you see a wallet
Not these enemies you've made your friends
I'm not a monkey for your dinner party
And not the means to just another ends.

Chorus
I don't want to be like background music for you
I don't want to throw my diamonds on the ground
You build up your home to face the sunset you see
It doesn't turn the other way around.

II: Smart Is Dumb
Your sense of beauty has become your blemish
Your friends have now become your enemies
Your treasures occupy the dusty corners
They've brought you nothing anybody sees
When God himself has now been sent away and
Our chain-of-being falls in broken hands:
What's the rest of us to compensate with
And how would anybody understand?

Chorus
I don't want to be like background music for you
I don't want to lose my diamonds in the the haze
For seventeen years I worked to write you this book
And you've forgotten it in seventeen days.

III: Not Porn Enough
Once I stopped to watch this midnight movie
This woman stopped to show us everything
But it was not enough to stay enamored
'Too much' was still not worth remembering
Reminded me of a politician
Who whored himself but not enough to win
He had 'something' but he wanted 'everything' so he got 'nothing'
I hope I haven't learned the same from him.

Chorus
I don't want to be like background music for you
I don't want to throw my diamonds to the sea
There isn't an honor in coming in last
When there's no honor in the victory.

What Is Music?

This could be very elementary but it also could be a good starting point.

What is music?

I ask this because of my dissatisfaction with what we're calling music these days. "These Days" meaning the past 40 to 400 years.

I don't like art. I don't like avant guarde. I don't like self-expression. I don't like product. I don't like merchandise. I don't like fun.

This may not be universal but I'm ok with that, I'm trying to collect my own thoughts here. Nevermind trying to get it right for a whole collective of people.

Music is a powerful thing. I would go so far as to say it could be the most transcendent medium we as humans possess. Therefore it qualifies as "a powerful thing." Not that it's a contest, but no other human action can transcend quite as well as music. "Transcend" being the greatest thing you can achieve. All other mediums either get in their own way or don't even take on the task of transcendence. So that's my point: transcendence is the greatest of human possibilities and music is the way to achieve transcendence.

To me, the way we utilize music these days makes a Dave Chappelle paraphrase come to mind: I don't like people playin' on my phone. We make cute little songs about love and we experiment with little sounds and we like rhymes and sounds and we feel able to express ourselves. But that isn't what music can fully achieve. All that is like using a souped-up muscle car to go back and forth from the house to the grocery store and back: a waste of potential. Woo woo! Look at me, I'm expressing myself! I have the conch! I have the conch and I have no real message to utilize it for! Woo woo!

So within the question what is music? I say that music is the medium by which we transcend our limits and communicate with God. (When you transcend your limits, they aren't limits anymore...) With the right head and heart you can focus that sound and turn it into a kind of portal. I know God is anathema within human discourse these days but I'm going to verbalize anyway. There's me and there's God and music is the language that can cross the divide.

This really isn't all that revolutionary. Up until Vatican II coincidentally, none of this would be so foreign to people. I'm trying to broaden my head beyond the narrow straits that have been placed upon me. What is music? It's a portal. It isn't art or self-expression, that sounds like talking into a phone that doesn't have somebody on the other end of the line. Music is a portal to God. Now who is doing that music? Whom?