The Positive Potentially Transformational Aspect Of Music ( IZ good )

"Just like birds of a feather
we got to sing together,
we got to spread our love
along this lonely land
We got to realize, we got to stop the lies
We got to love this land
and give her a helping hand"

Excerpt from "I hear music (Mr. Reggae)" by Billy Kaui, Ka'au Crater Boys

          When I started this site, TruthRevival.org, 4 years ago, the first post (partially) had to do with language and it is still one of the posts I am most proud of. In thinking about rebooting this site after giving it a long rest, I thought of many topics over the last year and a half and am happy to make the first new post (partially) about music. I remember an interview with someone (I cannot find it now to link to) on DemocracyNow.org, possibly Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn, and was taken aback by his mentioning of what he considered the importance of music.

          Music is something which I am fairly infrequent about considering as "important". Mindless, banal, trite, inconsequential, insignificant, and irrelevant are adjectives which I would more often think of first. However, philosophically as well as personally, I well understand or have considered the ramifications and felt the impact of this "other" type of language, one many have called a "universal" language.

          Like "love", music has the power not only to move people, but to transform them. "Transform" may seem like too strong a word, but in many cases, music almost literally can open up new worlds for people anywhere in the world. I don't limit this to the "world" of opera houses or stage, or the ability to travel to cities and learn of different cultures, especially Western culture which many within it see as more, or exclusively, "civilized". I mean music itself is potentially transforming in making people feel emotions, canned experiences in a sense, but to feel an affinity to a part of the Universe they don't necessarily understand or know, but like it and want more of it, or to get to know it better. And suddenly they can spend much of their lives in trying to understand it, to become fluent in its language, and can wish to share it with others. Transforming, or potentially transforming, though a grandiose way of putting it, is not incorrect, at least not for a great many people around the world.

          What got me to thinking about writing about music was a simple request a few months ago to look for a CD with Israel (IZ) Kamakawiwo'ole’s "Over the Rainbow" on it. That led to finding a good video of it on YouTube, and then to the idea of having a new post with that video embedded. I tried to decide between 3 different CDs I which thought contained the song. I tried to find one in a used CD store (I live in Hawaii) or a cheap used one on eBay (more on account of being poor rather than being cheap). The one I finally bought was the only one of the 3 without ANY version of that song on it. (The original version was "Over the Rainbow/Wonderful World" on Facing Future, a shorter version of the "Over the Rainbow" parts of the song appeared on Alone in IZ World, a posthumous collection. Likewise, the Wonderful World section of the song appeared without the "Over the Rainbow" parts on Wonderful World, a second posthumous collection. Caveat emptor. Dang you Mountain Apple Records! (Mahalo to you at the end of this though.))

          I have a little bit of history with this subject. When I first heard "Facing Future" I fell in love with the album so much that I gave it as a Christmas gift to many people, even ones I had not given gifts to in years. I had the money to, which was a rare thing, and said roughly to each one, "you absolutely HAVE to listen to this CD. It is that good, you should not miss it and will probably be glad you did." So because of that and my love of that CD and that song (included on it), I was glad to take up the charge of finding someone a copy of it when asked. (Really though, it is already in practically every music store in the world today it seems. Within the last 6 months supposedly IZ's "Over the Rainbow" was the number 1 selling song in France, Switzerland, Germany, and Austria (peaking in December 2010). Unsure of that, but the source is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_Kamakawiwo%CA%BBole )

          I may have given a copy to each of my parents (both were alive then) but really would not have expected my father to have listened to it at the time even if I gave him his own copy. My mother "got" or understood and appreciated music in a way my father did not. He was more of a "talk radio" type of person. He listened to music, but not a lot and only in passing, whereas my mother often had music playing around the house while I was growing up.

          One day when the "Young and the Restless/Nadia's theme" came on the radio she asked me to close my eyes when I listened to it and tell her what I saw. Anyone who knew me as a child knew I could not let that go without a comment. "How can I SEE anything if my EYES are CLOSED!" I responded. I probably knew what she meant before she rephrased it, but I just really, really hated trick questions.

          I used to get massive killer headaches in my teens, and a few songs would help relieve the pressure pretty quickly, though with no small part of effort on my part to allow the music to be able to relieve the pain. I had to try to get into a sort of meditative state. Beethoven’s "Für Elise" worked well, as did many tracks by Mozart, but the "Young and the Restless/Nadia's theme" always worked the fastest.





          My father, as I mentioned, did not seem to "get" some kinds of music. Though I remember hearing he had a serious interest in music when he was young, in addition to the classic parental complaint about new music being too loud, he often complained about love songs. "Why would anybody want to listen to something that is depressing or makes them depressed?" he asked more than once.

          I don't think I ever had as good an answer to that for him as I put it in a blog post a few years ago...

The transition was abrupt, and a bit shocking. One second not thinking, not analyzing but just being and experiencing in totality, just feeling joy and wonder at what is before me and then, shock and confusion at what does it mean, what should I do, and not having an answer to a question I never would have anticipated needing to have an answer to. That is what life throws at you whenever you become complacent, if you are lucky.

You may not see it that way. Neither may the bird. But when you get over the shock, you may discover as I did, it was necessary to grow beyond how you saw things before, no matter how much more innocent and carefree and better it was. Both levels of seeing and experiencing you need to know, and the transitions will always be there triggering them, and they are a part of you because the experiences are there to make you feel, good, bad, joy, grief, to make you feel and know through interaction with other living things, what is means to each to be alive, both separate and how you fit together to create those experiences within both, and each within each other as well.

Hazy beginnings, Abrupt Ends, Dreams Overshadowing, and Concentrated Notes
Jareddubois.com / PolSci.com

and similarly from the second previous post to that one...

That is a weakness, a part of my circumstances, that is hardest to bear, by choice or not. Knowledge of why this is so is not lacking in me anymore, but it is not always a comfort. Life is always best a friction, a coarseness, meant to make a mark or impression upon you. Without it, without deep feeling, gliding too easily, you are not engaged in it and less a part of it than you can be. How much you should be a part of it, a part of them, a part of their lives, that is your choice.

Triple Heartbreak: NY Beggars, Yoshoo, and Rotten Apples in Moscow

Jareddubois.com / PolSci.com

          Music can bring out such feeling, even without words. Music, like life or pain or tragedy, or love and joy, makes a mark upon you. It forms a part of your consciousness you may or may not be aware of. As others have said, it can be said to make up the soundtrack of/to your life. It helps you define your preferences and can shape or influence your identity. And for many who play or write music, it can be all these things and much more.

          Western culture in a sense these days seeks to separate people from feeling things too deeply. It is increasingly a doped up culture which is breaking down the connections of empathy and feelings toward the lives of those around you. Even memory manipulation (which is as bad and as truly evil as torture, also ascendant) is now beginning to lay down the foundations of a marketable "unexperience." Oh the good we will do to distance people from what happened to them, to relieve PTSD and help them get on with their lives. Why should those who have killed or tortured people have to live with those memories or guilt when they were just following orders, or why should someone who was raped or brutalized have to relive it? The road to hell, as they say, is paved with good intentions, and we are very far along it already. Those who are insulated from feeling pain, can become insulated from feeling period, and even worse, insulated from the need for controlling or eliminating the desire to inflict pain upon others. Perfected killing/torturing machines.

          Music can help rekindle the feelings or the ability to feel in those who have lost it, or even worse, enable those who never felt things deeply at all. Words and music together can be manipulative, even tranquilizing and sedative in bad way against intolerable acts of ever less democratic "controlled" "democracies" and this unfortunately is well understood by the increasingly authoritarian aspects of governments all around the world. But music is a language nonetheless. Though nothing but corporate friendly- to- government mindless synco-pop may predominate, or empathy killing, objectifying, dehumanizing gangsta rap, and whatever can be advertised as more "edgy" or "on the edge" or "over the edge", also all packaged and sold and marketed by large corporations. There still exists the framework for truly "subversive" music to prevail, though it will never get quasi-authoritarian governments and their corporate sponsors thumbs up and promotion or radio play. Songs which make people question their poverty, their lack of control, their powerlessness, and their utterly corrupted governments and cultures. In the absence of such things played openly or widely, people can still be moved by music which makes them yearn to aspire to more, just from having their "eyes" opened by music to think of things or feel things they never thought of or felt before.

          IZ's music made a big impression on me, and Facing Future I still consider to be one of the best albums of all time. At my also long dormant website, POLSCI.COM, it gave the only "Hawaiian lyric of the month" (it never was monthly though) which was not even a song lyric. This came from the liner notes...

"Facing future I see hope
Hope that we will survive
Hope that we will prosper
Hope that once again we will reap the blessings of this magical land
For without hope I cannot live
Remember the past but do not dwell there
Face the future where all our hopes stand"

Israel Kamakawiwo'ole’s Facing Future liner notes

          At the time of that "issue" of POLSCI.COM, December 2004, I was struggling to hope for the future. Those words I connected with, and I added my own blurb about hope beneath it....

It is easy to predict that humanity has no long term prospects for survival, at least free, and easier still once thinking that way, to make it come true. Its continuation based on how we live, treat each other, and the direction we seem to be headed in, expecting it can go on like this for very long defies logic, common sense, and even reason. We are teaching and being taught every day to despise the very international institutions we founded generations ago to bring us together and promote peace. Greed and power frames all discussions on how to treat each other. Those who would profit from setting us apart from each other, forever at each other, never seeing or admitting we all, all around the world, are ohana, family, brothers and sisters, they always rise to the top and forever divide us. I forget often that hope needs no reason nor foundation. It grows even in the most abysmal and desperate circumstances. That is why it is so hard to kill it. Hope is forever our only road forward, and even blind hope might help us find our way forward. Hope must flow into us from beyond this world, for otherwise it would have been stolen from us and sold back to us like everything else.

          But the short paragraph above that “lyric” was also influenced by IZ, as were some other paragraphs in my Notes pages. I had just read a horribly insensitive article by a writer I will not name nor reference purposely who, AT THE TIME THE STATE WAS MOURNING HIS DEATH, (mentioning he was lying in state in the Capital building I believe) mocking his weight and make jokes about what sex with him must have been like. That was just beyond belief. Also I remembered a person I went to school with who could not walk well, multiple defects possibly from birth, who had the most indomitably hopeful empathic manner towards everyone. To most people, they saw just a cripple. What I saw literally blew me away. Some would use the word "saintly," but I saw someone with courage and a hardened positive outlook which literally made me feel unworthy to even be around her.

          One could say with such people, they may have to be that way, so shockingly , so disturbingly hopeful and positive in their outlooks without any seeming meaning or reason for that optimism. With bodies that frail, a good bout of severe depression might well be fatal. They may HAVE to never give up or never doubt whatever beliefs keep them alive and keep them going and keep them from complaining about the, to us, horrible hand fate has dealt them. That actually could be true. But still, I recognize superiority when I see it, and in that respect and in those qualities and quantities, I all too rarely do.

          Those two people, the author of that article mocking IZ because of his weight and using his fame to "sell" it as "journalism", and that person of seemingly indomitable courage influenced what I wrote at the top of that web page...

People who ridicule others because of their apparent disabilities, appearance, or perceived problems or weaknesses are fools. In some who appear weak, infirm, helpless, or ill I have seen a strength of spirit, mana, a thousand times more powerful than in we who dare to think ourselves strong, healthy, or mighty, and may appear as such to others or ourselves. Appearances, physical forms, are nothing, only a superficial reality. The strength of our lives and spirits are only minorly affected by them, and only then as much as we allow them to be affected by them and let those feelings in ourselves about our bodies get us down. Learn to see with your eyes closed and your heart, soul, and mind open. Then you will see true beauty and real strength where others are truly blind to it.

Notes Part 2, Pg 58

          And so I remain still trying to see with my eyes closed and my heart, and soul, and mind open. And still, I believe music can help people to do that. I try to learn from the best, and try not to imitate the worst. Mahalo nui loa to IZ and to my parents, wherever they may be, and to all those who have helped me learn to want to do that.

Note: Also mahalo to those at Mountain Apple Records who helped me attribute the current POLSCI.COM's (and seemingly eternal, unchanged for over 2 years) Summer 2008 Hawaiian Lyric of the Month, "Warren's Song/I'll Be There" to the right person. It took some searching on their part, and it was appreciated.

© Copyright 2011 Jared DuBois

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