The Analogue Landscape

My eyes are tired of looking at this glaring computer screen.  On the other hand I am so pissed off, that I must vent somehow.  After watching a few movies on the AMC network, I both am happy and sad.  I am happy because I feel some things that are familiar to me. That feeling comes from a variety of stimuli.  Beautiful cinematic images on the screen, effective musical underscoring, creative writing, and craftsman acting all move my emotions, especially when they occur simultaneously.  It is this magical combination that makes a successful film.  As I watched these classic movies from decades gone by, the overt reaction I had was sorrow.  How was I feeling sorrow at the experiencing of those artistic things I just mentioned?  It is because mostly they are extinct.  It seems I have lived long enough, a half a century, to be able to witness a true progression of history and art.  This progression, both a progression and extinction, has happened before.  Most notably the stylistic periods in European music represent a similar progression.  While I did not live in those times, broadly I do understand the changes.  Without living during those changes one never really will never know why and how music expired and excelled.  Certainly they were a direct correlation of the politics of the time.  Wouldn't it be nice to be able to travel back in time and understand how the Renaissance morphed into the Baroque or Rococo?  Still there is much to be understood in music history.  What I do know today is we are at a similar crossroads.  A specific period of American music history is over.  After watching these classic films on AMC blatantly it is obvious.  American music is and never will be the same.  We are on a downward spiral.  It both is disconcerting and completely disappointing to live in such a time.  I have devoted my life to the art of music, and to be stuck in the year 2014 is a nightmare.  At the age of fifty-two now I am able to look back at over half a century of life and observe.  My mojo no longer is active.  Fully I believe it still is potent, but with utterly and absolutely no impetus whatsoever to pursue music it is in seclusion.  It is in seclusion because no longer do I feel joy in the pursuit of music.  I feel loss.  I feel loss as I undoubtedly observe that American music irrefutably is on a downward spiral.  What has caused this decline?  After viewing several of these AMC classic films, it became glaringly obvious.  The marriage of music to drama or rather music to the human condition is over.  No longer it seems does the entertainment industry feel it is profitable to exploit this strong and magical union.  Everything falters with this decision.  Depth of character, interaction, drama, and catharsis all are are stranded on a digital blue screen of stasis.  Without a search and understanding of the human condition represented metaphorically through music, we are a much weaker race.  We are insensitive, selfish, and violent.  We are being deprived of our core human components without even knowing it.  The duality that served this exploration seems no longer to exist.  In musical terms the absence of the leitmotif leaves actors naked on their deserted islands.  Once a knowledgeable and skilled composer would aid the development of a plot and characters at an intimate level.  This intimacy was achieved because analog sound was analogous to analog film and analog emotion.  It was continuous.  It was not separated into manmade samples.  Analog energy is the epitome of God's energy.  It is powerful, continuous, broad, and expressive.  It has not been compressed into a rich man's capsule.  It is vibrant, alive, and free.  The frequencies of sound, visible light, and emotion are uninhibited.  Today that is not the case.  Today this humanity has been sacrificed for an artificial cyber existence.  It has failed.  All of the computer programming in the world cannot represent the beauty of nature.  Natural sound, natural light, and natural feeling can not be represented by digits, pixels, and decimals.  Compression is no the answer to the human condition, and it never has been.  Always it has been expansion.  Expansion of consciousness, expansion of awareness, and expansion of potential.  The twenty-first century only has brought stagnation in art.  The digital realm entered, existed, and failed.  No application, computer program, or operating system can simulate real life, yet as a populace it has been chosen.  It is cheaper.  It is easier.  The human condition is a remnant of its former self.  It is because our land is polluted.  The pristine canvas upon which analog beauty was created now is a poisonous, volatile, and almost fatal landscape.  The rich and powerful are content with social chaos as it only cements their hold on wealth and power.  They sit back and laugh as humans die.  We are in a new Dark Ages, and who knew?