Musical Technique and Swing Feel

I have two things on my mind this evening.  Actually it is three, but they may be related in some abstract way.  One thing on my mind is the disappearance of swing feel.  I have found over the last decade that no longer am I able to talk about "feel" with other musicians.  The word "feel" may be too abstract anyway.  It is not in fashion today in America to talk about feelings or "vibes."  It was a hippy thing.  It was a thing related to "Free Love" and "The Electric Cool Aid Acid Test."  This was a period when Americans experimented with drugs.  It was a rebellious time when the greater populace did not agree with the governance and direction of their own country.  Consequently their found their own alternative practices to make them happy.  Happiness is an emotion, and while emotion in America surely is not in vogue it should not be questioned that emotions are one unique thing that actually make us human.  With effort most of us can think, but actualizing our feelings is a different affair.  Many choose not to actualize their feelings.  I have found later in life that the feelings I once utilized for artistry now are an intolerable burden.  When I do allow myself to feel something, the feeling so utterly is alone that I feel much worse than when I felt nothing.  Surely this cannot be sentiment, because sentiment is supposed to be pleasurable.  Remembering something of which you were fond possibly could be pleasurable, but also it could be extremely painful IF you miss what you had.  This is how my feelings are effecting me today.  Only they provide me with grief, because I have not one person in my life that shares my sentiments.  Not one.  I do not have a single solitary person that shares my interests, my opinions, or my sentiments.  I feel strongly about music, because I have chosen it as a vocation and a profession.  I have studied it academically for nine years in three separate universities.  It used to be important to me until now.  Now things have changed, and the practices of music no longer are traditional.  They no longer relate to what used to be an academic music education.  An academic music education still is valid, but America has changed so she no longer recognizes or values the merits of a true academic music education.  What are some of the components of an academic music education?  The first and foremost component is sight singing.  Sight singing first is the ability to read written notated music, second to read a line of music independently from those around you, and third to understand how your notes fit into the chords of the music.  Simply it means you can read either the soprano, alto, tenor, or bass lines of a Bach chorale.  You at sight can actualize a written line of musical notes independently and different from those standing around you.  There is more to this than meets the eye.  Sight singing is a skill, and not many musicians can do it.  If you are an instrumentalist, your instrument provides the correct pitches of the notes when you move a slide, press valves, or close holes.  When you sing you must KNOW your intervals and how they sound.  Intervals are a root component of harmony, and are one of the first things you learn in a collegiate music theory class.  Subsequently half of the people drop out of freshman music theory, because the cannot intellectually understand intervals and thus harmony.  Today music in America is a joke.  While the traditional avenues of classical music still are present, jazz and popular music have waned in importance.  In my opinion they have waned, because Americans are too lazy to recognize and understand music is a craft and an art.  It is supposed to be easy for some reason.  It is supposed to be easy so anyone can do it.  It is supposed to be easy so superficial media producers can attempt to make music from uneducated people.  They have shot themselves in the foot.  America does not care about useless music.  Music that is uneducated merely is noise, and noise mostly is what we hear today instead of music.  When I turn on my television in the late evening, I am bombarded with noise, not music.  I have passed the point of compliant.  I complained for a long time.  Now I am stating truth.  Uneducated music is noise, and noise is bad for the human race.  Noise confuses us, and makes our lives more difficult.  It is unfortunate that this has become the new purpose of what used to be educated music.  America's corporations have chosen to use musical impostors to inhibit our all ready difficult lives.  These musical impostors covertly have replaced the once educated music that has driven America's culture.  They are operating in the same venues, but instead of uplifting and educating us they are bringing us down.  How are they doing this?  Musical impostors are too weak to take a stand.  They are too spineless to have an opinion, to state that opinion, and to stand behind their opinion.  Musical impostors have become the new example for America.  We have lost the ability to make educated decisions and to stand behind them.  Instead we waffle around cluttering up the airwaves with noise.  It is a simple process.  The first thing that is sacrificed is rhythm.  Consequently with no rhythm there can be no "feel."  I can't say for sure if in all cases this is happening on purpose.  It is plausible that sheer ignorance is the cause of the noise.  It is probable I guess that the majority of music producers today are not academically educated who know nothing of sight singing, intervals, and harmony.  It is interesting that I cannot think of another American practise where mediocrity or absolute failure of product is possible.  People do not buy bad food, do they?  If a restaurant produces poor food, usually they close.  How is it that poor music is everywhere in America?  How has this happened?  Poor music has grown in America the same way bad politics has proliferated.  A specific group of people are attempting to change the cultural practices of America.  They believe if they fail to educate Americans and then disguise truth, the public can be duped.  It is happening.  For ten years I have not been able to discuss "feel" with other musicians, because they do not know what it is.  They do not understand that there are different grooves, patterns, or clave of rhythm that produce different feelings.  Why would a novel use only one feeling its entire length?  Why would a television show use only one feeling?  WHY WOULD MUSIC ONLY USE ONE FEELING, yet this is what has happened in popular music.  The different styles of music that once were valid in America are being hidden from the populace.  We are being dealt a vanilla cone which once contained all the colors in the rainbow.  I only can surmise that watering down humanity is attempt to control it.  Within the scope of America's popular musics it is interesting to me that two things are amiss.  One is that musical technique no longer is necessary, and the other is that "Swing Feel" is extinct.  The same musicians that cannot speak intelligently about musical feel cannot talk about "Swing Feel."  They do not know what it is.  I would say 99.9% of all humans do not know what "Swing Feel" is.  The most credible DJ on the radio station WFSS on Sunday afternoons still plays jazz music with "Pop Feel."  What's the difference?  "Swing Feel" is related to "Classical Feel."  "Classical Feel" mostly is a contiguous period of time upon which musical ideas are relayed and supported.  A foundation of time is produced over which the ideas are free to proliferate.  Educated musicians will understand that to produce "time" a feeling is necessary.  Understanding a feeling and being able to produce it greatly facilitates the production of time.  How else can musicians choose a tempo and continue to stay at that tempo without monumental study with a metronome?  I'm sure good drummers do study with a metronome, but great drummers understand music at a greater depth.  Music is communication, and when one understands the conversation it is much easier to speak.  These concepts are lost in todays popular music.  Today's popular music is nursery rhyme.  It is noise more akin to mindless cooing than real music.  If we as Americans are not allowed to hear educated music, experience it, and learn from it, then we can be controlled.  We can and are being brainwashed.  When I turn on the television late in the evening 98% of the time I hear mindless cooing.  "Swing Feel" relies upon the aforementioned process of creating time.  A feeling is necessary, and with this feeling comes steady time.  A feeling cannot be created without steady time.  This is why popular music today cannot create feelings.  It cannot create steady time, because it can't create a feeling.  Instead it conjures an illusion to real music by miming the gestures used when playing good time.  It is a masquerade, and this masquerade began when musicians with no education and no learned technique realized they could masquerade as real musicians.  Neither can they produce the feeling nor play steady time.  Instead they use the simplistic gestures of making sounds on a guitar, bass guitar, or set of drums.  They never learn the underlying feeling or concept of the music.  They do not understand the music.  Worst of all they have no musical technique.  The core requirement of being a musician is absent.  These are the people making the noise today, and it would be prudent for America to recognize the difference.  There is educated music, and there is this noise.  When steady time cannot be produced because of the lack of ability to create a feeling, something has been substituted.  The majority of what we hear today on America's airwaves is this substitution.  It is common knowledge that America has lost her mainstream.  We have no cultural practices, products, or habits that bind us together.  With this loss there is very little chance of producing a common feeling among America's listeners.  Instead we have settled for sex instead of love.  With no feeling to bind us together, we settle for masturbation.  This masturbation manifests itself through rhythm in the most base way and not surprisingly it best can be understood by defining real porno music.  There can be no discernible rhythms.  There can be nothing that distracts the viewer from the sheer physicality of the sex act.  It is a stream of pulses tied together in no organized fashion.  This is what "Pop Feel" is.  It is like poking a sack of potatoes in any random fashion.  The sack is so unhappy and feelingless that any prod is appreciated no matter how random it is.  If you somehow get someone "turned on" then there is no need for technique.  Anything you do is appreciated.  Music requires more than this.  "Swing Feel" is lost because there no longer are venues that allow it.  If jazz music had as many concert halls as classical music, it is probable that "Swing Feel" could be saved.  It simply can't compete with the pollution of our modern industrial society.  It has become clear to me that there is a core of Americans who have American sentiments, but this faction completely and wholly is being controlled by foreign interests.  America has sold herself to outside bidders, and these foreign interests have infiltrated the cultural practices that have made America great.  Newspaper moguls from Australia, TV producers from the Netherlands, and other non-American millionaires have undermined America's cultural heritage.  During the Viet Nam War it became clear that no matter how the United States tried, we could not defeat the people indigenous to Viet nam.  It was their land.  It was their country.  To a large extent America is no different.  While we do owe our roots to immigrants, it is Americans who should be running America.