The Tet

 Several disparate topics are floating around in my brain, and I may try to touch on all of them.  Firstly a musician is unlikely to develop  true authenticity unless he learns swing music first.  Why?  The reason is you can feign to be a musician in this day and age, because real American popular music is dead.  What suffices today, computer-generated tracks, posing, and attitude do not make a true musician.  The building blocks to becoming a musician have not changed, although America has.  The change in America has not been for the better.  We are living in the delusion of the smartphone, which does most things for us.  The entire process and experience of having to indulge in something to learn it is being lost.  You can shoot a movie on a smartphone.  You can control your health (so they say).  You can check your sugar level.  You can file an insurance claim.  You can do most anything including having sex in cyberspace.  The tech industry wants this, because they make money fulfilling your needs.  Once in America people and brick and mortar businesses had to satisfy your needs.  It took more leg work.  This applies to our educational system, which has been stunted.  The educational system used to be the place where we cut our teeth.  It could be hard knocks, but you learned from it because you had to work at it.  The ease, convenience, and portability of a smartphone has stunted the cognitive and physical ability of the human race.  There is no such shortcut training to be a musician.  A smartphone is a useful digital music player, and more so if you exploit its true audio capabilities by using WAV or aiff files.   Play the recorded music through a hi fidelity audio system and you could experience the true nature of the music.  Most don't do this.  To be a musician you must be able to actualize time.  Music requires an understanding of time, the articulation of time, and the feeling of time.  You must be able to count and keep time at a variety of differing tempos.  There is no substitute for this requirement.  If you can't keep and feel a steady time pulse, then you are not a true musician.  Likewise it helps to possess talent.  Some people work on this their entire lives.  Establishing the building blocks of good musicianship are a good place to start.  Talent can come later with knowledge, experience, and listening.  How does one learn time?  The easiest method is to understand that a feeling can be created, a feeling different than what is bouncing around in the world.  With steady time at a chosen tempo and a specific rhythmic feel articulated by specific metric patterns, feelings can be achieved.  This is a highly controversial statement, and many may disagree with it.  Stravinsky and many others have said that the ascribing of feelings to music is pointless.  Coming from such a intellectual mind, this is shocking and discounts almost in its entirety why much music exists.  It is to voice the soul of the human being, and usually that is laden with burdensome emotion.  Why else would we be inclined to indulge in music?  To learn time there is no better way than to learn to articulate quarter notes.  This could be Beethoven.  This could be in a march, or this could be in the swing style of music.  As I have been studying the Blues, it became apparent that many musician who feel the blues and play the blues are not successful expressing their blues.  It is because they are not playing in good time.  It is easy to fake it.  Only a steady pulse of quarter notes can actualize an authentic human feeling.  Many forms of American popular music don't do this.  The main vocal artist my possess this feeling of time, but often the accompanying recorded tracks are nothing but fodder laid down to a click track.  Some rock bands such as AC/DC feign angst, anger, and aggression while performing, but upon closer scrutiny their instrumental tracks lack rhythmic vitality and groove.  It takes training and skill to play in time, but you can learn.  Teaching your muscles and body to articulate time is a major component of musical training.  As veteran bassist musician Carol Kaye often states, playing in the big bands is crucial training for this express reason.  It readily is evident in Blues performances, when the performers can feel the pulse.  Unfortunately the recent Bob Dylan concert was not an example.  If there is no discernible pulse, then really there is no music.  It could be a pleasant experience, but it will fail to transcend anything.  Secondly the dire consequences of our democracy are are not being understood.  Like music democracy must be supported.  It will fail to actualize unless it is understood, practiced, and reinforced.  Four years of a Trump Presidency has unseated our democracy on many levels, but no one seems to understand.  Corporate malfeasance is the methodology.  Without a capable government to express and reinforce the ideals of our Constitution, our freedoms will be lost.  In so many ways the freedoms of Americans upon have been encroached.  The majority of America have become livestock grazing in the field.  There interest in their own freedom is the same as a cow's.  They don't care, as long as there is hay in the field.  After the Covid subsidies stopped and our spending bubble popped, reality should set in.  There has never been another time in American history (or at least in our lifetimes) that corporate America ruled the roost.  Whether it is telecom, television, streaming, or social media, we are not in control of our own lives.  Big Brother has emerged, and he is all of this.  Corporate America has grown so quickly in the vacuum of post Covid and after four years of Donald Trump's handouts, it will be a miracle if American democracy survives.  They are telling use we will be happy with the new system of communism.  Perhaps the man will own all of our housing and food supply, but we will be provided for.  Believe this!  It is a lie.  Covid is the evidence.  On the contrary they are trying to kill us and thin out the population.  The Big Lie isn't just that Trump won.  It is that anyone cares about the well being of the American people.  The medical establishment has been bought and sold out by Big Pharma, and a handful of elite rich own most everything else.  Certainly they don't need a bunch of refugees roaming the earth.  It is far easier to kill us with a heat dome, famine, plague, or war.  When we realize this we will have a better chance of surviving.  This assault on humanity feels inhuman.  Because the value of human life has changed to cyberspace, it is like an alien species has invaded Earth.  Our familiar former human values and habits are extinct and seem frivolous.  Music?  Art?  Romance?  It is like the Tet is in control.