The Music of the Night

 There was a reason why Muscle Shoals was fruitful for American popular music.  Florence Alabama Music Enterprises was founded by Rick Hall in 1960.  Under his tutelage the Swampers formed, a capable rhythm section, and recorded and created the Muscle Shoals sound.  Diverse musical artists were drawn to FAME, as it built a reputation for musical creativity and production.  Not unlike Stax Records in Memphis both studios were known for racial diversity.  Muscle Shoals was a remote location on the banks of the Tennessee River in northern Alabama, and was the butt of many jokes.  Music in a broad sense encompasses many human sensibilities, not just aural sound.  With the advancement of wireless technology, our understanding and thus production of music has waned.  Music is more than a short wave radio signal, a dot or dash of Morse code, or a simple sound byte.  Why is it that burgeoning wireless technology has hurt the field of music?  Watershed cultural events in America's history like radio and television easily are not usurped by a PC.  All of the 1's and 0's cannot create art, a deep contemplative study, understanding, and creative interpretating of life.  Convenience in a frenetically paced world does not suffice.  Immediate gratification is a shallow and unsatisfying anodyne.  We have come to live in a disposable society, and we are suffering the consequences, a lack of soul.  What is missing from digital music?  There is no question the storing and sharing of digital music via Napster changed the music industry.  It could be said this network gratuitously offering contraband music to the masses annihilated America's traditional music industry.  Who could resist the immediate gratification of downloading music immediately for free?  In a business sense like loosing weight from a smart phone, sending your gold jewelry to a company in the mail and expecting a check, or collecting millions from the lottery, continuing to steal commercially recorded music from the Black Web is not beneficial for the American economy.  We have lost sight that if money is to circulate representing goods and services, than all goods and services must be included, not just energy, housing, and food.  The basis of a Democratic Republic choosing Capitalism and a free market, is based upon everyone being included, not just the wealthy and empowered.  This is how America has changed in the last several decades.  We have become a nation of success or failure on a grand scale and of great spectacle, and the model of this irresponsible behavior is foreign television programming that that has convoluted America's premiere maiden communication offerings.  With the sheer amount of time, devotion, impetus, and money spent building America's first wireless radio networks, and the positive affect they had creating solidarity in America, especially in rural areas, cheap, trite, superficial talent shows exploiting average Americans has been extremely detrimental to our economy.  In essence the opportunity, fluidity, and power of average people has been hijacked by the elite wealthy.  This hijacking was the Big Short in 2008, when banks foreclosed on un-vetted pooled mortgages that continue to make hedge fund managers filthy rich.  Unknowing buyers at the urging of President Bill Clinton bought outside of their means with easily obtainable free flowing credit, later to be foreclosed upon when raises in premiums doubled and tripled with the written terms of the contract.  They were fleeced, and it was this practice that has stolen America's money.  A small group of Wall Street investors saw this coming and created custom financial instruments that were forced to pay them off moving the bulk of America's capital to their own offshore bank accounts.  We have not recovered, and to this day that money is just sitting stagnant.  For Capitalism to work and America to become healthy again in a free market system, this money has to flow.  Instead a plutocracy has been created with a committee of oligarchs.  We have become a nation of rich and poor with very little middle class, the class that has been the cornerstone of American achievement since her inception.  What is the best example of the middle class?  It is the group of professionals responsible for educating your children and creating the future leaders of our nation.  The Troubled Assets Relief Program, at the urging of Secretary of the Treasury Hank Paulson, used federally funded taxpayer dollars to bail out corporate America, and the Tea Party began.  Before our economy will be refurbished,  American priorities must change.  Donald Trump's grand push to autocracy should stay a dream in his head.  No one would argue that the personal computer has changed the world, business, and economies, but we are human.  Money is not the only thing we need, and our planet Earth is the best example of this.  Billions of dollars in paper money cannot affect the change needed to heal her.  Mother Nature is a fickle beast, and unless we curb the sheer amount of microwave radiation and carbon emissions currently in play, we will perish as a race.  The predictions in the Book of Revelations will come true, and fire will rain down from the heavens and bubble up from the oceans.  God will come again and judgement will happen.  Those who have accepted Christ will be transported to a new planet, and the traitors, sinners, and Agnostics will be left on earth like a smoldering Hades.  The goodness of America has been lost.  It is disconcerting that America reelected Donald Trump, and the rest of us are living with self-proclaimed self-serving fascists.  This is not what I want to think about when I get up in the morning, but after watching several quality Hollywood films such as "A Most Violent Year,"  it become evident that in a free society your neighbors also are your competitors.  When their level of intelligence and civility dips below an acceptable level, we are forced to reckon with their irresponsibility.  The cusp of civil war in this case is ill timed.  America needs regeneration, and like Trump wanting a Nobel Peace Prize for sanctioning a violent siege of our nation's Capital, his Make America Great Again should be interpreted as make it great for the white and wealthy.  He coerced minority voters and immediately forsake them.  Even as grocery prices continue to rise and the earth gets hotter, and full fledged attacks on average working Americans, especially in the Civil Service, are carried out, America continues to choose a Hitleresque dictator over a black woman.  Our recent Presidential campaign was not elegant, effective, or streamline.  Like Joe Biden has become, it was a stumbling attempt to keep the democratic party in power.  Only conceding his candidacy for President months before the election, no democrat had the time to mount a potentially successful and winning campaign.  Knowing that the electing of a woman for the first time in American history, and an African-American woman at that, nearly was impossible, Kamala Harris had no real chance.  Like everything in America, the election process has become broken.  How does American popular music have anything to do with politics?  I don't know the quick answer to that, but I do know that commercially recorded music once was a profitable, satisfying, and sometimes artistic machine.  Music, television, and film have contributed to a social and moral consciousness in America, and it is needed.  What is not needed is foreign entities hijacking American businesses such as Chemours and DAK Americas.  Mexicans and the Chinese are not citizens of the United States of America, so why do they own and have control of American businesses in our backyards?  I have developed judicious animosity towards North Carolina since moving back.  While Phil Berger has replenished the state coffers to some extent, priorities here have moved in the wrong direction.  I agree with legal prostitution, but prostituting your state purely for money is a mistake.  North Carolina has failed in the most massive way, failing to provide clean water and clean air.  With the amount of aeronautical industry slated to build in North Carolina, a PFAS-laden Cape Fear River basin is no longer is our first priority.  With Ground Forces Command moving to Fort Bragg, with them they brought increased and plentiful air pollution.  American, Delta, PSA, and Piedmont airlines are not helping spewing downtown Fayetteville with black microdust every time they take off and land.  If we did desire a resurgence of American popular music, and its long term affects on the human soul, no longer is it easy to achieve what once was in the mid years of the twentieth century.  While shared recorded music now may exist in earbuds in private, the process of creating music always has and should be conducted in a plural human realm.  Music production can have its solitary aspects, but as communication of ideas, thoughts, and feelings it cannot exist in a vacuum.  The music will be richer, more plentiful, and more satisfying if it is allowed to gestate in real time, such as how a composer pens a major work.  The best metaphor for this process is imagining Frank Sinatra singing a sonorous vocal in an isolated, insulated, vocal booth with headphones.  His intonation will suffer, because of the inability of headphones to represent live bass frequencies, and there is no acoustic reinforcement of his voice.  What does this mean?  It means like a community, your end product will be better if it has support rather than opposition.  Imagine Frank trying to sing this vocal rendition in a trench on the battlefield with guns a blazing.  Then imagine him at his prime early in his career singing in front of a live orchestra for thousands of military spouses missing their deployed husbands.  The symbiosis of all of this support via emotional energy conveyed in person in real time is insurmountable.  It takes a village.