All coffee must now have cardamom.
All kisses, watermelon traces.
"Three major record labels produce two-thirds of all music consumed in America. They are the most powerful buyer of music and talent, and they use that power to prioritize a handful of mega-stars and pop hits. They pitch music into massive radio conglomerates and streaming platforms that control how music is consumed, and they collect an ever-growing share of industry revenue." (Ron Knox, Wired) This is part of the explanation for the uncreative lyrics, copycat/bland melodies, the ubiquity of the pseudo-dramatically rendered I/IV/VI/V chord progression, and the overproduction/unimaginative arrangements which dominate the Top 20 in 2021 and the Country charts. I listen primarily to new music. However, none of it is found in the US Top 20 or Country charts, even as I do check in on them now and then. For Universal, Sonny and Warner, it's not about quality. It's about sales, quite obviously and inevitably. Music corporations are ruled by the same "logic of the market" as any other corporation.
Jeff Bezos has made $7 million per hour since the beginning of the pandemic. The primary reason for this is *not* that he is greedy; though he is greedy. The primary reason for this is that Jeff Bezos is operating within a social system that respects, rewards, admires, idolizes, fetishizes and worships people who are greedy-to-the-point-of-being-insane. For all of us, *psychologically,* it is our misfortune to be born into this idiotic and self-destructive culture. For many of us, it is additionally debilitating in terms of our *safety, health, and most basic material well being*... And it's dumb dumb dumb dumb dumb. George Washington: silly. Henry Ford: silly. Trump: silly. Bill Gates: silly. Walt Disney, PT Barnum, Randolph Hearst, Warren Buffett, Oprah Winfrey, Nicolas Cage and his 32 houses: silly. Foolish. Absurd.
“Art is the essential medium for the communication of a moral ideal.” The hapless Ayn Rand got virtually nothing right in her life as a philosopher. But she was canny and she got that much right. We live in an age where many people pursue art that is devoid of an ethical message or impulse and where many who do have a moral message to share do not engage in the creation of art as their mode of expression. Art does not *have* to be anything: It is free imaginative expression which utilizes craft. However, for those of us who recognize that the belief system underpinning our current reality is in the process of delivering us to the gates of Hell, we must recognize that story-song-image-verse-movement-drama are beautiful and resonant ways to offer up alternative visions.
The other-than-human world is still singing, calling, spinning, running, swimming, diving, blooming, blossoming, whirring, flying, leaping, charging, changing color, changing shape, projecting light, projecting pheromones across space, bouncing sonar through the night and through the endless oceans for balletic navigation.
Most people alive today do not know that much of human history was spent in small, non-hierarchical groups with little-to-no incidence of mental illness. These were the times before large scale agriculture which began with the Neolithic Revolution in Mesopotamia 10,000 years ago. (Modern humans appeared at least as early as 230,000 years ago). Some such immediate return hunter gatherer cultures still persist today, but, of course, they are threatened. Our lack of awareness about these other ways of living in what could be called primal anarchy (without hierachy) - indeed the purposeful erasure of these peoples and the vanishing of the knowledge of their lifeways - has extremely grave consequences for our lives today. It means that virtually everybody thinks that we have to choose between three relatively miserable options: Capitalism, mass scale authoritarian "communism" or feudalism. Obviously, social democratic countries offer a more humane form of capitalism than what we have in the US. But even those nations are still mired in work-as-toil, severe hierarchy, "race"/class/gender–based oppression, ecological alienation and the destructiveness of the extraction economy. We need settle for none of these miserabilism-based options. The idea that we must settle for one of them is the lethal canard rocketing us and our planet into the inferno. (Link to a relevant TED Talk video below, "Depression Is a Disease of Civilization," by Dr. Steven Ilardi, KSU).
Be surprised at nothing. Brittle white and collapsing coral reefs. Monarch butterfly swarms whittled down to butterfly quartets. Reduced birdsong. Emaciated bears. People bent over desks day and night, growing more and more unhealthy. Neighborhoods poisoned by the burning of medical waste. Children’s asthma spiking there. Landscapes of dumb lawns, monochromatic. You may see a defunct satellite tumbling at you from the heavens. Snuff films made publicly by the police. All is faltering, wavering. Glowing coals and debris are plowed into the lake. Children stalk the hallways of vast schools in military vests as if in a snake venom fever dream. Carcasses of hogs are left to rot in the river, poisoning the people, the river animals. There is no end to it. It exceeds all science fiction novels, all science-fiction films combined and all that will ever be written. It was launched by an idea and the idea calls itself the economy and the economy is not you. To the economy, we are like great and graceful Russian bears reduced to performing idiot circus tricks for coins. The economy is not you or me. It is a cluster of numbers spinning, wavering, flickering like a Fourth of July sparkler that singes the fingers and then burns through the body. The economy is a hovering cluster of malice and bottomless want. Strange new creatures are born out of the waste of discarded tires. We make enemies of our fellow Earth species. Driving roads cut through forests and mountains, we sense the animals’ fear of us and their hatred of us. Eyes watching from the hills and then going out. A black fin slices the water as we walk along the polluted industrial wharf. Glimpsed briefly and then gone. Grass grows high behind the nuclear reactor and the noise of insects reaches endolymph-crushing levels and then retreats. Rabbits amass late night on the baseball diamond. What could they be doing? You approach, only to see them scatter in all directions like tossed gravel. Such strangeness not seen before. There are no owls in this neighborhood, are there? I mean, there never were before, were there?
