Tag: music
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Active Terrain
When I first watched Cave of Forgotten Dreams, I didn’t have a lightbulb moment. I had something stranger—a sense of orientation. Herzog’s voice drifted through the darkness, talking about Paleolithic painters using the cave’s natural forms as part of their art. How they didn’t flatten the wall into canvas—they collaborated with it. Followed its curves.…
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Permaservism
You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” The Eagles’ Hotel California was once just a cryptic allegory—rock-star excess, American decadence, or some vague sense of spiritual entrapment. But these days, it feels more like a business model. A system that isn’t quite capitalism, isn’t quite socialism, and isn’t quite…
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Have a Cigar
Scene: Dimly lit record label office, smoke curling through the air. Peter Coyote lounges at the head of a massive leather couch, cool, calculating, sizing up the young band sitting across from him. The musicians look equal parts excited and nervous, caught somewhere between awe and dread. Coyote lights a cigar, gestures grandly for them…
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Mainstream Monoculture
The mainstream molds us like clay, shaping us into a monoculture—an artificial orchard of uniformity. Each of us, like the rows of apple trees, stands neatly in line, subject to the same pesticides that poison our authenticity. Our minds, pruned and cut, are directed to grow in ways that serve a larger machinery. This training—this…
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Burning down the house
The music is still there. The sounds that shaped my early life, like sharp needles pricking my teenage skin, embedding themselves deep in my veins. I adored it. The riffs, the lyrics, the goddamn poetry of it all. The raw, uncut power of Boomer music was a truth I couldn’t deny. Clapton, Joni, Bowie—these people…
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The Cheaper The Mortgage
The cheaper the mortgage, the more vibrant the cultural scene—it’s almost an economic law. When people aren’t crushed under the weight of exorbitant housing costs, they have room to breathe, to create, to take risks. In neighborhoods where the rent isn’t devouring their every dollar, artists, writers, and musicians can afford to be bold, to…
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Before the Music
The concert hall shimmered, a metallic womb pulsing with fluorescent hum. Musicians, faces pale smudges in the harsh light, drifted in, shedding winter coats like molting insects. A cacophony of coughs, greetings sliced by the metallic screech of oboe tuning. It was the pre-symphony symphony, a chaotic ballet of individual voices yearning for cohesion. The…
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The Naked Lunch of Attention
Music, once a virus of the soul, a sonic worm burrowing into the meat of consciousness, has been lobotomized by the Soft Machine. Chopped into bite-sized dopamine nuggets, it’s pumped into the veins of the masses through the IV drip of the Attention Economy. Music, once a tangible fix, now a digitized roach motel for…