Why do we care about singers? Wherein lies the power of songs? Maybe it derives from the sheer strangeness of there being singing in the world. The note, the scale, the chord; melodies, harmonies, arrangements; symphonies, ragas, Chinese operas, jazz, the blues: that such things should exist, that we should have discovered the magical intervals and distances that yield the poor cluster of notes, all within the span of a human hand, from which we can build our cathedrals of sound, is as alchemical a mystery as mathematics, or wine, or love. Maybe the birds taught us. Maybe not. Maybe we are just creatures in search of exaltation. We don't have much of it. Our lives are not what we deserve; they are, let us agree, in many painful ways deficient. Song turns them into something else. Song shows us a world that is worthy of our yearning, it shows us our selves as they might be, if we were worthy of the world.
--Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet
Posted by eshtine at September 14, 2002 11:30 AMAfter a quote by Rushdie..all I have the guts to offer is a corollary. Song has been devalued with our ability to reproduce other people's music at will. Everywhere you go, there's music..all electronic, all perfect, all a creation of some remote individual. just go back to our grandparent's youth--music was created and reproduced by PEOPLE with instruments. You could see, touch, feel, participate. Maybe that's why Concerts are so popular. Music wasn't something you bought on a disc so a laser beam could bounce of it and reproduce digitally perfect sounds. NO. Music was made by voices, and instruments where you could feel the vibration, hear the squeeks of the fingers on the guitar strings.....The most golden moments are when people sing together--the National Anthem, Bohemian Rhapsody, Take me Out To the Ball Game, whatever. It serves as a unifying, primordial act. Imagine the feeling of the same people just listening on their Walkmans, each in their own world, bopping silently to music nobody else can hear......
Posted by: Kit Gefallen at September 15, 2002 10:29 AM