space cowboys

space cowboys - no, not the clint eastwood movie.  instead... my millionth attempt at trying to convey this theory i have about music.  (dont worry.. there will be a 1,000,001 attempt coming)

two american frontiers occupied our imaginations since our inception.  one, the west, was the promised land, promised to us by God in some manifest destiny that entitled white americans to keep pushing west and claiming land.  the west was california, a land of milk and honey, of gold even, and vast lands warmed by constant sunshine.  that's the gist of that.

space came a bit later, after the west was won of course.  the idea was the same though, at least at the time.  the russians launched their satellite, not to stake claim to space itself, but to be pioneers in science and ingenuity.  we put a man on the moon.  that was a milestone, but the frontiers were found to be expanding, accelerating out far beyond human scope.  and likewise, our ingenuity and imagination have chased those frontiers out, beyond the gravity of deductive reasoning and finite equations, through black holes that stretch and rip light and sound and spit us out through worm holes that maybe a few have imagined traveling...

well anyway.  there is music that reflects the values and stories of those two frontiers.  both frontiers achieve a certain destiny, but they are ultimately empty.  it's as if there was some unforeseen leak that let that destiny drip out, leaving the music incomplete.  the western commemorated the stories of people and places, they ascribed meaning to values and value to meaning...  but they were insular, circular, incested and eventually marketed to become crappy country music that makes mere reference to the "good old days".  once they hit the coast and settled their lands, they began to leak imagination from their heartfelt honesty, and they leaked it until they were dry like the riverbeds in late summer, or dry like their repetitive, cursory conversations they had with their neighbors.  dry like the promise of the western frontier, leaving a thirst for imagination and expansiveness.

with that thirst, they launched themselves into space.  they looked back on our small blue earth and saw things in a different light.  they asked questions that challenged meaning and values and stories in our music, deconstructing that which they did not themselves build.  sound became waveforms, words were just sounds, music was sound on sound.  as for light, it became waves and particles, scientifically proven, but methodically detached from previous connotations of good, and dark stripped of evil.  and with just waveforms and sounds and particles and waves, we achieved something primal and raw, more real than any story, universal as the consciousness of the living, and empty as the vastness of space.  even as we breathe, space is become more vast and more empty.  galaxies are just too few and far between for this space experiment to gather the beauty of light and sound in a way that can be appreciated in a song.

so where the west failed in that we reached its end, space failed in reaching no end.  so somewhere in between is where we are, but not where we will be.  like folding two ends of a string, music will bring together the western frontier to converge with the expansion of space, and in their joining will make something perfect, i believe.  

in other words:  folk music + experimental music = omg