crucial

a couple of months ago I was walking around the louvre, and not really feeling it. the paintings and statues weren't really having much affect on my hyper-modern image saturated 21st century mind.
then I started to realize that these objects had fixed a way of seeing for the people of those times, had made concrete a lot of nebulous ways of feeling and thinking. royalty knows this, that's why they commission: to write the culture.

william gibson says the future is here already but its unevenly distributed. this was always true, but there is a wider spread of future apparent in our current now. architects, at royal behest, placed big "Nows" in public places and the peasants (to make the point perfectly crude) are taught to respect the current definition of era.

that control system (having the images implanted on us) has now been drastically loosened, and with the ever malleable internet we can (if we try) create our own reality. no, f'real.

architecture and images are stronger statements than writing, but music is better still. i can read and look at pictures about somebody (or read record reviews) but 1 second of audio and its as though I consumed their soul directly. i did consume their soul directly.

music is pure God, pure outside-of-time-and-space stuff. the machines, guitar strings and airwaves just vibrate here in relative reality to shadow the presence.

this advances out into culture, style, behavior, action and reality. french africans define themselves with hip-hop. soldiers in iraq crank heavy metal in their tanks (which are installed with large stereo systems. f'real) people get married and cry to music. japanese dudes pound euro-techno to breach their right-left brain détentes.

no, but I mean more than this. people learn how to walk because of music. learn how to swear, how to act proud or transcendent. people meditate with music, put their lives together while immersed in it.

some people choose to believe that music is an accessory to their lifestyle or that it only reflects it. some people's music does sound like it was only created to give them something to show off the home entertainment system. music isn't exactly kicking ass at this point in history.

when music fetches that brand new impulse out of the forward sensors of the self (looking for that perfect beat), then thought itself is being created. its fetched from pre-existence into existence. f'real.

the future is also unevenly distributed within music. some take it seriously but everybody is in the end affected by it.

Techno bubbled up from techno-rebel roots to become the modern style of musical time-flow. Techno(+dub) time-flow is now endemic throughout music. Some people look on this as the ineveitable weaking normalization of the pure initial bliss of innovation. you could also say that the new code has been succesfully assimilated. a job well done for the Techno Rebel Army.

about this time, walking around the louvre, i think "ok, shut up now. don't get full of yourself" musicians are so into themselves and their self-centered art.

This is the kind of lawlessness that easily insinuates itself unobserved through music... because it is supposed to be only a form of play and to work no harm. Nor does it work any, except that by gradual infiltration it softly overflows upon the characters and pursuits of men and from these issues forth grown greater to attack their business dealings, and from these relations it proceeds against the laws and the constitution with wanton license till it finally overthrows all things public and private....For the modes of music are never disturbed without unsettling of the most fundamental political and social conventions...It is here, then, that our guardians must build their guardhouse and post of watch.

-Plato, The Republic 360 BCE