Music is the new Village

I’m not sure if I’m right about this but I suspect that the music we listen to is an attempt to fill the void created by our missing tribe. If the house is empty I often try to fill it up by putting a CD on. Not only does it replace the music that would be present amongst a tribe but it provides a background of human interaction that should be present in all out lives.It’s also the closest a lot of us will get to jamming which seems to be a special kind of trip that only musicians go on. I suspect it enables a group of souls to interact at a level that our civilised defenses usually don’t allow. A musician friend of mine once let me, with my fledgling and suspect musical skills, jam with him – for a brief moment I was actually in the music just going where ever the moment took us. It didn’t last long and it will probably never happen again.

Apart from that one-off event, the nearest I can normally get to a musical trip is going to see a live band, which is pretty good or listening to a CD which is ‘not bad’ or listening to commerical radio which is a usually pretty bad – typically the commercial process has watered down all the good stuff and these days radio transmits emotion about as well as it transmits smells. Unfortunately this sorry excuse for anything useful or good is the closest a lot of people get to having a tribe these days.