As much as I admire the kind of music that artists like Peter Gabriel, Mark Trueack, Marco Bernard, Galahad, Big Big Train, Arjen Anthony Lucassen and many others seem compelled to make in this, the 21st Century, more and more I am finding it all quite homogenous and interchangeable, and, thus, rather boring. It has become virtually impossible for me to listen to an album of this type of music straight through because I get so antsy--I'm ready to move on to something different (something I like); the music just drives me away! Plus, these artists are the type that like to put out these monstrously long albums. I've found that I can get into a 40 to 45 minute long album much more easily than I can anything longer than that. (Is my nervous system conditioned from the thousands of vinyl albums I owned in the 1970s--albums whose hand-held liner notes were as valuable to the listening experience as the expensive needle and speakers I had to deliver it?)
It seems that my recent years of deep dives into the musics of the 1960s and 1970s (Prog Folk, the Psychedelic Rock movement, Jazz and the birth of Jazz-Rock Fusion with its successive rapid evolution) has left me even more annoyed and unmoved by these bombastic, manifesto-delivering world NeoProg artists and their moralizing albums. I am VERY much of their globally-empathetic mindset and greatly admire their fortitude to carry on their personal crusades, but I just don't find the music enjoyable or the messages necessary for me. This makes me sad for I know that these artists are working very hard--that they are very serious in their compositional discipline and artful expression of the conscience-raising messages that compel them to create. I'm just not there anymore. (I see Collapse as inevitable: the consume-and-throw-away mentality is too inextricably ingrained within our species' deepest consciousnesses.) So I apologize. Perhaps these are the artists and albums that I should simply stay away from; I should just let others be, give them the freedom to travel their own path without having to face the negativity of a nay-sayer like me. Hmm. Something to seriously ponder.
As U2's Paul Hewson ("Bono") was able to convince me back in the 1980s, music cannot, in fact, effect significant social-political change. No matter how much you think John Coltrane or Bob Dylan or The Who or Gil Scott-Heron and Marvin Gaye changed your life, their music did nothing to assuage or change the self-destructive trends in human behaviour. If the studies/findings of scientists like Heinrich Wilhelm Dove, Robert Monroe, Alfred Tomatis, Masaru Emoto, Don Campbell, Jonathon Goldman, Deepak Chopra, and a whole host of New Age musicians have any bearing on the discussion, it would be an incontrovertible conclusion that the vibrational patterns of music have very direct effects on health and well-being--for all species! However, the chaotic cacophony of sound constantly bombarding the first world human since the takeover of the Industrial and consumer-capitalist world has created such a barrage of dissonance that patterns of self-destruction fed by the individual's and collectives' reflective internal and mental/psychological chaos is the pervasive result.
The dissonant sound of our 21st Century surroundings are, in fact, causing dis-ease. Human health--on all levels: physical, emotional, mental, psychological, social, and even spiritual--is being not only affected by the pervasive dissonant cacophony but it is being dictated by it. The Monroe Institute--one of America's longest-running human health research academies--has concluded many times over that the healthiest vibrational milieu for humans to exist within is one in which the natural sounds and rhythms of Nature predominate: anything else is disruptive, stressful, and probably deleterious. Many pre-Industrial cultures spent significant time and effort developing health-enhancing musical traditions--often within the Nature-immersed surroundings of monastic life circumstances. It seems that the musical traditions of the 20th Century exorcised some kind of a demonic Shadow, dumping this archetypical god of chaos and gluttony out into the visible world for every one to see, hypnotically seducing people to act according to its will: willing people to act from increasingly lower levels of vibrations--from increasingly haphazard and disorderly fields of chaos and mayhem. Where it may be healthy to recognize and discourse with one's Shadow, the dance did not really come with an instruction manual. Addiction and depravity have been loosed to run rampant, openly, throughout society, in the public eye and full media endorsement, with less and less restrictions (spiritual practices) and an alarmingly increased number of vehicles and tools for expression. (If I sound like a preacher-zealot it is because I feel it is a lack of spiritual focus in our lives that is the key and missing element to provide balance to our Shadow side--that the Shadow is running free and unrestricted because capitalist hedonism has distracted and disconnected us from any awareness of our spiritual core. A return to the personal search for a "spiritual path" is essential to a return to health of our selves, our communities, our species, our planet.)
Art and music reflect our needs. (In fact, our entire field of conscious and unconscious perception is a reflection of the state of our Innermost Being.) We need Beauty, Truth, Harmony, and Love in our lives. Our more-pragmatic ancestors understood the human need for an understanding and acceptance of our species' place within the circle of life, within, not above or separate from, Nature and the natural order of things. The admirable trend in musical commodities to employ instrumentation and traditions of the world's myriad and diverse folk or traditional musical traditions is something I highly applaud. To then subjugate these "innocent" somewhat-natural sounds and forms to exist within, or coincide with, the structures and weaves of modern electrically-produced or -enhanced instruments is, by definition, a debasement, a dilution, of the "purity" of the Natural conditions from which the original instruments arose. This effort and instinct is arrogant in the typical human way of hubris; this "disturbance" of the natural order ("dissonance") only contributes to the entropic, chaotic effect trend toward disharmony and dis-ease (a term that is here intended to include the tendencies toward an accrual of and invitation to tension, struggle, conflict, and war). While the hidden implications of these artists' intentions are obvious to me, I still commend them despite their ignorance and naïveté.
I would like, therefore, to offer my sincerest apologies to all artists whose works have become boring or irksome to me. I had embarked upon this mission to hear and review musics of 21st Century artists with the pure intention of extolling and promoting the new (young) talent of this era. My allegiances and objectives have shifted. As I have reached the twilight years of my life, I feel that there has been some kind of subconscious alarm going off which is warning me against the wasting of my time; I am finding myself increasingly intolerant of that which I feel "wastes my time." You, my devoted reader, for whom I am very grateful, may be seeing/reading a far more selective list of albums and artists in my future pages. in fact, I can already see a wheedling down of the presence of many representatives of the subgenres of progressive rock music that ProgArchives and I have been espousing over the past 15 years. Sorry! That's just a reflection of my own evolution: my own return to a more spiritually-centered life. Praise be to Me!
