music editorial

Musical Geniuses Who've Rocked Our Lives

Mark Weston — Thu, 25 Oct 2018 13:09:58 +0000

Musical Geniuses Who've Rocked Our Lives Mark Weston October 25, 2018 - 09:09

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The beautiful thing about music is that it is a universal language that everyone can understand and feel. It transcends all boundaries in society and truly unites us as a human race. For this reason it's no wonder an artist can pull millions to a concert in a foreign country where the majority do not even understand the lyrics, but can feel the power of the music. Music can help people connect or it can help them forget, here are some of those artists responsible for making a huge influence on all our lives.

Bob Dylan is one example of someone who used the medium of music to touch lives in a way that almost all musicians never will. Having won the Nobel prize for literature for having "created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition," he was responsible for capturing the attention of teenagers by making poetry cool again. Besides being sat on stage next to Martin Luther king Jr. during his "I have a dream" speech, Bob Dylan also pledged the entire proceeds of his Christmas album to homeless charities in perpetuity.

Bob Marley is an artist synonymous with the reggae music genre since he was largely responsible for popularizing it in the West. Using music as a vehicle he used his voice to educate the West about his Rastafarianism religion and the culture of his home country Jamaica. His lyrics would never shy away from condemning the injustices that were prevailing at the time, and for this reason he will remain as an artist that helped change the world for the better.

Where one looks at sheer talent, Jimi Hendrix is at the top of the list. The self-trained guitarist is widely considered as a musical genius for his precision and speed while playing, singing and dancing simultaneously. It is widely considered that he is one of the most influential musicians in the history of rock, and has even gone so far as to inspire games by Net Entertainment. Jimi shaped rock music and was responsible for bringing it to new heights during his short career that lasted less than a decade. In 1969, he appeared at several benefit concerts for African-American causes And often spoke out against violence and encouraged tolerance for others.

The artists mentioned above were all worshipped as gods when they were at their peak. However, none comes close to the level of the king of rock -- Elvis Presley. According to an American demographics magazine, 84% of Americans say their life had been touched by Elvis Presley. What may seem like normal now was considered extremely controversial at that time, and Elvis was at the forefront of pushing musical boundaries.

The music that he made was said to be "corrupting the minds of young people," but given the state of the world at the time and the people making these statements we can say in hindsight that it was for the better.

These are just a few of the artists but the list can go on. Michael Jackson, the Beatles , Freddie Mercury and Prince are just as deserving to be on the list. These musical geniuses touched the world and shaped it into what it is today. Who would you add to the list?

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American Gothic!

Millree Hughes — Sun, 27 Nov 2016 06:07:49 +0000

American Gothic! Millree Hughes November 27, 2016 - 01:07

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GOTH

America has a taste for cultural collapse and rebirth, whether in the religious right's mythos of the Rapture or in the left's fascination with nuclear extermination or the cataclysmic results of the effects of global warming as in say, Cormack McCarthy's The Road. This is the mulch that Goth grows best in. American Gothic, the subculture of the doomed.

At the beginning of the '70s, Heavy Metal emerged as a genre separate from Hard Rock. The record Black Sabbath by Black Sabbath, released in 1970, contains all of the essential elements of the genre. Loud, often slow, riffy, hard, blues-influenced rock. Satanic lyrics, long hair and beards, simple silver jewelry and a gloomy melodramatic mein. The band came from Birmingham and reflected the bleakness of an industrial city in decline. Instead of militating against the situation of the four-day working week, strikes, and unemployment that its young men faced, the lyrics of metal focused on fantasies of an escape into a non-specific medieval life of warriors, wizards, and demons.

Metal created the template for Goth, but it could be argued that some of the most essential elements of the fashion were put in place in the stage show The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The music was a combination of poppy rock and Off-Broadway tunes. But it did employ horror movie costumes.

Ozzy Osbourne himself stated that he wanted to create an equivalent of horror movies in music.

Horror movies had been popular since the beginning of film Americans responded to an image of a vague, ancient, amorphous Europe that both terrified and attracted them. The peasant life that many had left behind was reflected back to them, but not from the shtetl, slum, or shanty town window but from behind the castle walls as a suppressed memory. A projection of the oppressor.

The stories of Count Dracula and Baron Frankenstein morphed in the new world into a critique of the old. What if the aristocracy could enslave the proletariat even from beyond the grave? Horror changed from the '60s onward, perhaps as a result of the Cold War or as part of a fear of newer immigrants with stranger customs. The wolf was in the fold, in the figure of the serial killer and the psycho. When Goth emerged in the early '80s, it became the drag of both horror movie lovers and high school outsiders. From Carrie to the reality of Columbine, the haves persecuted the have-nots and the have-nots imagined their psychic revenge. Parents, teachers and popular pupils could no longer come near the newly undead.

Subculture pantomimes the youth side of the generational divide. A young Goth girl in corpse paint with her mother becomes a metaphor for the child separated from the parent by death.

The child psychologist Winnicott describes how the child wants the signals of its needs to be mirrored by the mother. 'The good enough mother' does this and also allows the child the space to experience the world for themselves. The neurotic parent is so caught up in their own experiences that they do not reciprocate the look; instead, the child learns to wait for the mother's approval. She is not present to guide them through an all-important transition. Their completely subjective reality is not separated from the mother. They begin to discover that the external world is filled with events they cannot control and the desires of other autonomous beings. As a result, the unprepared child becomes prey to what Winnicott called 'primal agonies'.

Although this is something that occurs to pre-toddler babies, the Goth teenager returns to this crossroads where the subjective universe meets objective reality.

"The site of the monsters in horror films and horror fiction in the psychic economy can be defined precisely: it is at a point of intersection between a social and a psychological space."*

The Goth kid turns their own persona into a version of the '"transitional object" (for babies this is often a security blanket or toy). They do this to make a parallel between the transition from childhood to adulthood and the transition from subjective babyhood to objective babyhood. This object (themselves) embodies their worst fears of separation from the mother in death. It reflects the horror of both the child's' sublimated fear and the one the parent experiences at the loss of the child to a teenage subculture they do not understand. Goth personifies a double death; the image of the death of the child in the eyes of the parent. And for the child, the memory of the loss of the mother and the death of that part of childhood where the mother and child were one.

The toy version sees the world only as other Goths do. This is how they negotiate the transition period. They temper the world's harshness with a range of responses and opinions which despite Goth's many stylistic permutations are very consistent. This helps with both the transition to the adult world and to soothe the trauma of the initial touch of objective reality.

America itself discovers its primal fear of the rest of the world again and again. The world's foremost superpower fears its responsibility for the world's immolation, its financial meltdown, immigrants, deviants and the enemy within, and its own death. American Goth takes the fearful gaze and projects it back at the viewer.

*Xquisite Ex-timacy: Jacques Lacan vis-à-vis Contemporary Horror by Stefan Gullatz, Volume 5, Issue 2 / March 2001

John Lennon and the Immortal 9

David Comfort — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 20:38:56 +0000

John Lennon and the Immortal 9 David Comfort October 9, 2010 - 16:38

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Photo credit: bob Gruen

On October 9th, Yoko Ono, in honor of what would have been John Lennon's 70th birthday, will light his Peace Tower in Iceland, and perform a memorial concert.

The number 9 always had profound significance for John, especially after first meeting Yoko at a London art gallery on November 9, 1966. His second wife was a serious student of the occult and of Cheiro, the father of modern numerology. Like John, she too identified herself as a Number 9 person, the sum of the numbers of her own birthday on the 18th (of February, 1933). Cheiro stated that 9 represented creative, universal consciousness. He characterized Number 9 personalities as fiercely independent, energetic, strong-willed and domineering, often subject to great struggles in youth, but great success later on.

The number played uncannily in the lives of John and Yoko. Due to many previous miscarriages, plus John's low sperm count, doctors told Yoko she had little chance of conceiving: but she delivered Sean by Caesarian on October 9, 1975. She subscribed to the Asian superstition that a child born on his father's birthday would inherit his soul. Yoko had suffered three earlier miscarriages. The second had occurred on October 9, 1969, on John's 29th birthday. After their marriage that year, John had immersed himself in numerology. With Yoko's guidance, and that of her many astrologers, he governed his latter life according to her numbers.

In one of his last interviews, he told Playboy magazine: "She's the teacher and I'm the pupil. She's taught me everything I fucking know." He had written the famous "Revolution 9," "#9 Dream," and "One After 909."

By 1978, the former Beatle told his tarot reader, John Green, "The big plan is that I do nothing for the next four years. Mother [Yoko] says that everything I do is doomed to failure until the year 1982. That year, according to the numbers, I'll conquer the world again."

In Dakota Days, Green writes of Lennons dedicated mystical practices -- his meditation, his psychic training, his cleansing fasts, his vows of silence, his Tarot study. His card was the 9th, The Hermit, representing contemplation and introspection. Green, who did daily readings for Lennon, predicted that 1980 (1 + 9 + 8 +0 = 18 / 1 + 8 = 9) would be a big year for him. On his October 9th birthday that year, he released the single "Starting Over" from his new album with Yoko, Double Fantasy. "Let's take a chance and fly away somewhere alone," he sang. "It's like we both are falling in love again. It'll be just like starting over, starting over."

But, two months later, he was gunned down in front of his Dakota apartment building by a demented former fan, Mark David Chapman. The fateful date was December 8. But, as his first wife, Cynthia, pointed out in her own biography, it was the 9th in the place of his birth -- Britain. According to Robert Rosen's, Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon, Chapman, obsessed with Salinger's The Catcher In the Rye, meant to write its final, missing chapter -- 27 -- in Lennon's blood.

Asserts Rosen: "It's as if 27, the triple 9, formed a numerological Bermuda Triangle that has swallowed at least five great musicians."

Referring to all those who died at age 27 -- Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, and Jim Morrison (born on Dec. 8, Lennon’s death day), Rosen calls 27 "the unluckiest number in rock ’n’ roll." Years before Chapman had pursued Lennon, the ex-Beatle had been targeted by another psychiatric patient. Charles Manson was obsessed with John’s "Revolution 9," believing it was based on the Book of Revelations' Chapter 9, and predicted the "Helter Skelter" Armageddon to come. In 1969, hoping to involve Lennon in his apocalyptic revolution in the California desert, Manson wrote and phoned the singer repeatedly, but without a reply. John and Yoko were doing their Toronto bed-in for peace at the time. At last the cult leader and serial murderer wrote the "Revolution" composer a blood-soaked letter.

A student of history, and of ancient civilizations in particular, Lennon was aware of the enormous significance many cultures attached to numerology, especially to the number 9. There were 9 muses and 9 choirs of angels. The Greeks and Romans buried their dead on the 9th day, and held memorial feasts for the deceased every 9th year. Yet, it was also a number of rebirth. Christ remained on the cross for 9 hours before the burial and resurrection. The deceased Pope is mourned for 9 days. Nine is unique in being the only number which, when multiplied by any other, always reproduces itself (e.g. 9 x 6 = 54; 5 + 4 = 9). For this reason, it is regarded by numerologists as the symbol of indestructible matter. For the Egyptians, Greeks, and Freemasons too, it signified eternity. The Aztecs believed that the soul passed through nine stages to final rest. And so, it is a fitting symbol for the great, immortal artist that was and is John Lennon. In honor of this, Yoko Ono opened his Strawberry Fields monument on Oct. 9, 1985.

And now, celebrating his 70th birthday, she will light his Peace Tower at the top of the world. "I'm not afraid of dying," John had once said."It's just like getting out of one car and into another." So he got out of his limousine and, minutes later, revolver-shot, was carried into an NYPD squad car. The car sped for the hospital, it's sirens screaming as had the blitz raid sirens outside the London hospital where he had been born on October 9, 1940.

"Turn off your mind, relax and float down stream / It is not dying, it is not dying," he had sung on Revolver's "Tomorrow Never Knows," channeling The Tibetan Book of the Dead. "So play the game Existence to the end, / Of the beginning, of the beginning."