The History of Music: A Personal Story (Part 2)

The Punk Period

After the first band, Guti, Carlos and I wandered into separate musical branches.  Guti went further into the darkening forests of hardcore metal, Carlos chilled on the bobbing boughs of the nineties East Coast hip hop scene, and I swung through the addreline-filled tree lines of pop-punk.

Pop-punk was fast and fun.  The irreverent melodic screams of the below-average singers were tinged with the appropriate amount of melancholy.  The singers whined, but their bitterness was masked by exuberant energy and a “I don’t give a fuck” pose, like broken beer bottles under a mosh-pit.

The central punk band of my early punk phase was a skate-punk group from Sweden named Millencolin (a misspelling of “melancholy,” and also, supposedly, the name of a skate trick).  Life on a Plate, their second album, was their best.  The album opened with “Bullion,” a song about a bored, lost, and indolent twenty-one year old, which pretty much sums up the punk scene at the time.  The greatest pop-punk album of the era was Green Day’s Dookie.  The themes being boredom, insecurity, frustration, and the emptiness inherent in a world filled with meaningless, superficial satisfaction.

And Baudrillard rolls in his grave...

iChannel was invented on a weeknight by a group of friends that lived together in a university dorm at Santa Clara.  They reportedly came up with the idea after watching The Truman Show.  People that created an account at iChannel could post real-time footage of what they were up, like a “status update in video form.”  Each member’s account had a profile picture, a wall of saved videos from the past, and, at the top of the page, a live video feed of the member’s life.

It started slowly; at the beginning only a few people joined, mainly to check out what their friends were doing.  The feed came directly from people’s phones, and you could watch your friend enjoying a concert, traveling, at a party, or just shopping at a grocery store.  Then, more and more people started to create accounts, and there was a short-lived fad that involved randomly looking at what strangers were doing.  As this fad became mainstream, celebrities entered the fray.  Now you had the inside scoop on the daily lives of your favorite celebrity.  You knew iChannel had lost all its initial cred, when middle aged news reporters trying to sound “in” on the latest tech craze started doing stories on the company.  Suddenly, parents and uncles starting joining iChannel.

It became addictive.  People shopping at a grocery store would walk down the aisles looking down at their phone at the video feed of a celebrity shopping at a grocery store.  People at parties spent most of their time watching the feed of other people at other parties.  Celebrity iChannels became incredibly popular, reaching a point where television companies started paying these celebrities to broadcast their iChannel feeds.  Reality stars now spent their time off from shooting reality shows, getting paid to film footage of their real life.  These celebrities started hiring writers to help them create better iChannel material.

The History of Music: A Personal Story (Part 1)

The First Band

Infatuated, we were.  Luis would spend most classes writing the band’s name over and over, filling entire pages of his notebook, like a madman carving out the walls of his cell.  Carlos grew out his hair, like the guitarist, and tried in vain to roll the locks into dreads to no avail.  Guti bought an expensive and flamboyant Puma track suit, like the one the lead singer would wear.  And everyday, after school we would make the pilgrimage to Guti’s house to watch the band’s documentary, a collection of the band’s music videos and clips of the members goofing around while drunk.

The group was KoRn, and nothing else in our lives moved us like Jonathan Davis’ whiny, tortured growl.  It encapsulated perfectly the frustration, latent rage, and self-pity of our preteen years.  The loud bursts of heavily distorted guitar, and the unabashed screams embodied our boundless energy and repressed freedom.  We were at a pivotal stage in the system’s process of domestication (puberty), and we needed an outlet for our boiling animal needs.  A desire to jump, to push, to scream at the top of our lungs.  I remember being in my room, turning the volume up until the speakers rattled, and pretending to be up on that stage, and yelling out the lyrics, pumping and flailing my arms around, and running erratically in circles (then someone would walk in and I would feel the same sensation as if they had walked in on me masturbating).

Nigger

Do words have meaning independent of their context?

A simple “Yes” or “No” cannot answer the question.  Instead, we should imagine a continuum, with “Yes” on one extreme and “No” on the other.  People who believe context plays no part in the meaning of a word would fall on the “Yes” extreme, while those who say that words are meaningless outside of their context would be on the opposite extreme.  The greater the power held by words themselves, the closer one veers towards “Yes,” and the greater the influence of context on the meaning of words, the closer one gets to “No.”

I am much closer to “No” than I am to “Yes.”  I believe words have meaning, but that their meaning is incredibly flexible, and molded by the situation in which they are used and the intentions of the person using the word.  A perfect example are those situations in which people use a word or expression incorrectly, and the listeners understand or even accept the new incorrect meaning of the word.  At a recent conference, an audience member made reference to throwing “low balls,” when really he meant to say throwing a “soft ball,” but everyone knew what he meant, and other audience members repeated the “throwing a low ball” expression.

There are many people, however, that lean heavily towards the “Yes” answer.  People on the left and politically correct-types are strong believers in the power of words, and tend to ignore contextualized meanings.  These people believe words (independent of their intended and implied meanings based on the situation) can be offensive and hateful, which leads to a prohibition of words in all contexts and situations. (Caveat: for certain words, the prohibition only applies to certain groups of people) This prohibition has, in my view, ridiculous and nonsensical outcomes.  For example, I, as a white person, am prohibited from reciting lines from one of my favorite rap songs by Nas (“I rap for listeners, blunt-heads, fly ladies, and prisoners,/Henessy-holders and old-school niggers…”), because the word “nigger” is offensive even when quoting someone who is using it in a completely inoffensive way.

International School

It was heavier than merited by its size, like a double-A battery.  Cylindrical, with one end curving together to form a dull point.  We found it in the playground, on a grassy mound by the fence.  A thick bronze needle in a green haystack.  It looked like a miniature skyscraper from one of those futuristic industrial dystopias depicted in movies.

Mr. Morton’s lower lip swallowed up the lower part of his mustache as he held the bronze battery at a distance.  “It’s a bullet,” he stated.  Then, looking off into the distance, his clear blue eyes crystallized.  “This area was a scene to many battles during the war.”  The fog from his eyes clearing, he looked down and started telling us about the system of underground tunnels used to smuggle contraband, and of soldiers sitting criss-cross-applesauce with stethoscopes held to the ground listening for diggers.

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She interrupted, disrupted, destroyed, shattered the balance between the factions.  The previous year, before her father’s military post changed, everything had been peaceful, quiet.  The international kids congregated over near the little kid’s playground, sat at the picnic tables, or on the stone steps, and chatted in English, laughing their well-mannered chuckles.  The local kids played football on the other end of the school, or watched their friends play football, or smoked cigarettes behind the bleachers, thinking of the dirtiest things to say to one another in the national language.

The hybrids drifted around, a nomadic tribe, wheeling and dealing with the international kids in English, and gossiping with the local kids behind the bleachers in their language.  The hybrids unwittingly held the key to the relations between the international and national kids.  Beyond symbolizing the physical mixing of the two factions, their association to both groups acted as a valve to release built-up tension between the cliques, and at times even promoted mingling.

The Great Pollution Exchange Program

Standing on a busy street corner holding a clipboard against her chest, beaming her smile and extending pamphlets to each passerby.  Her eyes caught my attention; her pupils were like emerald marbles, with a perfectly circular abyss in the middle.  The pamphlet promoted the Save the Earth Initiative; I don’t tend to talk to these kind of people, but she was too pretty.  I asked her what it was about.  Noticing I was smitten, she began her rehearsed long pitch, targeted specifically for the horny male that is willing to endure a five minute long sales pitch.