is music the ultimate incorruptible?

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I've just moved to a new house, and one of my new flatmates is a Buddhist and a philosophy student. We got to talking tonight, and we ended up talking about morality, about how to structure a world to ensure peace, and eventually, god/spirituality/truth/goodness.

Now, I'm mostly a secular kind of guy. I feel spiritually complete, I'm as happy as I want to be, and indeed, need to be. I'm not on any spiritual path, and I don't feel like I'm searching for anything, or wanting to attain any enhanced mental or spiritual state; I'm happy. My friend Linda Joy is equally secular, and humanistic, and unbelievably happy, and devoted to music with a kind of religious fervour; this is something I have learnt from her, and something that I think every musician, indeed every person, should be.

Music is truth. At a live gig, if the night is good, the musicians play well, and the music is amazing, everyone knows it -- the musicians know it, the audience knows it. Shared magic happens.

This is the ultimate goal of all musicians, and by extension, of all music: to share Music with an audience. This goal is incorruptible, because the truth only happens when the musicians let it happen; and when the musicians let it happen, the audience knows. It's not something you can fake, not something you can imagine or put on. Either it's there, or it isn't. There are no masks to hide behind, there are no hidden agendas or secret plots, there are no power disparities. There is just Music.

Music will change the world. Musicians, who are as we speak beating out the templates for the next cultural revolution, are collaborating with other musicians from around the world at the speed of email, of podcasting, of the time it takes to find another musician's website or a netlabel and send out a sliver of communication.

Our land is Creative Commons, our communication is filesharing, our religion is Music. We are a strength that cannot be beaten, an incorruptible force of truth.

We are making the future.

We are making it right.

― damian_nz aka frey (damian_nz), Tuesday, 14 March 2006 12:13 (twenty years ago)

GTFO

― Dom Passantino (Dom Passantino), Tuesday, 14 March 2006 12:21 (twenty years ago)

PLUR

― Konal Doddz (blueski), Tuesday, 14 March 2006 12:22 (twenty years ago)

YSI?

― The Man Without Shadow (Enrique), Tuesday, 14 March 2006 12:23 (twenty years ago)

Too.. Much.. Optimism..
Must.. Crush..

― ilm (damian_nz), Tuesday, 14 March 2006 12:27 (twenty years ago)

"our communication is filesharing"

― DJ Mencap (DJ Mencap), Tuesday, 14 March 2006 12:31 (twenty years ago)

We are a strength that cannot be beaten, an incorruptible force of truth.
We are making the future.

We are making it right.

Is that you Mr President?

― Onimo (GerryNemo), Tuesday, 14 March 2006 12:33 (twenty years ago)

dj mencap - thank you

― damian_nz aka frey (damian_nz), Tuesday, 14 March 2006 12:35 (twenty years ago)

If this were true, we would all be living in a utopia already, thanks to Sun Ra.

― Rockist_Scientist (RSLaRue), Tuesday, 14 March 2006 12:50 (twenty years ago)

too essentialist in thought and not self-conscious enough in writing. why can't good ideas be represented with some dignity?

― lf (lfam), Tuesday, 14 March 2006 13:09 (twenty years ago)

Because hippies suck.

― Eppy (Eppy), Tuesday, 14 March 2006 14:10 (twenty years ago)

Actually, when I saw "incorruptible" in the thread title, followed by mention of Buddhism, I thought this might be about music being relatively less subject to impermanence than other art forms (because more abstract). That probably applies more to a western composition-centered concept of music though.

― Rockist_Scientist (RSLaRue), Tuesday, 14 March 2006 14:53 (twenty years ago)

KORITFW

― geeta (geeta), Tuesday, 14 March 2006 14:55 (twenty years ago)

At a live gig, if the night is good, the musicians play well, and the music is amazing, everyone knows it -- the musicians know it, the audience knows it.

Unless you've wandered into a Dave Matthews gig by mistake.

― I'm thinking six, six, six (noodle vague), Tuesday, 14 March 2006 14:58 (twenty years ago)

http://www.loustal.nl/images2004/Inrockuptibles.jpg http://www.pixup.com/lof/actu/inrock2.gif http://crdp.ac-amiens.fr/internotes/Magazine/revuepresse/inrock_cine/Bowie1.jpg http://www.ebweb.at/ortner/tia/95/inrock950618/inrock950618_1.jpg http://www.velvetgoldmine.it/images/inrockuptibles.jpg

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Tuesday, 14 March 2006 15:01 (twenty years ago)

hahaha i was just thinking about posting images from that mag!! tracer you cad

― geeta (geeta), Tuesday, 14 March 2006 15:23 (twenty years ago)

don't attack this guy, he posted it at 7am, so he's obvs still high after a night of dancing.

MORE THREADS LIKE THIS PLS

― gritty sanskrit (sanskrit), Tuesday, 14 March 2006 17:03 (twenty years ago)

wow, where have all the interesting people gone? a year or three ago a post like this here would've got a whole pile of responses. i'm having much more luck with this on cec-conference, microsound and the audiofoundation list.

― damian_nz (damian_nz), Wednesday, 15 March 2006 11:44 (twenty years ago)

we're all on dissensus.

― The Man Without Shadow (Enrique), Wednesday, 15 March 2006 11:47 (twenty years ago)

Damian your thread title was a question but your post didn't seem to really expand on it beyond just making a statement (that's either affirming or cliched depending on the weather) which most will be familiar with and many perhaps agree with so I don't know where the discussion can go from there really.

― Konal Doddz (blueski), Wednesday, 15 March 2006 11:56 (twenty years ago)

yeh, i don't think there's really any kind of challenge to the question you're asking (if there even is a question). No one's going to stand up and go "Yeh, music turned me into a violent psycho bugger" (apart from maybe the odd, dead Judas Priest listener). But then of course you could apply your theory to plane-spotting or Burmese cookery. I don't think that being interested in music automatically makes one a good person, if that's the kind of reaction you're looking for.

― dog latin (dog latin), Wednesday, 15 March 2006 12:18 (twenty years ago)

We are making the future.

We are making it right.

and this, to be fair is nauseatingly icky.

― dog latin (dog latin), Wednesday, 15 March 2006 12:20 (twenty years ago)

there see, we've proved your theory wrong from the outset.

― dog latin (dog latin), Wednesday, 15 March 2006 12:21 (twenty years ago)

If music is incorruptible, why was something like Creative Commons needed?

― Diego Valladolid (dvalladt), Wednesday, 15 March 2006 20:16 (twenty years ago)

Why do I feel slightly nauseous?

― dr lulu (dr lulu), Wednesday, 15 March 2006 20:19 (twenty years ago)

he just cut and pasted it from his blog.

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Wednesday, 15 March 2006 20:27 (twenty years ago)

many perhaps agree with

In the past three days i've had no fewer than twenty people violently disagreeing with me, coming from all sorts of angles, based on posting this exact same content to various other places. For example, if music is the ultimate incorruptible how can it be used to further for example fascism, or racism, or all sorts of dodgy ideas about the place of women (I don't doubt there were as many anti-feminist songs in the 70s as there were feminist songs).

Or, how can we talk about 'music as the ultimate corruptible' if music is made by human beings, which are demonstably corruptible, without positing some sort of divine source for music -- an idea which calls to mind dualism, which is bound to polarise people?

(And yes it is cut and pasted from my blog, or rather it started out as an email to a friend and became something else so it's cut and pasted from my email outbox to my blog and to various other places; because bugger all people read my blog and even fewer comment, and having gone to all the effort to put it together, knowing as I was doing so that what I was saying was contentious at best, I was buggered if I was just going to squirrel it away on my harddrive somewhere.)

― damian_nz (damian_nz), Wednesday, 15 March 2006 21:42 (twenty years ago)

is oxygen the ultimate incorruptible?

― Curt1s St3ph3ns, Thursday, 16 March 2006 00:23 (twenty years ago)

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0449911470.01._PE54_.The-Power-of-Positive-Thinking._SCLZZZZZZZ_.gif

― John Justen (johnjusten), Thursday, 16 March 2006 00:58 (twenty years ago)

http://www.bizarrerecords.com/galleries/sell/WheelerSizzle.jpg

― John Justen (johnjusten), Thursday, 16 March 2006 01:04 (twenty years ago)

it's a little something to say you're not on a spiritual path and then devote the rest of your message to laying out your spiritual path.

― jhoshea (scoopsnoodle), Thursday, 16 March 2006 01:06 (twenty years ago)

is buggering the ultimate incorruptible?

― gritty sanskrit (sanskrit), Thursday, 16 March 2006 01:08 (twenty years ago)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/52/Ihcoyc.JPG

― John Justen (johnjusten), Thursday, 16 March 2006 01:11 (twenty years ago)

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