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"... side by side with the human race runs another race of beings, the inhuman ones, the race of artists who guided by unknown impulses, take the lifeless mass of humanity and by the fever and ferment with which they imbue it turn this soggy dough into bread and the bread into wine and the wine into song..."
Henry Miller

Inventing a New Way to Listen to Music

This blog aims to expand your appreciation for song and written word together. Many of the posts have been designed to match the time of a specific song in reading length. The words of the post, together with the song you hear, will open your mind to a new way of reading and listening to music. Enjoy!

Friday, June 4, 2010

Soul Armistice (2:02)

Feel it. Feel it.

Sammy has something to say. So stop what you’re doin’. Let it all go.

How many of us fight it everyday? Fight traffic, fight people, fight emotions, and alarm clocks. Fight cravings over health choices. Fight with our kids, our parents, our wives, our siblings, and our friends. Fight bad news on the radio and not-news in the papers. Fight depression and the war.

Don’t Fight It. Don’t Fight It. Feel it.

We fight with the economy and with our draining bank accounts. We fight structure and conformity. We fight cubicles and office chairs. We fight keyboards and computer screens. And we fight against a blitzkrieg of emails.

We fight our weight and our height and our age. We fight our skin color and our language barrier. We fight the mirror in front of us, and the voice behind us. We fight the core of our souls and the invisibility of our spirits. We fight our sexual desires and primitive drives. We fight sustainability.

Oh, don’t be in pain, trying to restrain. Go ahead and move your hips.

And the whole time we are fighting it there is a large rumbling in our souls, like that tumba drum you don’t hear. But it’s there. Listen to it come in behind Sam Cooke’s voice—rhythmically pounding like an obsessive heartbeat, reminding us all of our primitive need to dance, to attract, to celebrate, (there it is) and to forget about life for a while. It dares us to tap into that part of our subconscious that is buried in our hips and toes, laying dormant, struggling for a breath of air only when the sound of a voice like Sam Cooke’s provokes it.

Whooaaa now. Don’t Sammy’s swingin’ music make you wanna flip?

Sammy washes it all away. Listen to him. First he reminds us of how simple everything can be. And then he dares us to rise with the sun and moon. Music evokes the spirit, and the spirit doesn’t think in reason or logic. There is no rationalizing with the abstract. Sam Cooke reaches into that part of us that knows deep down what we exist for, repetitively coercing each one of us to stop fighting and start listening. The rest is just details. Let it all go.

Don’t fight it. Don’t fight it. Feel it.

Feel it.

Roll on piano. Swing on.

Posted by Kory French at 10:41 AM
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