Music, life, and atheism

Music started for me in the string ensemble back in Raffles Institution. My friends whose artistic taste I trust tell me we played crap music half the time and played good music crappily the other half, but it opened my ears. I loved it all, the mozart, the atonal stuff by Bartok, even that funny little christmas piece that Rayner assures me is totally silly. I would not say I have a 'passion' for music - firstly, I hate that word and the way every upstart student who wants to edge his way into university uses the word to describe how vibrant he/she is, and secondly, it's not a passion but more of a chemical dependence. A bit like heroin - I'm not proud of it at all. It's not a noble pursuit, unless you're into classical music in which case it only occasionally is, it isn't high art and most of the time it isn't vastly intellectually stimulating. I just... like it, out of some kind of bloody-minded hatred for all human beings. 

Music interests me (that is exactly the word! interests. Thoroughly noncommital) as a signifier or symbol of human community. It's an artifact of culture as well as a commentary - but mostly an artifact. Most rockers couldn't tell a sociology textbook from The Lord of the Rings - especially King Crimson, who think The Lord of the Rings IS a sociology textbook, well nuts to them, they sucked anyway. I like to make music because I think it's thoroughly good fun, and it infuriates the passionate people when I tell them it's thoroughly good fun because they think it should be something great and profound, when in reality it's just some blokes making funny noises. Yet, although it is never conceptually profound, its effects can be profound. Anger, sadness, destruction, occasionally happiness - these probably aren't intrinsic to music but are auxiliary emotions. These interest me. Nobody ever wrote a good song thinking 'this is going to be a sad one', they just thought 'this sounds good' and the sadness came as a by-product of their thoroughly sordid state of existence. 

There are only two musicians I have ever come close to taking seriously (and this doesn't include classical music because I hardly know enough) - Jimi Hendrix and John Coltrane. Pete Townshend wrote on Rolling Stone of Hendrix that he felt phony listening to him, and he felt that all The Who had were silly little songs compared to Hendrix's 'real music'. Coltrane nobody needs to emphasise - he was amongst all other musicians and men, a prophet and a preacher in his own inimitable language - out of him probably emanated the only true spirituality any musician has had to offer, the others being cleverly deceptive or deluded fakes. If you were to claim that music has a spiritual quality, I might be able to see it in these two. In everybody else - I highly doubt it. It's all in good fun, though, and I love it just fine. 

adam