The basic default of what a person must get out of life

god must be atheist

Confessional.

Last night or this morning when I went back to bed, to rest, and I put on some Blues records, I came to a realization, an AHA!! experience.

It turns out that the insight I was so happy with may have been false. In fact, it most likely is. But I got a secondary insight, and that's worth gold. Came a bit late in life, too late in my life, but hey.

So I was lying in bed, half asleep, and a blues song came on. That's what it is! I exclaimed, quietly, inwardly. To experience how other people live, you must be half asleep, listening to songs. Because songs are the mirror of the soul; people sing about what matters to them the most, and that's what the kernel of being human is: to be able to sing the Blues. So if a person sets out to know what it's like to be human, how humans feel, live, and what they desire, all that body has to do is to listen to Blues songs half asleep.

Skepticism stepped in after a while when I was already awake for some time. I am sure it's true what they sing in the songs, but what do they sing? "My baby walks down the street." "My baby left me." "My baby loves me more than I can know; It is too much love, but I love her more than she can know."

What does this tell you? That the bloke who sings has a lover. Has had a lover, had once a lover, whatever. The secondary insight: don't worry what others feel, want, desire. Just do what they do, because apparently the most important thing in a person's life is to have his or her baby walk down the street. At least to Blues singers. I don't know about kings, prime ministers, serial murderers, criminals against mankind, astrophysicists, and carpenters. But I know what Blues players want, and that's I reckon what most every man wants: to have a baby walk down the street.

(There is much connotation there, unsaid, but emotionally expressed: she is exciting, she is someone to be proud of, she loves you and she loves in you that you love her.)

So if you are not slated to lead a country, or to lead a country to war, or to get the Nobel Prize, or the Oscars, then what you absolutely must do is this: to have your baby walk down the street.

You owe it to yourself.

Jack Cummins

↪god must be atheist

Perhaps music is a doorway into peak experiences and the 'baby' walking down the street is symbolic of fantasy. The psychoanalyst Winnicott spoke of object relations in childhood, starting with the mother as being of transformational states of consciousness. Music and the arts facilitate such transformation as well as relationships. I know that if I am feeling low music is the best cure and that is why I seek music equally to books. Such journeying in the imagination through music seems complementary to the philosophy quest.

Fooloso4

Well, if your baby is the bass player in a blues band sometimes she has got to walk, but more often a shuffle is the bassic default.

180 Proof

↪Fooloso4

:cool:

↪god must be atheist

An excerpt from my foremost blues philosopher:

“Blues music is an aesthetic device of confrontation and improvisation, an existential device or vehicle for coping with the ever-changing fortunes of human existence, in a word, entropy, the tendency of everything to become formless. Which is also to say that such music is a device for confronting and acknowledging the harsh fact that the human situation . . . is always awesome and all too often awful . . . But on the other hand, there is the frame of acceptance of the obvious fact that life is always a struggle against destructive forces.” ~Albert Murray — 180 Proof

god must be atheist

A bit of a change in direction: what differentiates in their lyrics' message country music from the blues? The musical style is obviously different, that I wish to divorce from the comparison. Strictly the words. Are there significant differences between the lyrics of country music and the blues?

This is not only a topic of discussion, but also an honest question: I hardly know any country songs, and the few that I heard broke my heart. I mean, I am very impressionable and I soak up art like a sponge and become its proper subordinate.

I grew up on rock. It's much milder in the emotive department. The blues makes me blue, but it's a good kind of blue. Country music is too much, like I said, it fills me with infinite sorrow and desolution.

Agent Smith

Blues music is an aesthetic device of confrontation and improvisation — 180 Proof

:fire:

If life gives you lemons, make lemonade? :chin:

To disrupt one rhythm, one ~~introduces~~ imposes nothing but another rhythm, si? Play along, dance to someone else's tune, oui?

Fooloso4

what differentiates in their lyrics' message country music from the blues? — god must be atheist

Hank Williams sings:

I got a feelin' called the blues, oh Lord
Since my baby said goodbye — Lovesick Blues

baker

↪god must be atheist

The basic default of what a person must get out of life

So if you are not slated to lead a country, or to lead a country to war, or to get the Nobel Prize, or the Oscars, then what you absolutely must do is this: to have your baby walk down the street. — god must be atheist

And if someone doesn't do that? You will do what? Nuke them? Draw and quarter them?

baker

I grew up on rock. It's much milder in the emotive department. The blues makes me blue, but it's a good kind of blue. Country music is too much, like I said, it fills me with infinite sorrow and desolution. — god must be atheist

This indicates a less than optimal fictionality competence.

Tom Storm

A bit of a change in direction: what differentiates in their lyrics' message country music from the blues? The musical style is obviously different, that I wish to divorce from the comparison. Strictly the words. Are there significant differences between the lyrics of country music and the blues? — god must be atheist

I don't generally listen to music with lyrics and I dislike the aesthetics of rock music, which I have never listened to except under sufferance. But I would venture most pop music is generally about celebration or consolation and so there is tremendous overlap in functionality between genres. What differs is the style, competence, sincerity, lyrical power and complexity.

There's nothing I can't find in Mahler or Beethoven (and jazz, Dexter Gordon, Charles Mingus) and when I do venture out into song it will be blues artists like Muddy Waters or John Lee Hooker, Sony Terry and Brownie McGhee. But in general, the more intense the blues is, the more cheerful I feel. The only music which depresses me is over produced 1980's rock... but only because it is grating and reminds me of a piss-poor decade.

180 Proof

There's nothing I can't find in Mahler or Beethoven (and jazz, Dexter Gordon, Charles Mingus) and when I do venture out into song it will be blues artists like Muddy Waters or John Lee Hooker, Sony Terry and Brownie McGhee. But in general, the more intense the blues is, the more cheerful I feel. — Tom Storm

:up:

The only music which depresses me is over produced 1980's rock.. but only because it is grating and reminds me of a piss-poor decade.

:100:

The basic default of what a person must get out of life

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