Sex, Politics and Religion

Sex, politics and religion. I like writing about music. It’s not really about some person from Ipanema or some chick named Lucy, or even about loving in an Orwellian nightmare or some musician losing his religion.  The musician and song is nothing. The musician only puts together a few rhythm patterns and words, but it is the listener that processes this stuff and gives it meaning. Every song recreates itself every time it gets inside someone else’s head. How could the musician be anything next to that? I can only talk about what something means to me and then hope that somebody else might get it.

Sounds of life. Sounds of ecstasy and pain. Miraculously, as I write, there is a little angel dancing about my ear singing: “If you have the answer, you don’t have to go.”

We all have questions. We look at life, our life and the lives around us and we can’t figure things out. So we look to people like Nietzsche, Spinoza and Kant (one who ended his life an insane catatonic and another who ended his life poor and outcast). Perhaps the whole search has to do with building some sort of rationalization for pain. Somehow those questions are reflected in music, embedded within it, in Bowie as much as Bach. And those are just the ones that we know about. You know, there are a lot of great musicians out there, going through the same stuff, who we never hear. We all live in a dysfunctional world and the philosophers, just like musicians, just like us, are messed up people trying to figure out how to get from point “a” to point “b” without getting run over in traffic.

Let’s face it. If a person had it all together they wouldn’t have to ask themselves the difficult questions. A person could just be happy, stop struggling with life, and disappear from that struggle. They wouldn’t have to ask: “How can I find happiness?” “What can give my life meaning?” For a certain 15- to 20-year-old, those questions might translate into “How does an open-minded bi-sexual find his fun in a reactionary hereto-sexual world without getting the crap beat out of him?” And if you are a kid going through that conflict, then how do you find a way out of stuff like that? David Bowie said “Give me your hand because you’re wonderful.” And, once the mind is opened by these questions, if you can make it across the street through the frustration and the self doubt, how does that translate into things like politics and religion? Once you get past “What does the world mean to me?” to “What do I mean to the world?” how are you going to participate?

Look, I don’t know anything about David Bowie. It isn’t the song, and it isn’t the musician. It’s all very personal. It’s the audience. Diamond Dogs was one of the albums that pulled me through when I was 15. A science-fiction geek, feeling like a freak, questions of sexual identity. And why the hell not. It all makes life interesting, if people like David can pull you through. Get you across that street to point “b” where you want to be.

Or, hell, go read some Spinoza, if that turns you on. I mean, whatever floats your boat, babe, because that’s all life is about really: sex, politics and religion. Those three things are the patterns. They are the templates. And making music is all about paying attention to the patterns of the world, listening to the rhythms of life. Yeah, musicians and philosophers have a lot in common.