Rift in the time space continuum
Once, when I was a wrung out, strung out, addled 25 year old, I had a strange conversation with my Mom.
She was notorious for not liking music so much, which is very tough in a music oriented family. Her refuge was Folk music and she really started getting in to it. She was all about Pete Seeger, Josh White Jr., Odetta, all of that.
So, one day I was around and I said offhandedly,
“You know Mom, there's this new album out that I think you might really like, it’s Paul Simon’s new one”
She sucked in her breath and her face lit up.
“Graceland?”
I looked up, startled.
“Yeah Graceland.”
In unison-
“I LOVE that album!!”
The universe imploded, we were thrown into a reverse negatronic void, and that’s the likeliest explanation of how it all started spinning out of contr, resulting in how G.W. didn’t get elected.
Eraworm Radio: Sweet Nothing - The Bottom 99
posted by Stella Magdalen @ 2/18/2006 10:41:00 AM
2 Comments:
Wait a sec - she loved music. She just thought she was an awful singer as she was told in her youth to "just mouth the words" because she was so bad. She had a large record collection, loved to go to live music concerts, and loved to hear people in her family play and sing. She especially loved folk, with a political edge. She contributed money to building an elevator when the ark moved, so she could be one of the people to use it and went to concerts in her wheelchair. And she went a number of times a year. Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie, Ann McGaragil (sp?) and more. She even braved going in to Detroit to see Arlo -- a huge thing for her. She always had Simon and Garfunkel albums too. It was part of her life always. She even made mix tapes once she knew how.
I don't really agree that she "loved" music. I don't think she had that deep a relationship with it. I feel that she saw how important it is in this society to have a musical allegiance, and that music is a common social outlet and so she found a type of music that she could be OK with.
Over the years I've seen zillions of people hanging around and supporting music scenes for mostly social reasons, that in the long run don't have that deep an interest in music. It's no crime, their money spends just as well as the music adorers.
My perception is that there was a very narrow range of music that she could tolerate. Folk worked for her, because it gave her a musical social identity tied to the type of politics and social causes she believed in. She could really get behind the messages and relate to the words and the "aura" of that scene and the people. This particular music scene music tied it all together for her.
Also because people like Joan Baez have quintessential voices that only a fool would disparage.
My feeling is that her interest in becoming a Folkie intensified around her Ozone house time and it did have close ties to the music she had gotten some enjoyment from when younger- Belafonte, Odetta, The Limelighters etc. but it seemed to have more to do with re-inforcing her personae as a fairly cool older lady.
I recall no large record collection of specifically hers, I always felt that the records were primarily Dads and that the ones she did enjoy were more because of the lyrics than the music.
I saw no particular strong relationship to music on her own, she never seemed to sit around and listen to music or say, the radio, independantly.
Sure, I can believe she contributed to the elevator, it was a cool thing to do and she would be able to use it to go to a place she desired to support and feel a part of.
I never said she didn't support musicality, to some extent she certainly did, but I also recall MUCH bitching about music when we were playing whatever in our rooms, and sometimes even requests to stop when the piano was being played.
The making of the mixed tapes, to me, seemed more about the messages she percieved in the lyrics that she wanted to share with people.
After all poular music is the poetry of our time and she certainly took interest in that aspect. She was interested in the idea of culture after all. It's bred into the middle class. And really, congratulations to her for sticking to it until she found a genre that she could finally get into, as I said.
But in terms of any deep and abiding love, I don't see it, and that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
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