Music that makes you cry...

Someone asked elsewhere about music that makes you cry...


The day before soul-funk great Curtis Mayfield's near fatal accident that paralyzed him from the neck down, he played a free show in a downtown amphitheater in my adopted home town of Long Beach.

I'd been working on some (now forgotten) recording project all day long and kept putting off stopping and leaving to get down to meet friends at the amphitheater.

When I finally got there, there were only two songs to go, but the crowd was in near-ecstasy and the band was absolutely cooking. The songs got extended with some great grooves and solos by a number of the players. I was simultaneously 100% in the groove still kicking myself for being late to the groove when they brought the main program to a glorious close. The crowd clapped just about forever and it was clear they were coming back for an encore. I don't remember the first encore number except that it grabbed the audience back in and started taking them back up.

And then, for the last song, they did "Move On Up."

Now, I knew the song and liked it OK but it had never really cut a big swathe in my consciousness. But this version started with a slow build and just kept building... winding the audience and the players up together in a big upward groove spiral, the back line laying down a thunderous, galloping groove and the front line latin percussion just smokin'... higher and higher... until finally... it was over and everyone just sort of collapsed... a moment of silence and then a thunder of applause while the band finally left the stage.

The next day, a lighting stand blew over in a heavy wind at the prep for a show (in New Jersey, I think) and it hit Curtis and basically broke his back. Paralyzed from the neck down, it looke like he might not survive. Certainly, few thought he'd be able to continue to make music. But, through what must have been sheer force of will, "sipping" from an oxygen tank in between punched vocal lines, Mayfield managed to continue recording.

The day his death was announced, I put on the album version of "Move On Up" in my old project studio and cranked it. For those minutes -- and they seemed to stretch a supernatural amount of time -- I was transported, memory of that last performance flashing in my mind, the ever-tightening groove of the record sweeping me along... 2/3 of the way through the song I realized there were hot tears streaming down my face... I was grinning like an idiot, all but dancing in my sweetspot, crying like a baby, joy, grief, everything swirling around in a vortex of groove...


Curtis Mayfield was a pretty deep guy in a lot of ways. Like many black artists of his generation, he got his start in church music.

When he was picked to create the soundtrack for the story of a super-fly, super pimp gangster, he somehow managed to create in the Superfly soundtrack a body of music that both celebrated this new, grittily urban version of the classic American outlaw -- but which also -- like a chorus in a Greek tragedy -- kept up a running moral commentary that ultimately underlined the classic notion that the film's anti-hero had sewn the seeds of his own fate and ultimate demise. All while laying down some of the funkiest grooves of the 70s or any era since.

A hell of a musician, role model, and mentor-by-example.

I love Curtis Mayfield. May he rest in peace.

More on muses and memes...

I continue my digression on the meta-musical...


I've even got an information-theory based paradigm that encompasses notions of reincarnation -- however, when I try to lay it out for a lot of folks, it generally seems to prove pretty unsatisfying for those who vest themselves in what I might presume to call illusions of ego, identity and unitary consciousness.

Still... I think I could preach a good case to the choir.


One thing that I think is interesting is that, possibly because I probably seem to many on some level to have a pretty, let's say, flavorful sense of self/identity, when I come out and talk about what I describe as the illusion of unitary consciousness/self/identity, it seems on some level to them like some form of contradiction.

But that's a misunderstanting of my position seemingly born of lack of full understanding of it. For me, the myth of my identity is as as real as anything else. And as imaginary.


You know, Plato had his cave. Each generation and culture has its own set of analogical tools. Today, some of us find it worthwhile or at least amusing to put metaphysical/ontological considerations into an info theory context. But, I gotta tell you, it works for me...

My own ideas about an information theory-based model for reincarnation start looking a lot like the web concept of data persistence -- but they started long before I'd ever heard the term or even used a computer except via a job stack of punch cards.

It was actually trying to draw a set of behaviors out of stacks of anecdotal reports of shade (ghost) phenomena. To me the classic characteristics of such reportage -- a somewhat indistinct, seemingly 3 dimensional apparition, reported by multiple, independent observers to be performing, typically, the same actions over and over made me think of one then, still relatively novel thing: holograms.

As I learned a little more about holograms, I tried to imagine how a human or animal (I've seen what appeared to be a human shade as a child and have, on at least one occasion, and several possibles, seen what appeared to be animal apparitions) might leave some sort of imprint on its physical surroundings.

That one will have to keep on waiting, I guess, but when I began dealing with computers and really thinking about information in its many aspects, it wasn't much of a jump to apply the notion as sort of information holograms... multiple fragments of often redundant information which interact to create a sort of memetic matrix.

It's usually a struggle laying it out to most folks but I was able to get it across to a fellow database programmer friend of mine (a seriously religious Christian who reads a lot of sci-fi, mind you, so not exactly someone unaccustomed to operating on multiple levels at once) in just a few minutes the other night.

On the existence of the muses...

I'm kind of an ontological relativist... I figure any paradigm that satisfactorily describes a given reality in a coherent, self-consistent way without breaking its own internal rules or denying self-evident reality is a fair choice.

No paradigm is perfect. You're looking for an analogical handle to mentally manipulate complex conceptual interrelationships. Whether you talk about subconscious autonomic intellectual processes or the muses, it's having a good grip on what you're talking about that counts.

From that perspective, I often talk about the muses because that's really how it feels. Now, mind you, my notion of the muses is based on information theory -- but then, so is my notion of sentience, identity,  sense of self. Since I don't, in a very real sense, believe in me, as some sort of unitary entity, it's pretty easy for me to be flexible about the muses.

It's not who ya know in the music biz, it's...

Elsewhere, a beginning songwriter asked about the possibility of coming out of nowhere to sell a hit song, perhaps elevated by a popular YouTube video, wondering if it was possible, or if the admonition to build and cultivate relationships with music biz insiders was still the reality...

Business relationships are key to doing anything in the music business. It is all about making connections and exploiting connections.

It is how the business works. The music business is -- with painful obviousness -- no kind of meritocracy.

It is all about who ya know and who... ahem... you help out.
That doesn't mean that all those interconnected people like each other -- far more often the contrary.

But they know each other. They know what to expect. And, when the song or album flops -- as is most often the case -- they can hide behind the reputation of the "known quantity" they hired to perform each key function. ("Well, they can't blame me, I hired a well known producer fresh from a number one, a top engineer with a bunch of gold, the same back up crew that worked with Joe Superstar on his big hits... the fact they're all my in-laws is immaterial.")

Are there occasional rags-to-riches stories? Sure. Are some of them true? Sometimes.

Often, they're just p.r., because one of the number one fantasies sold to pop fans is the rags-to-riches fantasy.

Because most pop fans are not, let's say, at the top of the economic spectrum. And the fantasy of having someone discover your genius and pluck you out of every day life and pop you into all the trappings of success and popular recognition of your gifts is hugely appealing to those caught up in the mundane struggle to survive.

But the reality is that most folks who get anywhere have been working long and hard to get there. That story is often rewritten to make it fit the standard rags-to-riches/Cinderella fantasy framework, but the reality is usually far less exciting -- or marketable.

And, all too often, the folks who haven't come up the hard way through lots of hard work, experience, and building connections, the folks who really do shoot to the top, find out the unfortunate truth of one tireless show biz maxim:

The faster you come up -- the faster you'll go down.