Something human singing in the darkness
Creative Strategy #224: Listen to the human song
A new kind of singalong.
I’m starting to discover a new kind of trance music.
both comforting and unsettling
a soft ache on beautiful waves of vocals.
Is it possible to make spiritual music without magic and spirits?
Keep all the celebration, the mourning, the pleas.
Keep the human song, and scour it of myth.
Honor the human voice expressing a human life.
Our struggle, our triumph,
our ability to form a tribe
that includes all of us.
(This video reminds me of us imitating The Beatles with brooms in our basement. 1963)
Try this snatch of hypnotic cool by the Northern Mali Tinariwen.
The whole song serves the groove.
It’s not as insistent as rock and roll but it is just as entrancing.
Groove happens, or it does not.
Groove is something you feel, or you don’t.
Groove is something you surrender to. Or you don’t.
You can’t fake it. It’s like comedy.
You laugh or you don’t.
You dance or you don’t.
And whenever I listen to these Toureg masters
I marvel at how little they do
and how the energy is chill but intense,
the emotion is always relaxed. Contained.
We respond to music whether or not we want to.
That’s why it doesn’t have to make sense.
It can even be in Latin.
As a shy person, ritual attracted me,
and robed as an altar boy I joined the sacred theater of the mass.
I learned the responses in Latin and promptly forgot them.
I learned to sing in churches. The “lifting” of voices was what strangers did weekly.
Here is the great Minnesota composer, Sergey Khvoshchinsky. An Ave Maria.
One of first pills they make you sure you swallow: The Pregnant Virgin.
I love that song.
But it celebrates a mother myth and a virgin myth.
Another celebration of the impossible woman.
The tragic burden of that.
Hell, even The Beatles’ “Let It Be” invokes a comforting mother/angel singing gospel.
The sacred music I grew up with effectively waged war on the body.
Denying the existence of the body hurts everyone. But that’s another story, for another time.
Portraying women as temptresses. Idolizing the mother.
Celebrating Celibacy and virginity.
Any body response to the divine was considered profane, base.
I pretty much had it preached out of me.
I have spent decades reconnecting my body to the beat.
I believe it is a healing thing.
I think the key to the music I’m looking for is that groove.
Comfortable. Irresistible. And communal.
For some reason it only arrives when two or more are gathered in its name.
Now I’ve stumbled upon what I call “campfire lullabies,”
songs soothing and shareable.
This is hardly a detour after a lifetime of singing in churches,
joining hippie utopian singalongs, like “Get Together,” “War is Over,”
I am enthusiast beyond my old faith.
Now I consider music as a path of healing.
This soundtrack helped me sit out life under Covid.
And I have come to welcome the immersion of ambient music;
it reminds me of Gregorian chant bouncing off the walls of a church.
It arrives bidden or unbidden.
Suddenly there is another presence in the room.
It is exultant. Curious. Open. It feels utterly natural.
But this natural communal intoxication is so rare that
it feels like magic when we finally surrender
to the luscious, mindless, gratitude and hope,
using words honed by centuries of blasphemy and banishment
until they become so artful or so true or so beautiful
that they funnel our deepest self into the human song of longing.
We all want so much more. Why can’t we make it?
Remember that scene from Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?
The crowd is going apey about one of the saddest and catchiest songs ever.
It makes no sense. And then the foot-stomping depressive bluegrass Man of Constant Sorrow is co-opted by a politician. And we slide into the tepid corn of You Are My Sunshine. And corn meal.
All music & ritual can be co-opted.
I remember first hearing Hey Jude on a bus full of seminarians on our way to Montreal and Expo 67.
We sang lustily along every time that song played.
The Nananananananas never seemed to stop. Seven Minutes?
“It’s a protest song,” explained my classmate, “against short endings.”
In some ways it is not a big song.
It is the simplest song of comfort for a little boy.
And it swells to include the clatter and voices, tidal and primal and meaningless.
If that is not a church song what is?
Ad Biz Secret: Julian Lennon spilled a tableful of drinks on me in Hollywood.
That’s all. That’s the secret. I met him. Nice guy.
We are a tribe who used to gather every night around a fire.
I imagine a family huddling under an over crop of rock
on the wall of a great dark valley.
A cozy small fire fed by children.
The tiny one points across the canyon to another fire on the opposite wall.
All heads turn to find the spark floating in the night.
And a sound they had never heard before comes.
It sounds like wind and birds and owls and pain.
Someone is singing in the small cave
and her amplified voice is
radiating through the canyon.
Gathering power and bouncing.
All the world was still for that song.
And still, very still, long after it stopped.
A song like that gets inside you.
The next night the kindling children are singing with their echoes over the canyon.
The human song is woven of longing,
longing for answers we may never know.
NEWSFLASH:
Human footprints discovered in Alamogordo White Sands Park, New Mexico dates back pre-ice age.
21,000 years ago Humans hunted Mammoth in North America!
We’ve sung these songs for a long time.
There’s got to be a reason.
—Patrick O’Leary