This Particular Darkness.

“I got a hundred years of down home running through my blood.”
-Alabama

Let’s pretend, for a second, that every type/genre of music can be reduced to a question about life, the universe and intentionality. For the moment, we’ll just treat this as a game, an exercise. I think rap music could be paraphrased as “How do we emerge from hardship?” You see a lot of songs about enduring and surviving (Talib Kweli’s Gotta Get By, Eminem’s Lose Yourself), a lot of songs about conflict, and then an explosion of songs about having made it. Maybe it’s more complicated than a single question, but certainly the culture of rap music could be well described in a few short questions: “how do we deal with hardship?”, “how do we overcome hardship?”, “what will we do with our power, once we gain it?” These questions are ultra-prevalent in rap, but to try to ground the body of pop music, or indie rock, in them would be a difficult exercise.

Ask me four years ago what I listened to, and I would have answered: punk. I might have then added “ska and indie rock”, but my answer was that I was a firm proponent of punk. Let’s give the unifying-question treatment to punk. “Are you willing to fight back?” “Who is to blame?” “How should we die?” Correct me if I’m wrong.

I’ve recently rejected the importance of those questions. I don’t see fighting a system as the best way to affect a system, and I don’t see confrontation as the best means for deep-rooted change. Thus, “Are you willing to fight back?” is like asking “Are you willing to break the hammer on the screw?” for me. I don’t see blame as a necessary or useful component of problem solving or conflict resolution, so “Who is to blame?” is problematic and unhelpful to me. And finally, I’ve moved away from the hometown I despised, and in doing so abandoned a lot of the fatalism that I carried with me, leaving the “How should we die?” question one that could only be answered prematurely and rashly.

Punk’s burning questions are no longer burning. They sit as nice signposts to remind me of my adolescence, but my mind has turned to new ones: “Where do we find beauty?” “How shall we live?” “Where do we go from here?” “What can we learn from the past as we explore new ground?”

And coincidentally, I have been drifting away from punk and toward some pretty surprising alternatives. Bluegrass, folk, alt.country, accoustic indie rock, folk-punk. Bands like Twilight Hotel, songs like Santa Fe by June Madrona… these captivate me, because they speak directly to the questions that I find myself fixated on. And at first I told myself, “Well, I can like folk without admitting to liking country”. And then it was, “Well, I can like the fiddle because Ghost Mice and other folk-punk bands use it, so it’s clearly still punk. But the evidence was mounting, mounting, constantly mounting. I was beginning to like country (of course, not the Garth Brooks, Dolly Parton kind of country, but certainly I found something beautiful in Cash, in hearing a fiddle, in every singer/songrwriter with a crooner’s voice and a story about finding himself in his travels). And I was almost ashamed of this, I felt like I was betraying my values and coming to resemble the home town I’d convinced myself I would forever hate.

When  I started to think less about the things that genres represented (punk = social activism, country = conservative rednecks) and more about the questions that genres asked, this transition clicked and made sense. Further, it informed me of the ways in which I could best explore these questions I had.

To take this idea of pervasive questions a step further, different genres are busy holding different conversations. If I look at all the folk and bluegrass that I listen to, I see a dialogue taking place about finding comfort. There are stories about finding it on the open road, stories about finding it at home, in the arms of a loved one, in times of peace, in times of conflict. I get to be a part of that conversation,  I get to feel situated in a culture.

One thing I pretty much take for granted in my own thinking is that we construct the world around us through our interests and our activities. My world is one where people are engaged in social creativity (story games, poetry slams, constant arts & crafts, teaching one another) and where people think about how communication works (story games theorism, exploring nonviolent communication, creating programming for our interest groups). In going back to school this month, and being exposed to a population of first-year students, I see that most people roughly my age aren’t living in that world at all. Entertainment is disseminated, that video games are the most participatory that people get. Communication isn’t an intentional and explored element of their lives (in Interpersonal Communications, we actually had a whole lecture devoted to explaining the idea that communication skills could be workshopped. WTF). I see regular evidence, and an abundance of evidence recently, that we live in worlds that we construct out of our interests and immediate situations.

But thinking about this idea that genres of music present us with pervasive questions, I am now reaching a new concept: we construct our worlds in order to challenge us in meaningful ways. Punk music asks “Are you willing to fight back?” Back when I was a firm supporter of punk, my world was shaped somewhat by this question. And I started to see forces that needed to be fought against - oppression, inequity, injustice, corporate monopolization, privatization, the exercise of priviledge. These were dominant challenges that populated my world with alarming frequency. In framing my world around certain questions (like those that punk asks), and engaging in certain dialogues (like those punk explores), I constructed a world plagued by certain dilemmas.

While I don’t discount those forces/challenges now, they aren’t the things that haunt me. I’m now framing my world around different questions (like “How shall we live?”), and engaging in different dialogues (like ones of self-reliance, rural living, being close to the earth), and as a result constructing the world in terms of different challenges (like urban expansionism, environmental decimation, feeling socially disconnected, sustainability and existential confusion). This is reflected, mirrored and at times propelled by the music I’m listening to.

I’m finally starting to listen for the questions, not the answers. And I’m pretty surprised by what I find myself nodding along to.