I read many years ago in the lesser known Taoist text the Wen Tzu that you can infer most of what you need to about a culture by its music; or for that matter, lack thereof.
I was listening to Charles Mingus’ “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”, and it hit me that, musically and culturally, there is a kind of before and after for black Americans. You had gospel, then jazz and blues and soul, then hip hop.
Hip hop is the After. Gone is nuance and the possibility of love, of open searching, of joy outside a sort of grim and violent and short conquest of a fundamentally antagonistic and gray world.
White folks, in the main, after being fascinated for at least half a century by what was certainly reasonable to call black music, went over in large numbers to rock, which is blues’ baby, as Muddy Waters put it.
What does rock celebrate? Reckless abandon. Excess. Losing your sense of self in orgiastic spasms fueled by sex and drugs and loud music.
Rock, as the word was used by many intellectuals in the middle half of the last century, is anti-“bourgeois”, but it is a flame that dies young.
Is that an ideal to aspire to? As I have pointed out, perhaps the greatest rock star of them all died alone on the toilet of constipation brought on by drugs.
Oh, I wander often, and usually have no idea where I am going. Intellectually I am a lost pilgrim in a foggy landscape. I find roads from time to time, but I rarely stay on them. Wherever they go is long known. Repetition is not my aim, even if I do I do sometimes repeat myself.
I suppose if your goal is to get lost then you are lost in the sense you dont want every time you find yourself on a road!!