Art and Music

Last week, a story about The Runaways’ Jackie Fuchs, centered around her account of being raped by the late music entrepreneur Kim Fowley in a motel room full of people on New Year’s Eve in 1975, challenged the very idea that rock and roll is something worth loving. Fuchs’ account hit the music world like a bomb that obliterated all taste of cherry from our mouths, demanding the acknowledgment of certain painful facts from anyone who loves 1970s pop culture, that groundbreaking all-female band in particular, or the romantic notion that music celebrating and enacting sexual openness is a force for freedom and empowerment.

Individuals can transmute from dull repetitive ‘thought’ into ascended golden thinking, but as our minds are freed, one at a time, we ultimately find that our broader society is embedded with a series of norms and structures – of Matrices and Caves – that perpetuate false imagery, preserving the status quo from the ‘threat’ of individual thinking.

Legendary music icon Neil Young will be taking a stand against Monsanto in his latest album release, The Monsanto Years. In a move that highlights just how far awareness on the issue of Monsanto’s toxic creations has come, Young will be working with the Willie Nelson sons in highlighting Monsanto’s activities within the new album.

At this year’s South by Southwest music and film festival in Austin, Texas, a group of teenage musicians from a slum in Paraguay made music and touched hearts with instruments made of trash. Their story is told in a documentary film, Landfill Harmonic, which also played at the film festival and won an audience response award.

Shouldn’t it be a trade violation to threaten to move someone’s job to another country? Shouldn’t we negotiate trade agreements that increase people’s wages on both sides of a trade border? These are the kinds of agreements we would make if We the People were negotiating trade agreements with representatives of the working people in other countries. Unfortunately that is not the kind of trade agreements that our current trade negotiation process produces.

This article provides an inspired synopsis of how different major civilizations have used music, and specifically the spacing of musical notes, in different ways. Then she connects those different manners of usage to certain socio/politico/economic developments. Jill Mattson is a four time author/soundhealing expert, uses Sound Healing techniques with original music

In this video, Anjula Ram interviews Krishna Das, who kindly graces us with some authentic dialogue on a number of matters such as: what kirtan is, why he sings, the difference between gurus and teachers, transcending religion, the role of having a practice, and dealing with ourselves, others and what’s going on in the world.