Someone once said to me in reference to my music: “I think you court disapproval.” This is fake news. A witch hunt. A hoax. I just take risks. I often fail and I lack the humility to keep my failures to myself. And, yes, my tastes are peculiar.
Regardless, at the risk of courting your disapproval, I’m sharing a 13-minute-long symphonic poem called SONIC ELEGY 2020. Sounds pretentious and interminably long, I know. (Enter: disapproval). But if you’re curious nonetheless, I’ve tried to reproduce sonically the arc of our country from 2008 until today, as felt by me and only me. What I am “saying” has already been said many times. I’ve just tried to say it with sound (and eight words). And what I’m trying to say is this:
When Barack Obama was elected I considered it proof that the U.S.A. was less racist and hateful than it had been for the past 232 years. Today, I know this interpretation was grossly naive and, very likely, racist itself. I had been tripping in a rave of Ecstasy, lost in a drug of good intent and pretty lights. Like any love-infused hallucination, it was great while it lasted.
The ecstasy ended in 2016 when the Trump family invaded the White House. Like many, I regarded it as yet another American Absurdity, a reality TV show live from the West Wing. That’s proven to be true, but criminally reductive.
Slowly over time, some of us came to feel Trump and co. aren’t simply absurd, but actually some form of Evil, whatever that means. For me it’s as if there were White Walkers, not Kardashians, in the Oval Office. Kids in cages forged that belief in me and it’s been a riffling decent into hell since then.
In 2020 some may feel we’re now embarking on some kind of Exodus—from what, we’re not yet sure. Certainly an exodus of hundreds of thousands of human lives. Where this Exodus will lead us and what goodbyes it will bring, we’re not sure—either the End of Trump or the End of Democracy for starters. It appears to be a zero sum game.
Sonic Elegy 2020 comprises those four scenes 1)Ecstasy 2)Absurdity 3)Evil 4)Exodus. While I neither court your disapproval nor your approval, I do hope you feel something. I guess I court reaction—because there’s not much worse than screaming into the void. Just ask the Kids in Cages and humans in hospitals. Sonic Elegy is for them.
Listen/download: SONIC ELEGY 2020.
Thank you to:
The choir: Teri Firkins, Tallulah, Scarlet, James Dankert, Matt Caflisch, Zoë Walby and Constance Faith Krejci.
Guitar solo madness: Joe Hastings