"Voices ought not be measured by how pretty they are.
Instead they matter only if they convince you
that they are telling the truth."
Sam Cooke

1.  Conflict Songs

Conflict songs, or "blood" songs, are songs that are mined directly from the earth.  The songwriter drives his pickaxe into the ground until a gemstone is found, at which point he carves and polishes it until it is transformed from a rough, unwieldy rock with sharp edges, to a shining piece of jewelry with sharp, bloody edges.  From "The Star Spangled Banner" to "Amazing Grace" to "Lil Ghetto Boy," conflict songs are conveyed directly from the mine to the consumer, without the interference of hyper-corporate, social media warlords with self-important titles such as "creator" and "influencer."  No working-class miner with chords and melodies stuck in their fingernails has any time for such presumptions of nobility. 

There's work to be done.

The song miner spends so much time underground, when he finally emerges with a rough, uncut song, he's so accustomed to darkness that he almost can't see the parasitic faux-nobility standing over him with an AK-47 of manufactured social validation pointed at his head.  "This guy thinks he's in charge?" says the song miner to himself, cleaning an interesting turn-of-phrase from his fingernails with an axe.  "He wouldn't know a diamond from a spent content-casing.  What's he doing here?"

Controlling the content trade, for the tech cartel overlords in Antwerp, London, and Silicon Valley, is what.  Did you find some content we can use, slave?  Get back into your hole.  Your people have traded their bands for bandwidth.  I'm the influential one now.  I am the creator, of my own desperate, disposable reflection.  All my spiritual and artistic jewelry is fake.

Nobody is free.

Small-time social media warlords with millions of "followers" but no true, genuine fans smuggle songs and arms through a complex network of squiggly lines that traverse the world like so much overcooked spaghetti.  Influencers and other narcissistic wannabes at various places on these squiggly lines convert the real music into disposable, unlistenable content that sucks all the vitality and inspiration out of the original, bloodsoaked jewel until it resembles a piece of used charcoal that leaves the listener aggravated, suicidal, and depressed.

"This is music?" Laments the consumer of free, disposable cultural chaff.  How many dead Soundcloud rappers do we actually need?  What happened to the miners?  The underground warriors of poetry, and sound?  The people who spent years learning how to play an instrument.  Y'know.  John Coltrane, Frank Zappa, Miles Davis.  What happened to the music?  I'm tired of listening to plastic rubies, dripping with fake blood. 

Where are all the diamonds?

The problem isn't limited to Africa and Europe, but here's a regional map of the African song trade, which has recording studios and content fences in India, Israel, and a country called "Togo," a miserable place in which there are no sit-down restaurants.  If you order food in Togo, you have to take it to go.  There's literally no way to sit down and enjoy a piece of music in peace.  No matter where you are, if you're in Togo, you have to go.  Not only is it the name of the country,

It's the law.

Unlike the diamond trade, in the arts, you want some conflict.  If there's no blood on the hands of the performer, you are witnessing nothing more substantial than an influential peacock, preening in the mirror.  If the hands of the performer show no signs of hard labor in the art mines, they are merely miming the gestures of a trendy, struggle-free existence.  Which is to say, an existence that is afraid to confront its own struggle, since there is no such thing as a struggle-free existence.  They are in love with the image they project, but have no idea how to play the saxophone, or fire an RPG.

They're not rappers like the rappers in the 80s and 90s, when you had to have some linguistic dirt under your fingernails.  It could be from the street, but the dirt in the words had to be real.  There was no way to fake the bloodstains or scars achieved by handling raw diamonds in a tunnel of tormented, primal noise.  But thanks to the social media warlords, anybody with a phone can pretend to be a poet.  If you put an RPG in the hand of the modern social-engineering rap creator, they'll never write a song like "Alabama" with it.  This is what protest music used to sound like.  I don't believe it either.  But it did.

Imagine a world in which the bombing death of 4 girls at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan inspires a response as disarmingly superior as that, and I'll show you a world on the path of finding justice for the victims.  A world in which the iron bubble still had windows.  A world in which music was a submarine.  An armament.  A flower.

Something you could take to church, or maybe battle.

On the shoulders of a miner.

With a side of fries,

To go.

2.  The Iron Bubble

Hey you,

It's been a rough day.  Not a bad day, but a rough one.  Talking was good, but it exists in a bubble of iron.  "It" being... I don't know.  Suffice it to say, I wrote "All I Want" in 1999.  It's still true.

Housekeeping done.  Back to the subjective, weeping echo at hand.  I feel better with one foot out the door.  No home is real until you are free.

All I want is to get out of here.  It's not suicidal.  Suicide is the ultimate imprisonment.  You don't get to parole yourself from life.  That's cheating.

Anyway, this is why I write.  This is why I've always written.  The iron bubble needs to breathe.  There are dents in it, from the numerous times I've tried to punch a window through it.  But it doesn't work.  You bruise your hand and have to play the show with purple fingers.  In the event I never heal from my tragic heart, don't take it as a sign that God doesn't come through.  Nobody's suffering is sacred.  Let them think I'm "crazy," or "too much."  Other people knowing the truth wouldn't help me heal, because if I need their understanding or approval to heal, I will never heal.  So they don't need to know, and I don't need them to.  They can't even handle truth in their OWN lives; why bother them with the truth of mine?

But the song is my song, and it's still true.  The sun will shine for 1,000 years.  As in, the millennial reign of Christ.  I'm not a scholar, but it's in the book somewhere.  Toward the end, after the part when the entire world turns against Israel, and God has to intervene so they're not destroyed.  Events which were prophesied thousands of years ago, and which are playing out in the headlines today.  Crazy times.

Thanks for listening,
N