Music & the Lyre of Life: The Winter Dance Airplane Crash & Our Mortal Coils
Music & the Lyre of Life: The Winter Dance Airplane Crash & Our Mortal Coils
The time of the Winter Dance. The airplane crash on February 3, 1959 killed the party. Songwriter & singer Don McLean posed the immortal question for all mortal beings in “American Pie,” his tribute to the extinguished out stars who perished in the crash: Can music save your mortal soul? The engine of optimism plowed a tragic furrow in an Iowa field, the world turned upside down for the future greatness that lasted no more. Backwards in what we call history, a freak-age of enduring disillusionment came upon our generations, since memorialized like McLean's “American Pie,” by an age of defiant art in song that tried to bring a little sanity back to overwhelm the madness of it all.
Those poets believed music could save not only a mortal soul, but a dying ideal of justice in liberty.
The 1960s, '70s, and '80s experienced multiple horrors of tragic deaths, assassinations, attempted ones, and war, not just the cold ones. In that time, never did people so accessible to each other need to throw some cold water on leaders and led alike, calm down, and patiently work out some sort of providential solution for the larger, inner gap between optimism and malaise, between hope and the despair. In those thirty years between the air crash in Iowa and the “end of history” in the early '90s, I witnessed twenty of them. I recall, with much fear, how the jaws of a fateful destiny with peace or nuclear winter—whichever way it would go was uncertain—pervaded shadows on skylines like specters waiting to snatch us with radiation
These last twenty years, to winter 2010-11, the pessimism that blighted the dull gray of history in our black and white photos of the 1960s and '70s now show up as sharp tuck lines and dyed hair in vivid digital television clarity. It pervades. It invades, and it make us restless. How other starving and mutilated generations might hold the present bling-junk civilization in contempt. We're not starving yet, nor does plague reign like the horrid angel it once did. We need to lighten up, take a cold philosophical shower in the stream of thought, and reason past why we arrived at this point, and how to get beyond it.
In the dates of greed, there were the attempts on the lives of Reagan, Pope John Paul II.. One spirit crushing assassination did succeed, the one we could never Imagine, that of John Lennon. If, earlier in the age of war and worry, those February 3, 1959 deaths of musicians Holly, Valens, and the Bopper on their way to the fateful Winter Dance in Iowa, did ignite the dark spirit, that death of music, there followed in 9 years the murders of JFK, MLK2, and RFK. These men of vision, though flawed, genuinely spoke of visions of peace on earth, brotherhood,, and the end of the war which dispel innocence (Vietnam), we also got the sharp noted hopes from the lyre of minstrels, rockers, hipsters, and different, diffident shades of libertarians, in song. All need is love; peace on earth; great days of sunshine, even in a hazy, cloudy mind-fogging dope of moral depression.
So, if asked, can music save a mortal soul? Or, even can it capture the spirit of an age, creating a mass appeal for the world rather than murder of our hope, the answer had better be, “Hell, yes, music can bring us back from the coil of the rope!” Even lyric sad poems of the death of rock and roll kings, and of the giant leaders of our history, we cannot fault the attempt to right the wrongs we see, without corrupting with violence. Te rabbits in the hole of time forty years ago played chess, before mad queens, and characters in drug tripping debauchery lived the high life. But those legends at least rebelled against the anti-conformism, called the status quo suckage, and fought against tyranny.
Where have the poets gone who speak the truth about the need for optimism, if not for plain old faith? We need them now more than ever. In our case, they're here, not elsewhere. We must hear them, and not censure, those calling for a new age of truth in art. We need our legends back.
The time of the Winter Dance. The airplane crash on February 3, 1959 killed the party. Songwriter & singer Don McLean posed the immortal question for all mortal beings in “American Pie,” his tribute to the extinguished out stars who perished in the crash: Can music save your mortal soul? The engine of optimism plowed a tragic furrow in an Iowa field, the world turned upside down for the future greatness that lasted no more. Backwards in what we call history, a freak-age of enduring disillusionment came upon our generations, since memorialized like McLean's “American Pie,” by an age of defiant art in song that tried to bring a little sanity back to overwhelm the madness of it all.
Those poets believed music could save not only a mortal soul, but a dying ideal of justice in liberty.
The 1960s, '70s, and '80s experienced multiple horrors of tragic deaths, assassinations, attempted ones, and war, not just the cold ones. In that time, never did people so accessible to each other need to throw some cold water on leaders and led alike, calm down, and patiently work out some sort of providential solution for the larger, inner gap between optimism and malaise, between hope and the despair. In those thirty years between the air crash in Iowa and the “end of history” in the early '90s, I witnessed twenty of them. I recall, with much fear, how the jaws of a fateful destiny with peace or nuclear winter—whichever way it would go was uncertain—pervaded shadows on skylines like specters waiting to snatch us with radiation
These last twenty years, to winter 2010-11, the pessimism that blighted the dull gray of history in our black and white photos of the 1960s and '70s now show up as sharp tuck lines and dyed hair in vivid digital television clarity. It pervades. It invades, and it make us restless. How other starving and mutilated generations might hold the present bling-junk civilization in contempt. We're not starving yet, nor does plague reign like the horrid angel it once did. We need to lighten up, take a cold philosophical shower in the stream of thought, and reason past why we arrived at this point, and how to get beyond it.
In the dates of greed, there were the attempts on the lives of Reagan, Pope John Paul II.. One spirit crushing assassination did succeed, the one we could never Imagine, that of John Lennon. If, earlier in the age of war and worry, those February 3, 1959 deaths of musicians Holly, Valens, and the Bopper on their way to the fateful Winter Dance in Iowa, did ignite the dark spirit, that death of music, there followed in 9 years the murders of JFK, MLK2, and RFK. These men of vision, though flawed, genuinely spoke of visions of peace on earth, brotherhood,, and the end of the war which dispel innocence (Vietnam), we also got the sharp noted hopes from the lyre of minstrels, rockers, hipsters, and different, diffident shades of libertarians, in song. All need is love; peace on earth; great days of sunshine, even in a hazy, cloudy mind-fogging dope of moral depression.
So, if asked, can music save a mortal soul? Or, even can it capture the spirit of an age, creating a mass appeal for the world rather than murder of our hope, the answer had better be, “Hell, yes, music can bring us back from the coil of the rope!” Even lyric sad poems of the death of rock and roll kings, and of the giant leaders of our history, we cannot fault the attempt to right the wrongs we see, without corrupting with violence. Te rabbits in the hole of time forty years ago played chess, before mad queens, and characters in drug tripping debauchery lived the high life. But those legends at least rebelled against the anti-conformism, called the status quo suckage, and fought against tyranny.
Where have the poets gone who speak the truth about the need for optimism, if not for plain old faith? We need them now more than ever. In our case, they're here, not elsewhere. We must hear them, and not censure, those calling for a new age of truth in art. We need our legends back.
posted by Scipio Cepicanus @ 9:08 PM
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