He told me that the reason people love the music from the 60's is because the creators were all on drugs. Aha, said I. It makes sence. The vision came from somewhere else... from something else. This started a desire to know what the time was all about. It was a feeling I had, that something was started there that no one has really looked at with the eyes needed to recognize why all the shit hit the fan in one small period of time. It was like the rise and fall of the renaissance in less than fifteen years. Why was everything building into a momentum that was literally assinated, and allowed to be lost in the haze that was the late seventies? The period of time I am talking about here is the late fifties, to the early seventies. By 1975, it was over, and it was gone. Not just the hippie crap, the counter culture, ect.. My obsession has been with the birth of recognized emotion. It is this element that I believed was missing from all of the tales I have heard told about the era. I believe that the vision I had was not something my eyes held at one moment, but how bathed in emotion I felt as a child, and by the age of five, I could tell that it had... not disappeared, but had changed, been suppressed. I knew as a child that I did not feel it anymore, and was being taught how to bury it inside of myself and ignore it.. The fall of recognized emotion, as I felt it, was sometime in late '74. This is the hidden dream inside my head, and the feeling I have been chasing through total non-understanding. In total honesty, I have been trying to define this empty part of myself and, until I committed myself to this story, I did not realize it. This is what I spent all of those years on drugs, boozing my way through notebooks and personalities to return to. How was it that I became so instilled with emotion as a child that I did not know it? Why has that been such a silent mission for me for over fifteen years?
I can
see now why... I did not know. I have
lived enough of my life at this point in time to finally see what I have been
searching for. I have contended, more
silently over the past five years or so, that emotion was recognized in the
counter culture of the sixties, but defined by the equal rights movement of the
fifties. I know that drugs helped, but
that is not the point. Drugs were the
direct reason why such a discovery was lost in the bastion of the late
seventies, and passed over for gratification in the eighties. The demand for emotion was spawned by the
black generation, who, since the late forties, began a war to not only be
recognized, but demand that they be allowed to feel what they feel. Blues born upon the black-soul?
Rock-n-roll? The macarena? Even country line dancing is a form of the
Harlem shuffle. I see this as no
coincidence.
The
equal rights movement was the time in history when a nation of people stood up
to an emotional oppression they could no longer ignore. Later, the rich kids in college would use
the same lessons to fight a war they did not believe in, showing a bit of
smarts on their part. The blacks have
known about emotion for such a long time, that, to this day, it is still
ignored in lieu of being taken advantage of.
The slaves, even in the most oppressive of atmospheres, still had the
arts and emotion at a level that far exceeded the very title their owners
claimed; the title of masters.
This battle raged on from the late
forties into the late sixties, and still continues in small skirmishes to this
day. In the middle of this, it was the
music that introduced what I call emotional-communication. The basic idea of the blues was practiced,
and merged with the newly forged rock-n-roll.
People began to want to express their feelings, to be one with the rest
of the world, to be one. So, I
conclude, that was the literal birth of emotion.
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