Stranger Fiction - On music

John Lennon, Jim Morrison and Bob Marley all understood the cultic element of music and the power it bestows on those who wield it as a weapon.

Long before Facebook, Leonard Cohen could hear Hank Wlliams coughing all night long a hundred floors above him, and all day long Bob Dylan heard a man shouting he had been framed.

The song of birds is the sound of aeons. In ancient times, before the plow and the wheel, even before the sword and the club, this was how the rain forests and the savannas sounded.

Music is the true language of love, the art form all other arts aspire to, but musicians are generally tools.

When the freedom fighters of the Spanish Civil War realized they had been betrayed in unison by the major superpowers - USA, Great Britain and The Soviet Union - a proverb formed: "We lost the war, but we had the best poets."

There is music in everything, in foot steps on gravel, in a spinning object, in photons, in water, in air. However, music in every era tends to reflect the environment, and that is why modern music is stale, linear, electronic, reflecting the anthropocene.

Something happened in the 1960s that may never happen again, something utterly unexplainable. People, for a moment, would burst with freedom, inspiration and imagination. As long as the current culture lasts, it will dream of that age, long for it, wonder about it.