Awake
- Activate
Sun Ra - Piano Interlude
The planet is asleep and it’s the fault of musicians who are untrue to themselves.
– Sun Ra
I’ve searched for and have yet to find the original source of this quote, but apocryphal attribution doesn’t make it less true. I’ve been thinking about it since I first heard it decades ago. The more I turn it over the more sense I find.
Whichever Sun Ra said this, in whichever timeline, is absolutely correct. When musicians are awake and true to themselves in their creations, their music is a vessel for that truth and carries it to every ear. Awake artists wake up the whole planet.
Sun Ra’s quote continuously drops in to say hello. Some examples:
- It ducks and weaves through my notes on music as a distributed, conscious entity. The intentionality and emotional depth of the music would have an impact on the consciousness it could carry.
- It soft-shoes a path around my thoughts on what’s missing in purely algorithmic compositions and sound design: the conscious meaning-making is listener-side only.
- It underlines songwriting and production similarities/differences across genre and time. All are devised to deliver something living, something in motion, something present for the age in which they are created.
- It shines a spotlight on what makes a vocal good: the quality of carrying a feeling directly into the listener’s head and heart. Awareness of and embodiment of the emotion while singing enables it to be transmitted, which then helps the listener become aware of and experience the same feeling.
- It peeks out between clouds of pareidolia and why some see more faces in their environment than others. Creativity is not the domain of sleepwalkers - metaphors, analogies, conceptual and pattern-based linkages require viewer awareness before they come to active life.
- It howls about divergent neural structures and thought processes and their possible links to creativity. Various forms may enable the hyperawareness of and attention to the depths of feeling art is born from.
- It is the voice of instruction in my head every time I relearn this history lesson: when education is removed by the powerful, ignorance fells culture and the human world regresses to a more primitive state. This is why fascists are always anti-culture, because art contains truth and thus cannot be manufactured or strictly controlled. It is made by those who are awake and aware, and those who experience the art may also be awakened and become aware. Chain reactions commence.
The ability to create art; to deeply communicate with more than words; to enter and harness conceptual frameworks in the pursuit of a desired goal; to find the overlap in a Venn of seemingly disparate ideas; to interpret the abstract and make it concrete: all of these require self-awareness and systemic feedback that include one’s self in the equation.
Creation is a conscious act. One must be awake to create.
Wake up. The opposite of woke is asleep.