Tumbled Thoughts On American Muslim Life

Said is seriously killin’ this oud!

This cat is dope!

My brother Dave holding it down with his trio.

It Roars

“…in the past people would listen to music out of love for music, nowadays it roars everywhere and all the time, ‘regardless whether we want to hear it,’ it roars from loudspeakers, in cars, in restaurants, in elevators, in the streets, in waiting rooms, in gyms, in the earpieces of Walkmans, music rewritten, reorchestrated, abridged, and stretched out, fragments of rock, of jazz, of opera, a flood of everything jumbled together so that we don’t know who composed it (music become noise is anonymous), so that we can’t tell beginning from end (music become noise has no form): sewage-water music in which music is dying.”

Milan Kundera, Ignorance.

A Noise Among Other Noises

Schoenberg was aware that the bacterium existed. As early as 1930 he wrote: “Radio is an enemy, a ruthless enemy marching irresistibly forward, and any resistance is hopeless”; it “force-feeds us music … regardless of whether we want to hear it, or whether we can grasp it,” with the result that music becomes just noise, a noise among other noises.

Milan Kundera from Ignorance.

The Unbearable Silence

Why does a CVS, or any drug store for that matter, need music? Everywhere you go there’s music to the point that music becomes meaningless. It’s as if modernity cannot stand its own silence: in the absence of any clamour, modernity must face its weary self whereupon it, methods of deconstruction not withstanding, is fully incapable of articulating any meaning or purpose to life.