Don't Listen To Politicians - Listen To Musicians

stephen.king989 (64)in #music • 8 years ago (edited)

I've been listening to music for over 25 years. Not just listening, like, it's on the radio and I can hear it; but really listening. But, as I've just come to realize, I need to go back and listen again.

As of now, I've been in and out of bands, playing guitar, and writing songs longer than I haven't in my life. About 19 or 20 years now I think but, I sort of stopped counting after a while. The listening (or studying) of music started even before the playing of music did. Although, I didn't realize it until I actually picked up a guitar for the first time.

I started playing my friends Squire Stratocaster at his house when I would go there after school. He showed me a few riffs to get me started, and I would sit in his room and play them over and over until I got them right. Even after my friend lost interest and would go play a video game or something and wait for me to get tired of playing, I would keep practicing.

After a little while of that, it was clear to me that I needed to get my own guitar. I begged my parents to get me one but they didn't really want to. I assume they didn't want to deal with the noise, and they were right to think it would get noisy. Once I got started, the noise quickly took over their house for quite a few years.

I ended up selling quite a few things to scrounge together enough money to get the cheapest guitar and amplifier I could find at a pawn shop. I thought the guitar was called a Peavey Profiler, but I looked on google and can't find any pictures of it, so who knows what the name of it was.

It was a horrible guitar. The only thing it had going for it was the harmonics from the 5th, 7th, and 12th frets sounded really good but that's not anything to get excited about.

That guitar really kicked in the music bug for me, though. I would sit in my room for hours and hours, playing the same songs over and over again until I could get them good enough to play with my friends. All my friends had been playing guitar already for a while, so I was sort of behind them. It took some work, but I caught up to them after a bit of hard practicing. Literally playing until my fingers bled, just not the summer of '69 - more like '96 (just flip the numbers).

What I failed to miss while studying all that music, though, was the fact that all these musicians were awake. I was still very much asleep and I didn't really clue into what they were saying until many years later.

The most obvious ones are from Rage Against The Machine. Zack de la Rocha (the singer) was just telling me how it was and I wasn't even really listening. Even though I would study the songs and new every note, every drum beat, every word - I didn't realize what he was sayings.

RATM are just the most obvious band. With a song called "Wake Up" how could they not be awake. But all other rock, metal, and punk bands seem to be awake to the system and know what's going on. It amazes me how so many people can listen to this great music, enjoy and like the bands, and not really know what their message really is. How could I go over ten years with Zack screaming at me to "WAKE UP," before I actually did? It's mind boggling.

I'm noticing it more and more now. Older songs that I've heard thousands of times have new meaning to me. All these musicians are trying to tell us something about our current system and it's been going on for a long time.

Why are we not listening?

Maybe what we need to do is start!

Stop listening to lying politicians. You can't trust them. They are liars! It's actually insanity to think that voting for another politician will yield different results.