Music, Art and New Beginnings

Confucius said that you can tell the morality of a nation by its music. I think I know what he means. Although I grew up on a broad diet of popular music from the classic to the psychedelic and the progressive to the punk, there is little joy or hope to be found in any of the lyrics of the multiple music collections I have acquired, abandoned or rediscovered over my 40 years.

I often try to listen back to tapes and CDs only to find gut-wrenching misery in those lyrics. It is so disproportionate how many popular songs are about heartache, heartbreak and vengeance. If the subject matter is of a more political bent, it is amazing how much of it is cynical. Popular singers are largely just a bunch of critics.

The thing is though that I still like some of the sounds of popular and rock orientated music. We really do need more wholesome, happy, God-centred music to come and replace all the gangster rap and lusty broken relationship songs.

The thing is that I used to be a singer and a songwriter - I wasted many years pursuing that dream and when I finally had the opportunity of a record deal, my backing band pulled out. I tried to throw a new band together in time, but failed and decided ultimately that the music business was too fickle and uncertain a place to be putting all one's hopes and dreams. I decided then to do something where hard work guaranteed success and got into martial arts as my new career.

Several years ago I took a drastic step. I destroyed all of my own music recordings on the grounds that it had nothing positive to offer. Every word and every chord struck deep into the heart of the listener and offered them only bleakness, sadness, melancholy, hopelessness... my music was vast and spacious, ambient and crazy and had a negative power to influence and move people towards something wholly bad. So I felt. Recently (after a long absence) I bought a new guitar in the hope of creating something more positive, uplifting and devotional. I won't be pursuing any kind of musical career again, whatever the result.

I rarely wonder whether or not I did the right thing by destroying my own musical back-catalogue - anytime I think it through, with a slight shudder I feel glad that it has gone. If some might see my musical history as therapy (I was clearly not a very happy soul), I'd be inclined to answer that it was a part of the problem rather than the solution.

We CAN dwell on bleakness, or we can snap out of it and go and do something useful. Musicians and artists can be a self-indulgent lot and I genuinely wonder how useful such "art" is, if it can really be called art when it is not inspired by anything divine and speaks only of being entrenched in worldliness. Popular music caters to a niche of angst-ridden teenagers who are trying to get to grips with the world, but I think that all too often the musicians get stuck in that angst-ridden teen mindset and just stay there because their careers are built on it. Our teens surely need some more positive role models than the popular music world ever delivers. Hopefully those of us who grew up listening to those rock stars will grow out of it.

It isn't that I particularly wrote about the things that others would see as worldly. In fact my lyrics were quite philosophical in their own way. But they were still hugely self-indulgent. It is an easy trap to fall prey to in the world of performance where personality has become such a thing of status.

I had a rather animistic, Daoist or perhaps Hindu sense of Godness back then inasmuch as I did not really recognise the otherness of God. I saw God in everything and struggled to differentiate between Creator and creation. I had never been taken through Aquinas' logic concerning the un-produced producer and how a finite universe needed a separate and distinct creator.

Nothing can produce itself because to do so it would have to exist before it existed in order to bring itself into existence. I suppose the counter-argument would have to be that everything is part of the infinite and finite existence is just an illusion, but how are things which are inherently infinite fooled by such an illusion and why? It doesn't answer the fundamental question of HOW something infinite can manifest as something finite either. How do you create linear progressions of time within a single point of infinity with no beginning, middle or end? Surely you can't and the finite matter would have to be separate and distinct from its creator.

I'm sure God knows how it all works As for the rest of us, whether we're Hindu, Muslim, Jew, Christian or Sikh, we'll each have our own ways of trying to understand it, but I do believe that it is possible and probable that some of us are closer to The Truth (for such a thing truly must exist,) than others. It is pretty clear that none of us are gods, or we'd already know.