Driving home this morning I flashed back to little kid me in a house in Fresno, CA, sitting at a turntable with giant headphones on jamming along…
“Oye cómo va mi ritmo”
Man how I loved sneaking a listen to my brother’s Santana record!
I didn't understand the words but that was no thing. It was the same with 99 Luftballoons, Rock Me Amadeus and La Bamba when I was in high school. Nobody seemed to care. Not knowing the words made it mysterious--mesmerizing--magical even.
Being introduced to Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 “choral” in Music Appreciation at FCC years later had a strangely similar effect. Then there's the Macarena, Gangnam Style, and Bruno Mars and Rosie's APT. Tina Turner singing Sarvesham and the song Praan still send goosebumps down my spine, and to this day I love the Arabic intro to Sting's Desert Rose and Tamil chanting in U2’s Ahimsa. Jaci Velasquez’s Feliz Navidad is an all time Christmas favorite. The first Japanese song that caught me was Utada Hikaru’s First Love. In time I learned the lyrics to that one, but there are plenty of Japanese songs I still can’t understand and like just the same.
I've no idea what the priests chant after "Namu Myōhō Renge Kyō" at my wife’s family’s Buddhist temple either, but I swear the energy is the exact same as that emitted by the church choir in holiday services at Easterby Presbyterian when I was a kid. I'm sure they sang in English, but the words are long forgotten for me. It's the energy that came back in a flash the first time I accompanied my wife to the temple. Whoa! This feels like listening to the church choir!
If merely focused on the language of a song the music stops at the head. Music is magical in its power to bypass the head and go straight to the soul, and the soul needs no translation.
Anyway, so about that flashback this morning. It was brought on by listening to the Super Bowl Halftime Show. It was my first time to hear anything by Bad Bunny.
True story.
Like so much else that flies under the expat radar, I’d never even heard of the guy till curiosity got the best of me after seeing all the commotion a couple weeks ago. So I read a bit: Average guy, truck driver dad, school teacher mom, attended church and sang in the choir, attended university and worked in a supermarket, super talented, likes to break norms, certainly unique and sure appears to be following his bliss. Oh yeah, and his philanthropy! He's got his own foundation! He's given away million$ and helps a lot of kids! And awards out the wazoo and on and on.
Thank you Wikipedia!
Oh yeah, and he's an American and he's not in the Epstein files!
So I watched it. My take is as follows:
The Super Bowl Halftime show was fantastic!
I listened on my commute then pulled it up to watch when I got home. Artists amaze me. All of that came out of a someone’s imagination, or a lot of someones’ imaginations. The sugar cane field. The wedding! The dancing around the old white truck. Ricky Martin and Lady Gaga! Wow! And Mr. Bunny handing the kid the trophy and and and and! Woot!
Don’t stop me now I’m dancing!
So there’s my dive into the much ado about nothing . All the fuss on the social inter-media-webs was because of that? Seems a lot of folks’d do well to turn off whatever’s twisting their chonies up in a bunch and go out and sniff a flower.
Then boogie to a tune you can’t understand.
Trust me I know.
Just try it. You can thank me later.
No comments:
Post a Comment