Burro Wash + Jane’s Addiction’s rendition of “Sympathy for the devil”
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
I’ve been looking for a digital copy of this for the nearly entire year since it was released. I finally found it here.
Drowsy summer afternoons, falling in and out of dreams mixed with vapid television. I’m not sure who these guys are yet (The Pinks, PhasingGrapefruit, Grapefruit?), but I love what they’re doing.
My approach to this online space is to share aural and artistic experiences. It is not a promotional blog driven by a desire to be first or to represent some pop subculture ideology. So, normally, when every other music blog in a particular genre is pushing something, I sometimes avoid replicating the buzz here. But when something like the Nablus Project is good enough, the experience I want to share overrides any concern I have about its near ubiquity. This whole thing is sublime and worth much more than the $4 they ask for it.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Maybe I’m thinking about this too much.
In my experience, the creative life is best achieved with a foundation of stability, regularity (meaning with the governance of a regula, or rule), and discipline. Artists and musicians generally like to think otherwise, that the boundaries are to be tested and the rules broken. This is undoubted in a myopic sense, but the effective artist must be disciplined, experience, and trained even to achieve this rebellious end. Picasso the Cubist never would have existed without Picasso the Realist first mastering the rules of composition, color, shading, etc. To take this argument a step outward, the arts, rebellious and unconventional as they may be, historically flourish only in societies with law and order, prosperous economies, and with the support of the governing classes. Examining the question from further out still, artistic conventions are violated only within the physical boundaries of the canvas, the stone, the installation space, the spectrum of notes discernible by the human ear, the limitations of the human body - the regula of physics, in other words. Artists inherently and inevitably rely on the regular function of light, sound waves, moving bodies, etc.. This playground of the regula, the discipline, must, of course, be balanced with the freedom to express and innovate. But without the fundamental rules and order on which artistic expressions rely, the arts would be meaningless and would cease even to exist at all.
This argument is personal, too. If my own life is an unruly, ungoverned, and chaotic mess, I have less ability and opportunity to rise to my creative and productive peak. If I am in poor health - physical, mental, emotional, spiritual - I am less capable of wandering into the beauty and bliss of freedom and exploration. If I am bound by vices and appetites, I cannot roam as far into the potentialities of my mind, body, and their cooperative experiences.
This amazing song is a metaphor for all this. It is governed by a regula, the repetition and constancy of that droning rhythm. From this foundation of regularity and stability, beautiful meanderings emerge and soar into those realms of liberation that come only after the creator has mastered his discipline.
I’m certainly over-analyzing this, but this is all an attempt to say that “Flight” set my mind free on this morning’s commute.
