I am trying to break the habit of allowing the algorithm to know what music I will want to listen to. This is challenging, not so much because I feel dependent on the tech, but because the algorithms do the work that FM program directors and DJs did when I was a kid. When I listen to the radio lately, I’m almost more intrigued by the songs I don’t expect and don’t especially like. It’s too easy to cater our realities. Now, and I am far less interested in a catered reality than in one that sometimes asks me to look up and see something organically new. This is a relative term, of course. The old sage sorrowed, “There is nothing new under the sun” but the old sage was also a bored monarch and hadn’t the advantage of centuries of scientific exploration. There is nothing new because everything carries the echo of something else, but over time the key signature, the tempo, and the tune changes. What is it to live in an echoless world? To be a baby. Knowledge is the acceptance of echoes, applied to every facet of living. But one must always leave a few beats open for the extraordinary improvisation. For craft and art.
it’s all a blues rift
all a deep howling
against the cold,
against the dark,
against the light,
against too little
against too much
against and for
blues and banjo
man, blues and
that mad jazz music
that made
all the bigots worry
where their wives
got off to
while they were out
with the boys
hunting strange fruit
