8/19/2006 3:14 AM
I just finished watching “New York Doll”, the story of Arthur “Killer” Kane, bass player for the pioneering rock band, the New York Dolls.
God is good. That’s about all I have to say after watching this film. There’s not much else to say, or much of any importance, anyway.
And so… on with some unimportant rambling.
Rock and Roll is catharsis for the common man. It is a declaration, a complaint, and often a celebration. Some may call it the devil’s music… but I think God really has the corner on this market. After all, God put in us what becomes rock and roll.
It is modern man’s treatise against the earth… one that he hopes the heavens will overhear. Rock and roll’s chief implement, The venerated electric guitar, has been endowed with the all of the voices of the human experience.
Lullabies gently float from it’s strings and put little ones to sleep.
It cries the blues with us.
Majestic celebrations are declared in electrifying, clear, singing tones.
Soul rending anguish bellows forth, the amplifier becoming one’s only friend that can truly voice the fury, pain, and confusion that so often we mortals are called upon to endure.
The ubiquitous power chord, the open 5th, is a wonderful metaphor. Lacking the defining 3rd of a simple triad chord, it is neither major nor minor.
It is intense.
It is awake.
It is that space between fight and flight.
It is a place that those who live life fully and deliberately know all to well. To those with honest and perceptive hearts, so much of life is like the open 5th power chord – it is big, it is powerful, it could be glorious and triumphant, or it could be tragic and failing.And often both.
I do love rock and its prophets.
