Youth Of Iraq, Episode 2

Hey...

today was subtly pleasant, i was supposed to review for my finals but as usual i delayed it for yet anohter day, spent the noon in front of the TV/PC. Bored out quickly at 5 and went out with a few friends before finally hanging out with Bashaar Al Kaisi's bro back in my room, strumming California (we're picking up where u left us, u know who u r)...
so i am in a musical mood currently and decided to continue on my quest to explain what exactly has been going through my head for the past...six years...

*deep breath* hookay...

i have a copy of Kurt Vonnegut's Timequake, i didn't like it much when i first bought it but i found myself quoting from it over & over again.

BOOK: Stephen King - Everything's Eventual : 14 Dark Tales
Stephen King is way overrated, he writes in a great style, but it is so mercilessly repetitive that it eventually wears out its welcome, and the horror plot is usually rubbish - reading this short-story collection reminded me of an old Iraqi saying : 'Searching shit for melon seeds'....of the 14 tales, 2 were instant-classics 'All That You Love Will Be Carried Away' about a travelling insurance salesman whose only reason not to commit suicide is his pastime of collecting
bathroom graffiti, and the last 'Luckey Quarter' which ends things hopefully for a change, both stories are literary ones, not horror. the rest of the 12 vary from farily okay 'Autospy Room 4' about an alive man about to be accidentally
chopped up in the autopsy room told from his viewpoint, and 'The Road Virus Head North' was decent, but most end incomprehensibly and one is plain unreadable 'Eluria'. Never scary, but read it for the style. All That U Love is a must-read though.
All in all, uneven. (3/5)

in part 1, i left u at the door of my musical ambitions door after scouring what is called the Iraqi Metal Scene for lack of a better word. Today i am supposed to introduce u to whatever's been going on inside my own mind for the past years of musical meditation.

Music is kind of sacred to me, it hasn't always been that, i grew up in a mostly religion-adhering family, i learned early on that music does not sit well with religion side to side. However i hummed the occasional tune or two. Most iraqi teens
dig Arabic music, as they are supposed to do, however arabic pop these days is either a watered-down conversion of western aesthetics or all-out sex-driven heaving of overfed meat cows dancing their asses to the traditional one-two-three sound of dumbuk and nai. Many people listen to western music, but most have it figured out as either another Mr. Cool item or a mindless pastime, a devout hardcore minority is present nonetheless and these guys are knee-deep in either hip-hop or rock. I was first interested by music, like every other teen in his insecure, early days by the pop tunes of boybands...i ate, drank and slept Backstreet Boys when i was sixteen, fact : they called me AJ and for a good reason (those who know me will figure it out), we were freaks me & ma buddies, especially me, apparently i had just
discovered dirty words and we had this notebook (i found it a while eariler) in which we re-wrote all their songs to dirty versions, I was particularly fond of Larger Than Tonay's - (for those in-the-know, i was in Baghdad College) three
months later i was bored and turned to...who else? the King of Pop, who epitomized western music for all its best (& worst) in Iraq, i did six months of Michael, and i still listen to him every now & then, after half a year of making funny
shapes out of my shoes (i can moonwalk and do all his stuff pretty good, guys still come up and ask me to do it - i have his exact figure). music felt pretty stale for me, and that was when the Eminem mania was building up (early 2000), a friend introduced me to Marshall Mathers LP, prior to that, i figured Will Smith as all the rap that matters but that album blew my socks away...it is still one of my classic all-timers and Eminem is undeniably witty though repetitive at the moment, his style is so original, i was just getting to know Dre & Snoop & all that Pac/Biggie when my musical values were furiously shattered and after that time (March 2001), the world never looked the same again.

That was when i first heard No Leaf Clover.

No Leaf Clover is, by far, the closest composition that ever got to my all-time favorite song award, the foremost fusion of words and music I have ever heard in my whole short life. Never has a song offered such power, emotion, and atmosphere as this one. While lyrically the composition is vague and daunting, with such everyday indistinguishable words, the mirroring of their ideas into the music is what makes Clover totally mind-blowing, I never knew anything about music other than it's just a way of spending just a fun time. the actual analysis of this classic took me about six months, before that, I just listened, but I never expected the impression to be so awesome, I was too lowbrow to express my feelings anyway - eventually it changed my whole outlook on music as not just a tool for having fun, all the silly, kitschy pop music seemed absurd and meaningless, it frightened me that a band with such depth, detail and intelligence actually exists, and if only a tenth of music was as good! It taught me to carefully examine artistic works:books, photos, pictures, songs. Everything had whole new dimensions upon closer inspection. Consequently I found out that this line of thought has even influenced my usual real life relationships and social judgment of persons.
My entire world was upside down, those very bare-chested drug-addicted longhaired who i absolutely DETESTED became my philosphers and new world preachers. By unearthing Metallica - and heavy metal - i attained a new 'different' stamp from my social standpoint and also found a very powerful outlet to express my frustrations, i connected with the music that i have been looking for in years. Dark, intelligent and subliminal. When u first get into heavy metal, u think that anything that doesn't have distorted guitar in it is pop-crap or sellout songs, i tried the other metal offerings but i couldn't really find more of the music/lyric juxtapoisitionng that i was feasting upon.
it was only by chanc that i happened to watch a weird video by a band called Soundgarden (Black Hole Sun, naturally) and the respective album, Superunknown, brought radical new ideas hammering down to me, prior to this, grunge & alt.rock were classified in my brain as pop. but Superunkown taught me that the very same concepts i digged could be that much more scarier if they were injected INSIDE the classicist pop-song radio-ready 4-min outfit, a deep, bitter and dark irony that was always present in Chris Cornell's voice - the song THE DAY I TRIED TO LIVE is the absolute realiziation of a radiosong that says I LOVE U but really says FUCK U ALL TO ROTTEN HELL. It was the ultimate album for lost souls of Generation X, it was everything that Nirvana was supposed to be but really wasn't.

Which bring me to an important point.

Kurt Vonnegut once said : "People capable of liking some paintings or prints or whatever can rarely do so without knowning something about the artist, the situation is social rather than scientific. Any work of art is half of a conversation between two human beings, and it helps a lot to know who is talking at you. Does he or she have a reputation for seriousness, for religiousity, for suffering, for concupiscence, for rebellion, for sincerity, for jokes?
There are virtually no respected paintings made by persons about whom we know zilch. I dare to suggest that no picture can attract serious attention without a particular sort of human being attached to it in the viewer's mind. Pictures are famous for their humanness, not for their pictureness.'

This is vital. In many cases, the image of a certain performer is so intertwined with his music that it is impossible to separate when u r listening to, case in point, Nirvana.When i didnt' know absolutely NOTHING about the adventures of Kurt Cobain, i just picked up a compilation done by a friend of Nirvana songs, it had 'Teen Spirit', 'About A Girl', 'Come As You Are' , 'All Aplogies', etcetra etcetra...i kept playing it over & over...trying to understand what's the big deal?!? This is life-changing music??? i mean sure it's not bad, but its' not immortal as, say, Metallica [to me]. i came by Metallica though S&M, a high-brow concept concert performed with a symphony backing them up, throughout the concert, James Hetfield didn't strike me as the kind of guy who would go and have ten bottles and shoot up and scream at the top of his voice. No, sir, i thought of him that time as a scary prince of darkness who would finish the set and have a quiet dinner with his wife and kids and read TIME magazine (u can imagine my shock upon seeing Live Shit! Binge & Purge...) anyhow, in a short while i got to know all about Generation X, the trials and tribulations of Cobain and how he was pushed into the throne and his all anti-star stance and suddenly all his music made sense to me...ghosts of wallowing in self-ironic depression and mockery of the mainstream as well all that was in-between suddenly became impinged, but it was not by the MUSIC, it was by the PERSONA. MTV Unplugged became a classic and i kept listening to him. But I know now that people like him because of his personality, because of what he stands for, not for his musical ideas - which is basically punk-rock in its simplest form, it is virtually hard to separate the two - his lyrics are admittedly meaningless, he glued them up from separate poems but people have him labelled as performer capable of 'intense emotional songwriting'...well, u get the point. The same can be said of bands like The White Stripes, System Of A Down and Radiohead.


The sort of music i am looking to be able to create one day is should be ambitious in scope, utilizing sounds and instruments for a greater cause, so far i have only hinted at what music sends shivers down my spine, in order to clarify things up, here's a song, i suggest u listen to it before trying to understand what is said here :

Radiohead - Karma Police
This is a mid-tempo song based on paino and an acoustic chord strum, with a melancholy, ellegiac tone in the verses, during which, singer Thom Yorke sings this :

Karma Police, arrest this man, he talks in maths, he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radioKarma Police, arrest this girl, her hitler hairdo, is making me feel ill and weak i've crashed her party

I don't know what the singer meant to say here, but i have my own personal interpretation, it may not stand true, but i like it and it is the result of my previous exploratino of musical landscapes. This song is about a person living his life guided by some sort of 'moral code' that he set for himself : Peer pressure, attempts to look cool, whatsoever...thus in the verses, he is assuming his supposedly cool alter-ego, a false state of mind he made in which he procalims his
'Karma Police' to arrest several people he finds inapporporate or uncool, the verses are disenfranchied, but this free-word associated is what adds to the mystery, this coolness is fake, and is exposed by Yorke's tone, very unhappy and out of touch...in the break, a cold voice intones :

This is what u get, This is what u get, This is what u get, when u mess with us...

Basically, a man crushed by his own confusion.

I like the unorthodox chorus so much, it has my favorite trick of initial restrain followed by an unexpected cathartic blast brighter chords resonate as Yorke repeats in a voice filled with stupid but true happiness, it is a minute of release from
all this complicated modern-world pressures melded all in one line, the lyrics is negative but is rendered by Yorke like a man on drugs, it is his only refuge, a minute of simply losing all that pretence and complication and return to a more
simple state of mind, be yourself :

For a minute there, I lost myself
For a minute there, I lost myself
For a minute there, I lost myself
For a minute there, I lost myself

by the end of the chorus, u already see the depression creeping up in the end of Yorke's wail, as if the minute is over and we're back to pretending more of not liking people we are not, bottling our true feelings inside : basically living in
Iraq.

OK Computer, a development of Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon is about difficulites in living in the modern world, and this song is the amplification of that subject.

This is ambitious, complex music, it offers sublime depth into it, it is wrong to appraoch music with this kind of mathematical mentality usually, because sometimes free-form sponatenoity usually leads into great results, but all i am meaning to say is that i don't like rock music because it's full of blood and demons and chugga-chugga riffs, Bob Rock said it best : 'It's good to say kill kill fuck fuck, but it's better to say it for a reason.'

It's the reason that i'm betting my life on.

SOUNDGARDEN - HEAD DOWN
We see that smile, We see that smile, We see that smile on your face
We hear you cry, We hear you wail, We steal that smile from your face
We see you laugh, We see you dance, We take that away everyday
We see you cry, We turn your head, Then we'll slap your face
Bow down, Bow down, Live your life, Head down, Head down, Hide that smile
Head high, Head high, You've got to smileHead high, Head high, You've got to smile!

We see you try, We see you fail, Some things never change,
We hear you cry, We hear you wail, We steal that smile from your face
Bow down, Bow down, Live your life, Head down, Head down, Hide that smile
Head high, Head high, You've got to smileHead high, Head high, Head high like a song you like!

These lyrics are not much by themeselves lying on a piece of paper, but Cornell has the trick of combinig sound and words into somehting truly its own :
A strange number from the classic 1994 Superunknown written by bassist Ben Shepherd. The song starts unassumingly, with an unfocused acoustic and some shuffled drumming in the background; the acoustic surprisingly jumps headlong into a structured riff with percussion catching up with some busy lumbering. An electric guitar of the Black Sabbath detuned variety soon joins the fray, with an electric in front and an acoustic in back, the texture invoked is subtly queasy and hollow, from that texture comes out a hypnotically sympathetic Chris Cornell. Awash in cymbals, Cornell wears the tone of crooning, heartfelt sympathy, the kind of sympathy seen generously dealt from higher authority towards the lower, tortured spirits of peasants. Unlike real life -fortunately- all his sympathy is criminally and truthfully fake, starkly
disbelieved by the lyrical value of his affection, with such haunting sympathy, the assumed dictatorial governor concernedly addresses his cracked citizens of worship, telling them very dearly that he is the reason behind their suffering, so they should bow down and go home, live their lives, and, in true dictator fashion, the much-maligned hopes of victory is evoked passionately with the contrasting last lines 'Head high, Head high, you've got to smile', at which Cornell rises from his hypnosis into a higher, hopeful survival pitch. Having fulfilled that, the texture is disoriented again by the very first acoustic shuffle of the song, which transits the song into one of the most powerful riffs of the whole album, then again towards the electric/acoustic medley, before going back for some more discipline from his majesty.
You know what made me think of it this way, ever heard the Ba'ath's slogan: 'Head High, You're from Iraq?'


Well this was a bit confusing, but it's 4:49 AM so there ya have it

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