Good evening! I wanted to recycle a video I shared at some point late last year:
It’s a video that embodies much of what I value as a human being.
When I started this particular diary series late in the summer of 2016, there was a message that I wanted to get across – one of advocating global cooperation, rather than sort of destructive nationalism that was clearly already ascendant and doing much damage. I also wanted to communicate a sort of enjoyment of the sheer variety of ways that we’ve conveyed that cooperative and open-minded worldview through music. Made sense. I’ve been a music buff forever. When I was into punk, I noticed that a lot of my friends were really digging reggae and ska in particular. Of course I grew up in a period where recording artists regularly experimented with instrumentation from other musical styles and from culture vastly different from their own, and sort of took it for granted that this was a way to approach life itself.
Some of you have joined in and added to the conversation. And I want that to continue. I don’t know any easy ways to deal the darkness that has descended around our aching planet this decade, and I am perhaps now too jaded to believe that a simple song or set of tunes will somehow change the world. But music can convey that we’re not alone out there as we muddle through changing what we can. So here’s to a bit more eclectic muddling.
