Friday, July 01, 2005

 

Continuity and Change

For some unknown reason, I woke up this morning with the Jimi Hendrix song The Wind Cries Mary in my head, and recalled the day I first listened to his debut album Are You Experienced in the late summer of 1967 shortly before I started high school. I was about to turn fifteen, and had never taken drugs or smoked grass, but I remember the music and how it signaled a sea change in my cultural disposition that would develop over the following six years to officially-sanctioned adulthood.

Last week, as I listened to him again on American Indian Radio on Satellite, I thought briefly "how odd" but then recollected that he had spent much of his childhood with his Cherokee grandmother in Canada, and being a quarter Indian he would certainly be featured on their radio network. And this morning I can't help thinking how this young man of African, European, Mexican and Native American descent helped catalyze a cultural revolution that would begin a shift to include the values of all his ancestors within a new, more respectful--albeit confused--framework.

Of course, music and its poetry alone cannot affect a widespread change of temperament that will endure all the cruelties of man, but they are nevertheless crucial links in our belief systems and cosmologies that help enable us to achieve the humane. Perhaps, more than simply reflecting our madness and sorrows, they can sometimes give rise to our loving kindness and joy.

And so as I listen to AIROS spanning time and space from Jimi Hendrix to Rita Coolidge--two children of Cherokee grandmothers--I find both the continuity and the change we will need as our cultural tectonics once again shake the landscape of our ever-turbulent society.

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