This Carbon Based Life

By David Glenn Cox

For the last several years, I have been worried about the fate of popular music. With all its pitch correction splendor, and auto tune magic. The human voice reduced down to nothing but another keyboard app. Fully in the hands of corporate masters with magnificent light shows and scantily clad female singers. But if music be art, art should move us emotionally to something besides the mute button or changing the station.

Rednecks singing about their little town or drinking beer, pickup trucks and girls in tight blue jeans. The corporate money grab. Put them in a cowboy hat, promote them, puff them up, rob them, then sell them out, rinse and repeat. In my leisure haze, I wondered what would come next. I shouldn’t have wondered. With AI music they deleted all the humanity and passed the savings on to you! But I had speculated to myself that someone would come along some day with just a guitar and a human voice.

Not because I’m smart or wise, but just because I survived Disco. I had witnessed the rise of the corporate monster. A drum beat with a bass track and some trivial meaningless words tacked on. Disco was so popular they even played it on the radio in case you wanted to dance in your car while driving. Just a corporately inspired fad, like the hula hoop or the mechanical bull. Today, to the best of my knowledge, there are no classic disco stations on the radio.

They still play Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Bob Dylan on the radio, though. Their music was organic with weight and had meaning and it moved people. A conveyance of ideas and feelings from artist to listener. Being an old fart myself, I might be late to the game already. But I stumbled across someone and my faith in real human music was restored.

I stumbled across a young man from Arkansas named Jesse Welles and his song “Join Ice.” Then I listened to “Red”, “United Healthcare and “Big Balls.” One man, a guitar, a voice and a harmonica. Singing songs like Bob Dylan used to sing. No pitch correction or auto tune. No backup singers dancing in sequined string bikinis. I listened to an interview with Mr. Welles and he said the magic words, Woody Guthrie. And I knew that this young man knew what he was about and knew what he was doing.

He went on tour last year and sold out all twenty-five concerts. He appeared on Jimmy Kimmel and Stephan Colbert. Interestingly, he is an unsigned artist. What with YouTube and tik tok who needs A&R men? Welles added he just puts it out there and see if people like it. But gee, a record company could have him working 300 nights a year with a grueling schedule. And no matter how hard he worked he would always owe the record company more.

They could put him in a silver suit and an oversized ten-gallon cowboy hat. With patent leather cowboy boots with six-inch heels. Not long after that, they would begin to suggest subtle changes to his music. Cut down on the social criticism and maybe write a song about all the good things banks and oil companies do for us. Maybe get a corporate sponsor like Budweiser or Chase Bank.

Turn your career over to highly skilled people who don’t give a shit about you. Being that it’s Thanksgiving day, I’ll be listening to “Alice’s Restaurant” once again, because it’s a tradition. And because it’s still funny and still poignant. It is authentic and it’s human. They ran Johnny Cash out of Nashville along with Willie and Waylon, too. They wouldn’t play by Nashville’s rules. They refused to be spokes in a corporate wheel. Employees in a talent pool. Now, go on and talent! Sing something real pretty, but don’t offend anyone. It’s been a long time, but worth the wait

“The world is filled with people who are no longer needed. And who try to make slaves of all of us. And they have their music and we have ours. Theirs, the wasted songs of a superstitious nightmare. And without their music and ideological miscarriages to compare our songs of freedom to, we’d not have any opposite to compare music with — and like the drifting wind, hitting against no obstacle, we’d never know its speed, its power….”
― Woody Guthrie