© Pierre Maré,
2004 - 2007
Offbeat 12
Once upon a time there were ‘real’ musicians. You could turn on the radio and regularly hear something you hadn’t heard before. Tunes were fresher than unlaid eggs and the lyrics would amble up with an innocent smile and smack you between the eyes with a half brick in a sock. For those of you who are younger, at that stage, music was undemocratic and ‘hits’ were often unexpected. It didn’t take an SMS vote to make a star or next year’s chart topper. People actually had to buy the record before it became a hit.
One of the freshest bands I can remember was a mob called Talking Heads. In fact, they were so fresh they were way before their time, which is probably a good thing because had they arrived now, they would probably never have made it onto any music marketer’s ‘to do’ list. Too ‘so not what we’re selling this year, dude’.
Talking Heads had a hit with a song called ‘Psycho Killer’, which amazingly is not about politicians, religious leaders or white collar workers resolving labour disputes. They also had a whole lot of other great songs that never made it all the way up the charts, but should have. My personal favourite is a song called ‘Heaven’ which features the catchy refrain, “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.”
Every year, the academic industry spends millions of dollars on philosophy as a path to the truth. Millions of words are written, elucidated and debated, some of which are even less than five syllables long. Talking Heads arrived at a very worthy truth in about three minutes, and unlike academic philosophy, you could dance to it, even though the tempo was more suited to a very slow waltz or perhaps a quadrille.
There are different ideas about heaven, some of which involve harps, wings and fluffy white clouds, and others which feature virgins and small bowls of the sort of dessert that costs way more than a slab of chocolate cake with a side order of cream. Neither of these, nor any of the others, appeals to me as much as Talking Heads’ version.
We live in an age in which everything happens here and now. Consider the phenomenon of the modern day survival kit; a mobile phone, credit card and filofax and / or PDA. The Chinese saying, “may you live in interesting times” is no longer a curse: it is par for the course.
We are programmed to want more and achieve more. A stream of messages tell us to buy this, want that, be something else and define ourselves with the sort of attributes that only endless time and large amounts of money can buy. If advertising is to be believed, only people with the physique of Greek gods go to the gym. Fat guys who really need a workout get turned away at the door.
And just when you think you have it figured, you have to contend with this season’s fashions, a new management style and another wave of twelve step programmes that help you achieve so much more than you ever wanted to in the first place.
Then there’s satellite news and another set of questions. Ten years down the line, will your child really benefit from martial arts training or will a course in tactical shooting and the practical use of explosives in conflict resolution be more appropriate? Should you stockpile canned goods now, or wait a year or two and see how things play out?
A few things go missing in the horrible rush and ersatz ambition: you and I, for instance. And there’s almost no time to fix the situation. If there is time to spare, it’s more exciting to sell a four day trip up Everest, than to suggest something more mundane such as, “stay at home, don’t fix the sink, but do have a beer and chill out while you stare at the ceiling”.
As Talking Heads’ song ‘Heaven’ puts it, “It's hard to imagine that nothing at all could be so exciting, could be so much fun.” But if you take time to think about nothing in particular, especially when you should be doing something else, you may just find an exciting glimpse of your own personal heaven. It won’t be as rushed or busy as life is right now.
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