Member Since: 05/01/2008
Band Website: www.rowth.com
Influences: The Singin' ManifestoArt has always been at the forefront of the larger conflicts within a culture, and music I believe is the most powerful form as it can inspire the listener to act.
Artists have the power to show the way by pushing political and aesthetic boundaries and sometimes push a culture in a direction it's ready to go, otherwise they can act as witnesses.
Like food, music is such an opener. As the Kitchen Sisters have remarked, you can talk philosophy and different points of view and politics until you are blue in the face, but with the right lyrics, from the right artist, at the right time, with the right tune, you can open peoples minds to new ideas in the same way that the right taste and smell of food opens your memory and heart. Music connects people in ways that few things do. Music like food cross that divide.
For me, the singin' manifesto dates back to Robert Burns, if not before. He made poetry and songs of universal interest, rooted in his local culture but still responded to new ideas of his day. Bob Dylan and Bruce Springstein to some extent have continued down this road with their socio-economic viewpoints, but the unity that Burns' felt in his day has long since gone and today we are fragmented into a thousand, sometimes warring interests.
Singing can be a way to reconnect us to the best of our culture and liberate us at the same time. It can change the way we feel about ourselves, how we see ourselves and others, and make us more spontaneous. Brian Eno has said singing should be at the heart of the school curriculum. Woody Guthrie even went as far to say that singing could cure our national ills, and friends of Johnny Cash have said that he found new energy when singing, even when he was in poor health.
Curiously, the searching spirit that seeks to discover a final unity, is often convinced there is one. The last word to the Scot, Patrick Geddes (a poet-at-heart) on aesthetics: ‘we have thus reached the new paradox that ... economics is ... the ways and means of increasing not so much bread, as art’ (1884)
Record Label: Rowth
Type of Label: Indie